Composer Arnold Schoenberg had a gift for writing dissonant, bewildering
chamber and orchestral works that at times incited his audiences to riot.
Feeling unappreciated, Schoenberg argued that his audiences' preference
for consonant music was an acquired taste, resulting from exposure to the
music of a particular culture. In this he was quite wrong, according to
a recent study published in Nature and coauthored by Jerome Kagan,
Starch professor of psychology.
The study of 32 four-month-old babies indicates that even infants prefer
consonant to dissonant music. That preference appears to be innate, rather
than learned, Kagan says. The findings dispute the assertion of culturally
conditioned tastes and point out again that human babies, like all mammalian
infants, show preferences almost from birth. They do not, for example, like
sour tastes, rough textures, or asymmetry.
"If we all recognize that music is powerful, then what does this study
say?" Kagan asks. "It's powerful back at 16 weeks. You're moved
by music not because of something you learned as a child. It's because it's
in your brain."
For the experiment, 16-week-old babies listened to two 35-second melodies
composed on a computer synthesizer. Each melody had a consonant and dissonant
version. Consonance and dissonance refer to the pleasingness of two or more
frequencies occurring together, Kagan and co-author Marcel Zentner note.
Dissonance is the simultaneous playing of two or more pitches that, when
heard together, sound jarring to most listeners. For the experiment, the
dissonant version was composed in parallel minor seconds (which research
has indicated is the most dissonant interval), while the consonant version
used parallel thirds in only two voices.
The babies consistently showed that they preferred the consonant version
by looking longer at the audio speaker, babbling, and smiling. More than
half of the infants had an aversive reaction to the dissonant music, and
about 20 percent of the babies actually grimaced, manifesting what Kagan
calls a "disgust reaction." None of the babies preferred
the dissonant to the consonant music. Kagan was surprised at the infants'
strong aversive reaction to dissonance. "We thought it would be subtle,"
he says. "It was so striking."
According to Kagan, this is the first time scientists have tested human
reaction to dissonant melodies. In the past, they have measured reactions
to single dissonant chords. But melodies more closely resemble music as
we actually hear it.
What does the study mean for composers of dissonant music? "They're
fighting biology," Kagan says. Directors of U.S. symphony orchestras
rarely perform dissonant composers such as Schoenberg or Alban Berg because
most listeners do not like that type of music. But, Kagan adds, "Biology
isn't destiny....We start life with a biological bias but we can go against
our biology. Many people like dissonant music. Go to a disco. The sensory
experience in a disco would drive babies mad." Many adults also like
scotch and martinis, bitter drinks that would make most babies grimace.
If our aversion to dissonant sounds is indeed innate, it may have adaptive
purposes. A baby's cry or someone's wail over the loss of a beloved are
dissonant sounds that are unpleasant to hear. They may spur us to comfort
those who are in pain, Kagan says-partly as a way of muting an unpleasant
sound.
To answer critics who say that his work cannot be extrapolated to other
cultures, Kagan would like to do a follow-up study of babies in China and
India, where dissonant music is common. Because the babies' aversive reaction
to dissonant music was so strong in this experiment, Kagan believes he would
obtain similar results.
Kagan also wants to explore his hypothesis that people judge attractiveness
not only by physical appearance, but by the sound of the voice. He would
like to record a range of voices and play them in an experiment to find
out whether people with dissonant voices are judged less attractive. Just
as far-out, he says, would be an experiment looking at the ability of mothers
with dissonant voices to soothe their babies. "Are their babies more
irritable?" he asks. "What if a mother's lullabies had a lot of
dissonant overtones and her baby was more difficult to soothe? Wow."
