It's True: Some People Just Don't Like Music

sciencehabit writes "Researchers have found that between 1 and 3% of people don't like music of any kind. These people aren't tone deaf or incapable of grasping the emotional meaning of a song—their brains simply didn’t find listening to music rewarding. While some psychiatric disorders are associated with the loss of the ability to feel pleasure, called anhedonia, the music-haters represent the first evidence for not feeling pleasure from only one specific pleasing stimulant, a condition that has been dubbed music-specific anhedonia. Curious where you fall on the music reward spectrum? The researchers have an online quiz." I know I actively prefer silence to most music, but what I like, I like intensely. Update: 03/06 21:48 GMT by T : Sorry for the garbled submission; now fixed.

Comments

Mind = Blown

[BisuDagger]

The amount of statistical information in the OP and the bonus "online quiz" has made this the /. article of the day!

Re:Mind = Blown

[mythosaz]

Study also shows that between 1 and 3% of online survey takers don't give a crap about the questions they're being asked, and just want the survey to be over with.

HEY

[marcello_dl]

I didn't know there were so many fans of Bieber.

Re:HEY

[cayenne8]

Exactly.

So very little music you hear out today can be considered "musical" at all.

I prefer the days (I'm a rock/blues type) when people/groups generally wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, and aside from a bit of reverb, and other treatments shy of fucking Autotune...had real vocals on their songs.

I guess that's why I still see young kids of today, wearing AC/DC or Stones' tshirts (reproductions), and listening to Led Zeppelin, when they should have really come up with giants of music of their own day to replace the ones of my day.

I was shocked the other day really.

It was an afternoon on the way home from work not long ago. I was warm and I had the windows down on the car, and I was blaring Dazed and Confused, the 30 min live version from TSRTS album. It was during the extender part of Jimmy Page bowing his guitar, just a lot of noise really, and unless you knew this piece on a live recording...you'd not know what this noise was, especially considering the age of the piece.

Well, I pulled up, rolled up the windows, turned the music down and the car off and got out to walk into the store.

Just outside the store, a young stock boy, like in his upper teens, was sitting outside smoking a cig on break I guess. As I walked by, he spoke to me and said "Oh man, I love Zeppelin...dazed and confused!!"

I smiled and said yeah, good stuff or something like that.

As I walked in the store, I thought more about it and thought, goodness...HTF did he know that song?

Its that the old stuff is still around...because something happened along the way, and nothing really great or unifying in music happened much after my younger years, and the old stuff is still strong enough to keep a following. It hasn't been supplanted yet.

I think part of it was...most music through my era, had been very closely built or nicked from the music of the generation before it. Somewhere in the late 80s or 90's maybe, there was a break in the continuum. And music splintered, and money took over...and well, you just didn't get the continuing stream of artist with control over their music and time to hone their skills, style and following like say a Led Zeppelin did. Music became throw away, and while there have always been one hit wonders, that is now the norm. Groups don't earn or aren't given a chance to develop staying power. Or, maybe they just don't work as hard to know their instruments and music. I dunno.

Maybe some combination of all of the above.

Ok, now, get off my lawn, and lemme get my anti-static gun to "clear" my album I'm about to throw on the turntable.

Re:HEY

[CanHasDIY]

It was an afternoon on the way home from work not long ago. I was warm and I had the windows down on the car, and I was blaring Dazed and Confused, the 30 min live version from TSRTS album. It was during the extender part of Jimmy Page bowing his guitar, just a lot of noise really, and unless you knew this piece on a live recording...you'd not know what this noise was, especially considering the age of the piece.

Well, I pulled up, rolled up the windows, turned the music down and the car off and got out to walk into the store.

Just outside the store, a young stock boy, like in his upper teens, was sitting outside smoking a cig on break I guess. As I walked by, he spoke to me and said "Oh man, I love Zeppelin...dazed and confused!!"

I smiled and said yeah, good stuff or something like that.

As I walked in the store, I thought more about it and thought, goodness...HTF did he know that song?

To be fair, the Zep represents that rare breed of musician whose art transcends generations. Just so happens the 1960's and 70's were chock-full of that kind of artist: Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Pink Floyd, the Beatles...

Well, OK, maybe just those four. Now that I think about it, I don't know anyone under the age of 25 or 26 who can name even one Jefferson Starship or Bread song.

Re:HEY

[Anonymous Coward]

So very little music you hear out today can be considered "musical" at all.

I prefer the days (I'm a rock/blues type) when people/groups generally wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, and aside from a bit of reverb, and other treatments shy of fucking Autotune...had real vocals on their songs.

I hope this is sarcasm.

