Tag : Genres

Lausanne (Switzerland): Favouritism is a crucial component of people's identities and social life. Human behaviour and judgement can be influenced by tastes. Due to music's ongoing diversification and development, it is challenging and debatable how to most accurately express musical taste. Researchers in Germany polled more than 2,000 people about their musical preferences using a method that also took into account subgenres. They focused in particular on the lovers of five genres: European classical music, electronic dance music (EDM), metal, pop, and rock. "Our analyses revealed that people who like the same genre can have very different tastes if asked which sub-genres they like," said Anne Siebrasse, a doctoral student at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and lead author of the study published in Frontiers in Psychology. "Accordingly, fans of certain genres should not be perceived as homogeneous groups with the same tastes. Instead, we need to acknowledge differences within these groups that are also related to age, gender, education level, lifestyle, or personality traits." Subgroups with different preferences "When people talk about their musical tastes, they often use genre terms. However, on a genre level, fans of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would all be rock fans, however, they themselves would probably see huge differences," Siebrasse continued. To represent these differences empirically, her co-author Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann designed a questionnaire through which participants indicated how much they liked sub-styles associated with the examined genres. By systematically recording liking at genre and sub-genre levels, the researchers obtained a more differentiated picture of musical taste. As the researchers ...