All of these powers are why music is so important to us.” The way we experience music is always evolving When they grow up, that music will be part of who they are, tied in with memories and growing up. “But at the same time, the music people listened to at an early age becomes their native home comfort music. “Music becomes that stake in the ground - ‘this is who I am,’” says Gasser. Gasser says, as we grow, our musical tastes really help us to forge our individual identities - especially distinct from our parents. The power that we have as infants to process and understand music is extraordinary.” If you play something for a baby a few times and make a slight shift, the baby turns its head at that shift. It’s known as ‘inculturation.’ In the first six months or so, babies can actually follow the syntax of any musical style - complex rhythms from Turkey or major scales from Europe. There’s something similar that takes place with music. The synapses generated in the brain forge certain sounds and exclude others. Through the first year, especially, it gets more limited. “Every baby comes equipped to speak any language, or make any sound for the hundreds of languages that are out there. “What are the hundreds of factors of rhythm and harmony, melody and form, rhythm and sound, and lyrics and production? How can we objectively break those down? What is the shape or contour of the melody? What are the kinds of chord progressions used?”Īnother interesting thing about our musical tastes is how early those seeds are planted. “We came up with ‘Music Genome Project’ as a play on The Human Genome Project but I took that metaphor very seriously, aiming to break down the musical universe into different species by examining the factors that are somewhat active or potentially active in every single song,” explains Gasser. After earning his Ph.D., Gasser connected with Tim Westergren, one of the three founders of Pandora (the music app) and became head of music operation and architect of The Music Genome Project. “It really got me thinking (maybe not in a conscious way at that point) about how varied people’s tastes are, and how people of the same age group could gravitate to different styles of music.” Your music library, explainedĪs composers tend to do, Gasser would dissect various songs to better understand what might appeal to an audience. “I had people asking me to play a rather eclectic repertoire - everything from Scott Joplin, Mozart, and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ every single day,” says Gasser. A professional pianist since the age of 11, Gasser’s very first gig was playing cover songs at his local mall food court on weekends. Luckily, musician and musicologist Nolan Gasser wrote “ Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste” to answer these kinds of burning questions. Did certain key signatures or chord progressions across genres draw me in? Did I have a greater affinity to songs written in certain time signatures? Was it the subject matter or lyrical content? Or some wizardry involving all of the above? As I learned to play music and my music geekery bled into other genres and subgenres, I began to wonder why some songs resonated with me more than others. When I was a kid, there didn’t seem to be a rhyme and reason to what music I loved - my tastes spanned from art rock, to show tunes, to hard rock, pop and funk classics and disco deep-dives.
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