Exploring the musical taste of expert listeners: musicology students reveal tendency toward omnivorous taste.

Wolfgang Fuhrmann,Diana Omigie,Paul Elvers,Timo Fischinger

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01252

Abstract

Musicology students are engaged with music on an academic level and usually have an extensive musical background. They have a considerable knowledge of music history and theory and listening to music may be regarded as one of their primary occupations. Taken together, these factors qualify them as ≫expert listeners≪, who may be expected to exhibit a specific profile of musical taste: interest in a broad range of musical styles combined with a greater appreciation of ≫sophisticated≪ styles. The current study examined the musical taste of musicology students as compared to a control student group. Participants (n = 1003) completed an online survey regarding the frequency with which they listened to 22 musical styles. A factor analysis revealed six underlying dimensions of musical taste. A hierarchical cluster analysis then grouped all participants, regardless of their status, according to their similarity on these dimensions. The employed exploratory approach was expected to reveal potential differences between musicology students and controls. A three-cluster solution was obtained. Comparisons of the clusters in terms of musical taste revealed differences in the listening frequency and variety of appreciated music styles: the first cluster (51% musicology students/27% controls) showed the greatest musical engagement across all dimensions although with a tendency toward ≫sophisticated≪ musical styles. The second cluster (36% musicology students/46% controls) exhibited an interest in ≫conventional≪ music, while the third cluster (13% musicology students/27% controls) showed a strong liking of rock music. The results provide some support for the notion of specific tendencies in the musical taste of musicology students and the contribution of familiarity and knowledge toward musical omnivorousness. Further differences between the clusters in terms of social, personality, and sociodemographic factors are discussed.

Highlights

It has been noted since Antiquity that judgments on esthetic objects are difficult to account for
We further investigated whether the factor solution is due to the special population of musicology students in our sample
Factor structure heuristics yielded a fivefactor solution for the non-musicology subsample, with a principal component analysis (PCA) accounting for 55% of the variance, compared to the only musicology subsample maintaining a six-factor solution and a PCA accounting for 63% of the variance, indicating that being a musicology-student only slightly affects the factor structure

Summary

Introduction

It has been noted since Antiquity that judgments on esthetic objects are difficult to account for. People who describe the physical properties of an artwork in similar ways will not necessarily end up with the same subjective evaluations of it. To account for these differences, the concept of taste – seen as a natural faculty or trait acquired by education or through socialization – was Musical taste of musicology students introduced into debates on esthetics. While musical taste and preference are often used synonymously, we treat them, in the current paper, as separate, albeit closely linked concepts. Both are concerned with the liking and disliking of music. We consider the concept of taste to be the more relevant concept

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