...check your testosterone levels!
http://Study:%20Guys%20With%20More%20Testosterone%20Donât%20Like%20"Sophisticated"%20Music" rel="nofollow - Study: Guys With More Testosterone Don’t Like "Sophisticated" Music
A new study just published in the journal http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886917306980" rel="nofollow - Personality and Individual Differences from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hirokazu_Doi" rel="nofollow - Hirokazu Doi and https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kazuyuki_Shinohara" rel="nofollow - Kazuyuki Shinohara of
Nagasaki University asserts that men with more testosterone in their
saliva are less likely to enjoy sophisticated music: jazz, classical and
avant-garde.
It’s not completely clear who first said this, but it was https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/" rel="nofollow - probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Mull" rel="nofollow - Martin Mull :
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Music's a
non-verbal art that defies verbal description. When critics review a new
song or collection, they talk about lyrics, because for the music there
are no adequate words available beyond those that cite other
compositions for comparison. Likewise, some twist themselves into knots
trying to sort music into categories that dumb-down or miss its meaning
altogether, and even affix value judgments to such categories. And yet,
there’s no forward or back, “simple” or “advanced,” in music’s journey
through human history: The most avant-garde, “sophisticated” music often
sounds the most “primitive.”
In the study the authors write, “There is great variation in
preference patterns for music. However, the cause of such individual
differences has not been fully elucidated to date. Many behavioral
traits, including personality, are known to be influenced by
steroid-hormone testosterone. On this basis, we conjectured that
testosterone partly determines individual differences in music
preference." And so they became interested in learning whether
“neuroendocrinological function can exert influences on music preference
patterns.” They say, “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
demonstration of the link between biological predisposition and musical
preference.”
The study involved 37 Japanese male and 39 female listeners. They
were mostly in their early 20s, and the researchers measured each one’s
level of the hormone by analyzing concentrations of testosterone in
samples of their saliva.
The 25 fifteen-second musical snippets to which each subject listened weren’t identified to them by genre.
The snippets were selected by researchers to represent the spectrum
of music, based on five dimensions — Mellow, Contemporary/Urban,
Sophisticated, Intense, and Unpretentious — identified by neuroscientist
http://daniellevitin.com/publicpage/" rel="nofollow - Daniel Levitin in a 2011 http://mp.ucpress.edu/content/30/2/161" rel="nofollow - study .
Oddly, three of the five describe emotional effects, and one,
Contemporary/Urban, is a genre, as if Contemporary/Urban can’t also be
mellow, intense, or unpretentious. And the last one seems to reflect a
value judgment: “Sophisticated.” Hm. Each participant was asked to rate a
snipper as either “Like very much,” or Don’t like at all.”
The researchers also gave subjects questionnaires that sorted them in categories according to the http://bigthink.com/robby-berman/the-5-personality-types-and-why-you-care" rel="nofollow - Big Five personality types and found no persuasive correlation between musical preference and personality type.
However, “The main finding was a significant negative correlation
between testosterone level and a preference for sophisticated music
including classical, jazz and avant-garde music for males.”
Taking into consideration earlier studies that link high testosterone
levels with high dominance motivations and antisocial or rebellious
behaviors, the study’s authors conclude that “sophisticated “ music
maybe just isn’t aggressive enough to satisfy these males. Take that,
John Legend, you hellraiser.
There’s no discussion here of the fact that most jazz, classical, and
avant-garde music — with the exception or opera in the second case, and
free-style vocalizations in the third — has no words, and many people
simply like music they can sing along with, and/or that have stories
they can relate to on a personal level. Also, those three genres are
typified by pieces that are l-o-n-g, maybe too long for many modern
listeners, and certainly for many contexts in which music gets heard.
As we noted at the beginning, there are — as their will typically be —
numerous value judgments regarding music in the study’s conclusions.
One might assert, for example, that a modern pop record’s multi-layered
vocal and musical arrangements — not to mention lyrical content — are
significantly more complex than the far-more homogenous harmonic and
rhythmic movement within a typical classical piece. Or not.
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