What music you dig depends entirely on your experiences, not your biology, a new study has found.
In what's being touted as a world-first, researchers met with an Amazonian tribe with little exposure to Western music and culture and played them a range of harmonies. Some were considered pleasant ("consonance") and others dissonant, at least to Western ears.
"The aesthetic contrast between consonance and dissonance is often assumed to be biologically determined and common to all humans," the researchers write in journal Nature.
"However, this notion had not been tested in populations lacking exposure to Western music until now."
Led by Josh McDermott from MIT, the researchers measured the musical preferences of members of the remote Tsimane tribe, native to the Amazon region in Bolivia, South America. The participants listened to sounds and vocal harmonies over headphones, and rated their "pleasantness" on a four-point scale.
The results were compared to those of listeners in the US (some of whom were musicians) and urban Bolivia.
They found the Tsimane people rated consonant and dissonant sounds as equally pleasant, while listeners in the US - brought up with Western music - vastly preferred the consonant sounds. The city-dwelling Bolivians, aware of Western music but perhaps not exposed to it to the same degree as US citizens, were somewhere in between.
But listening to non-musical sounds, like laughs and gasps, the Tsimane people had similar tastes to Westerners.
"These findings suggest that the preference for consonant chords results from exposure to particular types of polyphonic (in this case, Western) music, rather than from the biology of the auditory system," the researchers said.
"Musical preference for consonance over dissonance varies with an individual's musical experience rather than being an inherent trait of the auditory system."
In other words, you learn to like particular types of music - you're not born that way.
"Culture has a dominant role in shaping what we find pleasant in music."
Newshub.