Every generation has great well crafted music, and every one has outside-written, overproduced pop that "real music" fans loathe. Believe it or not, we STILL have rock and blues. Just because you haven't made an attempt to find it doesn't mean it isn't there. It's hilarious that when people compare their favorite older music to modern music they always compare it to top-40 pop rather than the actual genre that would match. That autotune sentence of yours topped it off for me.

Somehow you manage to make Zeppelin and the Beatles represent the late 60s (not Three Dog Night or Neil Diamond), yet you automatically make pop radio music represent current music rather than, the MANY MANY bands who are extremely talented and creative without needing a lot of producing.

Ok, now, get off my lawn, and lemme get my anti-static gun to "clear" my album I'm about to throw on the turntable.

...

We still have turntables and EVERY BAND STILL RELEASES VINYL. I have vinyls of all of the music I consistently listen to and the only time I listen to MP3 is when I'm traveling.

Before you rant about an entire generation of musicians, please at least try to learn something first.

Re:HEY

[Cimexus]

Agreed. There's heaps of excellent new (mostly indie) music being produced these days. Pop, rock, electronica, all genres under the sun. Problem is that most of it doesn't ever make the radio (particularly in the US). You kind of have to go out actively looking for good stuff ... it won't hit you in the face by chance as you'll never hear any of it in the mainstream media or in public places etc.

Re:HEY

[Darinbob]

I'm sick of you young kids no longer listening to the legends of Liszt and Haydn.

Re:HEY

[TapeCutter]

I grew up in the 60's and 70's, really good music has always been "harder to find", only cream of 70's musicians lived on, the rest were promptly forgotten. Same with any era, my adult kids still listen to the Nirvana and Gun's and Roses they grew up with and enjoy it just as much as I enjoy Floyd and Marley. The difference since about the late 80's is that parents and their children often have similar tastes in music.

I can't comprehend how someone could not enjoy ANY music, music is the fundamental pre-cursor to language, not only is it deeply ingrained into humans but species as diverse as whales and grasshoppers use music to communicate with each other.

Re:HEY

[melchoir55]

I can't comprehend how someone could not enjoy ANY music, music is the fundamental pre-cursor to language, not only is it deeply ingrained into humans but species as diverse as whales and grasshoppers use music to communicate with each other.

IAAL (I am a linguist)

Music is not the fundamental precursor to language. Language is just a fancy way of diong communication. Communication itself is a common thing that organisms do. The likely precursor to human language would be symbolic rperesentation without things like syntax. "Music" doesn't enter into it.

Animals aren't doing "music", unless by "music" you mean a form of communication which depends on repetitive pitch patterns or something like that. If that is what you mean, then you havnen't managed to distinguish between language and music. Language does that too. Most people think of music as an artistic twist on language. Pitches are held longer than is "normal" in the dialect. A prosody pattern is represented with a guitar rather than a human voice doing actual speech. The list goes on at length.

Animals are communicating with one another, and they tend to do it in a very similar way to humans. Most animals aren't doing anything you can reasonably call music if you want the words "music", "communication", and "language" to have any distinction. Your example of a whale using music to communicate is anthropormorphization. Whale speech happens to sound like music to you because your brain is keyed to represent certain tones in certain patterns in certain ways. It isn't any different than an a squirrel chriping, it just sounds more beautiful to humans because the tones are low and held for long periods.

Language is a precursor to music. It isn't the other way around. All that being said, I am surprised there are humans who don't enjoy any kind of music at all at any time. I suspect the results are either being exagerated, the survey results were contaminated, or the people being surveyed had a tenous grasp on language in general

Oliver Sacks

[snooz_crash]

...has already written about this phenomenon. http://www.oliversacks.com/books/musicophilia/

Jazz

[Curate]

I know a few people who can't stand music of any kind. They prefer jazz.

Ringing in my Ears

[Danathar]

Most of my youth was listening to Rush, Metallica and other hard rock/Metal bands of the 80's.

As a result I have ringing in my ears that I only notice when it's silent.

Have you ever heard "The Silence is Deafening?" Well, for me silence can literally BE deafening.

Re:Ringing in my Ears

[Morpeth]

Just curious, have you ever had an extended period of silence, like hours or days? Why I ask is this, most people have some ringing in total silence (which is rare because we live with SO much background noise these days), but it settles down after an extensive period of being in silence or near silent conditions. Whenever I go backpacking somewhere very remote, my ears ring like hell for the first day or so, by the 2nd or 3rd day, not so much.

