This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Musical preferences generally develop throughout childhood and solidify in adolescence. Numerous factors contribute to musical preferences, including characteristics of the music itself, metainformation about the music and its creators, and the context in which the listener is exposed to it. Overall, music preference is largely a matter of chance, depending on the events, era, and environment of one’s life.

People have differing preferences regarding rhythm, and complex rhythms (as in Latin dance music) often are a strong deterrent or have a particular appeal. Some people have an antipathy to extremely high or low pitches and are thus unlikely to enjoy music featuring pitch extremes. Someone who uses music to regulate mood is unlikely to prefer pieces that feature a wide dynamic range. Timbre is an increasingly significant factor in music preference due to technological advances in music production and listening equipment, and if a listener associates a song, artist, or genre of music with negative experiences, emotions, or prejudices, they are unlikely to enjoy it. Listeners are more likely to enjoy music when the artist stands for something they believe in. Listening to music involves vulnerability because it requires one to open oneself up emotionally, so musicians must inspire a certain amount of trust. Cults of personality are prevalent in the music industry precisely because musicians often connect with listeners through the perception of shared vulnerability and common experiences.

Exposure leads to familiarity, which is a key prerequisite to preference, and although the brain’s auditory-processing systems take years to fully develop, most exposure to new experiences occurs during early childhood. Experiments have proven that fetuses can hear music while in the womb and that the type of music played influences an infant’s musical preferences even months after birth. Infants can discern the contour of music before all other characteristics, which explains the exaggerated and slowed manner of speech known as “motherese,” or the infant-directed speech that caregivers instinctively adopt when talking to babies. Infants tend to prefer music to which they have had exposure—in the womb or otherwise—and that has consonance and prominent rhythm. Babies begin to prefer their own culture’s music at around two years of age, concurrent to when language specialization occurs due to prolonged exposure to consistent stimuli that establish expectations. The undeveloped frontal lobe in young children means that they struggle to pay attention at the same level as adults, particularly to multiple things at once. Consequently, they tend to first prefer simple and predictable music before moving on to more complex songs later in childhood.

At around age 10, children generally begin to show real interest in music. Adults continue to identify with music they enjoyed at around age 14 throughout their lives, remembering such songs even when afflicted with major memory loss due to Alzheimer’s disease. This critical period in establishing musical preferences likely links to unique neurological developments during the same period and to the fact that the teen years are a key period of self-discovery, when the brain’s neurotransmitters are more likely to tag memories of music as emotionally important. Musical preference is a marker of group and personal identity for teens and has significant social consequences. By the end of one’s teen years, one has generally developed adult levels of auditory processing, and studies show that a person who has not studied music before their twenties has significantly more difficulty learning to play and read music than if they learned to do so while young. This marks the childhood and adolescent years as a key period of development in musical competence, likely because the formation and development of synaptic connections slows after this period and because synaptic pruning begins around the onset of puberty.

Although cognitive schema formed through childhood listening influence preferences, adults can acclimatize themselves to other styles and genres in later life. Structural processing is an important factor in music appreciation; one must be familiar with the rules, forms, and conventions of a genre to fully appreciate it. All people tend to like music at the same perceived level of complexity, as the inverted-U function of a graph represents. People dislike overly simple pieces because they seem trivial but also dislike overly complex pieces because they are unpredictable and incomprehensible. However, the perceived level of complexity of a piece differs from person to person, depending on numerous factors such as age, adventurousness, and willingness to invest time and effort in developing one’s understanding.

A newspaper study claimed that listening to just 10 minutes of Mozart could make someone more intelligent. Levitin is critical of this study, both because of its serious methodological flaws and because it implies that only the ancillary benefits of music are valuable. Long-term music listening causes some changes in the brain, including increased density and concentration of gray matter and enlargement of the cerebellum, although the corresponding benefit of these changes remains unclear. Exposure to music can have some long-term benefits, particularly regarding the role of music listening and music therapy in helping people overcome psychological problems. Additionally, infants who listen to music typically develop more authentic dynamic and pitch range in their pre-speech babble.