Slashdot Mirror
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.
The amount of statistical information in the OP and the bonus "online quiz" has made this the /. article of the day!
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
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