Carmon Messages: 1 Registered: July 2011 Location: new york
Esquire
Music can bring out such strong and mixed emotions from every listener. A listener also appreciates certain music over other. A listener will find some music to be horribly and some music to be great. What determines a listener to perceived a piece of music to be a great work of art? What determines a listener to perceive a piece of music to have no beauty?
It seems music has to be structured right in order for a listener to appreciate it. A music with wrong structure, whether is be bad rhythm or bad placement of noted, becomes a burden to listen to. What in our minds determines the structure that music has to have in order to be appreciated? Please explain why.
Ebirah01 Messages: 17 Registered: August 2011 Location: London, England, UK
Chancellor
Hey there Carmon!
The first part of your post is part of the answer: the appreciation of music is highly subjective and draws heavily from a listener's background and their personal construction of sensibilities and aesthetics. It is impossible to determine the answer to your question with any level of certainty, but what is certain is that musical tastes are without a doubt widely varied and extremely personal.
One source that may interest you is a book published in 2006 by Atlantic Books called This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin. The author was a record producer who gave up up his music job to study neuroscience. It does not give specific answers (and rightfully so), but it does map out great ways of looking at the questions you just posed.
There are a few other books, too, such Anthony Stor's book called Music and the Mind and a collection of essays edited by Henry Stobart entitled Sound. The latter book is a variety of thoughts on the construction of aesthetics and not directly related to your query, but the underlying meanings therein are pertinent and it is a great read!
I think what determines the kind of music we like is the time that we are growing up or when we are in the adolescent age. If you observe the old folks of today, they don't like the music of the youth today and I got strong belief that when these old folks were young, their parents don't like their kind of music as well. SO for me, the music that you perceive is great depends on the kind of music that you grew up with.
There are certain commonalities within a culture. Some frequency ratios, for example, as heard as pleasing to the ear, while others sound terrible to us. I think individual tastes have a lot to do with what you grow up hearing.
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