But if it's always there, you may have tinnitus, which unfortunately medicine been able to cure/resolve yet... :/

Re:Ringing in my Ears

[labnet]

Which is called tinnitus.
If you put anyone in a sound proof room for long enough, they will eventually hear noises.
The most common form of tinnitus is a high pitch ringing and the most common source is now believed to be in neural cortex (related to memory and overactive neurone feedback) rather than the ear, although the original source is often a defect in ear mechanism, such as a loss at a certain frequency where the brain is attempting to compensate.
In my case, it is 24x7 for the last 15 years. I can hold a hair dryer up to my head and still hear it.
The only medically accepted treatments are habituation(TRT)/masking which is teaching your brain to break the fight/flight response.
There are other techniques that have variable results, such as xanax, hypnosis, vegas nerve stimulation, notched music, and playing tones either side of the tinnitus frequency.
I heard a quote recently that if you could hear pain, that would be the sound of tinnitus.

Re:Sorry...

[plopez]

So in other words, no different from any other /. post.

Everyone I know hates music

[Cro Magnon]

As soon as I start singing, they throw rotten fruit at me!

Now are these people trainable?

[hey!]

Let's discard the people who can't recognize tunes or recognize emotions in music -- although they are interesting in themselves. Can the people who don't like music be trained to like music? In other words do they lack associated life experiences with music?

Another question is whether a better understanding would lead to enjoyment. We tend *not* to like music we haven't been exposed to (e.g. foreign music or young people's music).

Personally, I like to listen to music when I'm building something; this also correlates to what works for me when listening to lectures. I seldom need to look at notes, but I have to take them otherwise my mind wanders. I can even doodle, it doesn't matter. Somehow having my hands occupied seems to help my mind track external stimuli better.

Re:Now are these people trainable?

[ThatAblaze]

No.

I am one of the 1-3% mentioned. When I put my headphones on it's always an audio book. When I'm not listening to a book or doing something useful I find silence to be a lot more fulfilling than music. Music just gets in the way of constructive thought, and once you have heard a song a couple of times you've heard the song. Time to move on to something new.

Music just seems like a low-productivity and meaninglessly repetitive medium, irregardless of the quality of the song being played.

This is something I've always believed, but this is the first time I've ever seen that belief validated in any way by anyone. I think society does an excellent job of training people to like music already, and of telling people that they are weird if they don't.

Re:disliker!

[cayenne8]

These days I still dont get gangster rap... except for a few rare cases.

Well, to be fair, the words rap and music ARE mutually exclusive terms.

;)

Count Feynman as one who disliked music

[jmichaelg]

Richard Feynman said music sounded like noise to him. Didn't make any difference what type of music it was. He did however, like rhythm which is why he played percussion instruments.

Re:Really?

[CanHasDIY]

They must really hate this.

I do.

Namely because, to me, it represents that self-serving form of 'performance art,' that has absolutely no artistic value but rather is an expression of the "artists" narcissistic desire to be the center of attention by doing something remarkably weird and/or stupid, and subsequently pontificating on the topic as if they're the first person in history to ever do anything weird and/or stupid. You know, the kind of garbage that art snobs devour.

FWIW, I despise most of Andy Warhol's work for pretty much the same reasons.

Music

[ledow]

I have never bought a record, tape, CD, MP3 or anything else in my life.

Music is one of those things that just has no part in my life. I can appreciate it. I've been to concerts and ochestras. I quite enjoy it. But not enough to listen to it on loop 24 hours a day.

I spent many years spending hours travelling in the car with the radio on. It was for nothing else but to cure the "drone" of the car. I've not missed having it since I quit that job and don't travel far enough to even turn the radio on any more.

You know how the average person consider paintings? That's me with music. Yeah, I might have a few that I like, but I don't consume them all day long. I have enough to adorn my stereo to cover the occasional awkward silence and that's about it, and most of those someone has bought for me or I've been given for free.

I disable all music in games. It's the first thing I do before I even try the game - install, load up, turn off music. I just find it a distraction and don't get any value from it at all. (And yet, I have written games and put music into them because I understand some people like that).

If I do listen to anything, it's gentle, smooth music with predictable backings. Think "Sitting on the dock of the bay". I don't even have a single music file on my phone.

It's not something important to me, nor is it something I hate (there's a lot of music I hate, but it's not enough to be generalised hate of music). I can go to parties where music is playing and not go out of my mind, but my preference is no music.

Think of that next time you write a game and INSIST that the volume slider affects both sound effects and background music. You're just annoying me for no good reason.

They may not have found it.

[gurps_npc]

Until I was 30 I disliked most forms of music. Frankly I was shocked that so many people thought sound designed to influence their mental state was a good idea. Especially when you most often have no choice about what is playing.

Then I found dance and I fell in love with tango.

If I had not found it I might still dislike music.

It does not surprise me that 1-3% of the population has not found music they like - yet.

What Percentage of Adults are Deaf?

[ohieaux]

I've seen estimates from the US government at 2%. Sounds like 1-3% wouldn't be able to hear music anyway. Didn't RTFA, perhaps they accounted for that.