preference. These are difficult questions to unravel—whether certain sounds are pleasant to all people and why— and one could write a tome on this subject alone. (Many authors have.) That’s not what lies ahead here. We’re diving into a few cases of how scientists are studying taste to see what these cases reveal about annoyance.
Even people who grew up in essentially the same circumstances do not respond to all types of music the same way. You might get chills from the piercing wail of an Eddie Van Halen solo, whereas it may take a Wagner aria to tug your brother’s heartstrings. When you travel to other parts of the world, the disparities in preferences grow even vaster. Although music is ubiquitous among human cultures, one man’s music is another man’s noise.
“We fall into this trap of thinking that Western music is music, but there’s a pretty amazing variation,” says Josh McDermott, the neuroscientist we mentioned earlier for his work with tamarins and music. “Oftentimes, the stuff that people in one part of the world love is just incredibly annoying to us. Some of it is almost unlistenable.”
To understand the limits of Western listenability, you might start with some tunes by the Mafa. The Mafa are one of the 250 ethnic groups that make up Cameroon’s population. The group originated in the Mandara Mountains, which divide northern Cameroon from Nigeria. The landscape is dry, and the people are mostly farmers, cultivating sorghum, millet, and other crops on terraces on the hilly terrain. The Mafa live throughout the mountains, clustered in small villages of circular homes with thatched roofs. In the extreme north of the mountain range, there is no electrical supply, illness is widespread, and cultural isolation is nearly total.
That’s what drew Tom Fritz to the Mandara Mountains. He lives about three thousand miles away in Leipzig, a smallish German city. Among Leipzig’s claims to fame is the city’s musical history. It is home to Germany’s first musical conservatory, and Johann Sebastian Bach worked in Leipzig for nearly thirty years. Fritz is a neurophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Fritz is interested in music, which led him to his unlikely relationship with the Mafa.
Fritz’s big questions are similar to McDermott’s: Is our taste in music learned; is it distinctly human? Does music mean the same thing to different groups of people? He got his hands on some musical recordings from the Mandara Mountains region: it was unlike anything he had ever heard before. “I was astonished by how different their music sounded,” Fritz says. “That was one of the main reasons I decided to go visit the Mafa.”
Mafa music is produced by a set of different-size flutes played very quickly and repetitively, in complex rhythms. Each flute produces a different note. The flute looks like a long tube with a funnel-shaped mouthpiece, made of clay and wax. Flutes come in different lengths, and it’s not a trivial matter to produce sound with the instrument. “You have to invest a lot of energy—it’s sort of controlled hyperventilation,” says Fritz. He knows what he’s talking about. The Mafa gave him a set of flutes as a parting gift, and he has played them back in Leipzig for friends. “It’s really exhausting to play.”
Most Westerners would likely also find the flute music exhausting to listen to. To us, Mafa music resembles a broken accordion being played by a toddler.
If Mafa music doesn’t register as music to Westerners, Fritz wondered how Western music would sound to the Mafa. Specifically, he wanted to know whether the emotional cues that most Westerners take for granted—a minor chord sounding sad or a major chord happy—were recognizable to people who had never heard Western music. The question required finding people with virgin ears for Western tunes, which meant that not just any Mafa farmer in the Mandara Mountains would do.
“You want to go to very remote areas in this Mandara Mountain range… and find individuals who have never been to a church before, have never been to a market with an electrical supply, and who, of course, have never listened to a radio,” Fritz says. He needed to find the individuals who (often by design) isolated themselves from Westerners. For Fritz, that meant climbing for several hours into the most remote parts of the mountain range. Then he had to convince these folks—who had purposely avoided technology and strangers—to strap on headphones and take part in a foreigner’s scientific experiment. It was a tall order.
Across the Atlantic, Josh McDermott was approaching the musical taste question from a different angle. Here was his premise: If people prefer consonant melodies, and consonant melodies are often made of octaves, perfect fifths (those rock power chords), and perfect fourths, perhaps there is something about this arrangement of notes that helps explain our predilection. What’s special about perfect fourths and fifths, from a frequency perspective? Maybe there are physical properties of a chord that make it consonant.
When you examine the frequency content of a single note, a pattern emerges. Take the concert pitch A440. This particular A has a fundamental frequency of 440 Hz. That’s the main frequency we hear but not the only one. If you play A440 on a piano, you’re hearing not only a 440 Hz signal. It’s not a pure frequency; the piano produces other frequencies as well. Those other ingredients—called overtones—are integral multiples of that fundamental frequency. For example, a concert A will also include frequencies of 880 Hz and 1,320 Hz, says McDermott. “The frequencies have this precise relationship, and they’re spaced regularly in the spectrum.” This is called a harmonic sequence.
What about when you play a couple of notes at once to make a chord—how do those frequencies relate to each other? “When the chords are consonant, they also tend to produce frequencies that are harmonically related,” says McDermott. The frequencies in consonant chords are mathematically related in the same way that the overtones relate to the fundamental frequency in a single note. In consonant chords, the component frequencies are multiples of each other. “This seems to be the main thing that determines whether people find a chord pleasant or unpleasant.”
McDermott’s findings suggest that there’s something about the human ear and brain that makes an organized, patterned set of frequencies pleasant. These findings also provide an explanation for why dissonant sounds might be unpleasant. Whether this patterned relationship is the only explanation for why we find a chord pleasant isn’t clear.
Yet why would a set of pressure oscillations that are mathematically related be music to our ears at all? And is it really true for everyone? McDermott surveyed three hundred people and found that the number of years they spent playing an instrument correlated significantly with how much they preferred consonance over dissonance. If most ears like order, musically trained ears
“There’s this long debate over whether this is innate or learned from culture,” McDermott says. “And it’s kind of remained unresolved, in part because it’s very hard to do the right kind of cross-cultural studies.” Which is exactly what Tom Fritz was attempting to do.
The Mafa in the remote villages were wary of Fritz. He was an outsider with a bizarre request, completely irrelevant to life in the Mandara Mountains. “For the first three weeks, nobody would participate in my experiment,” Fritz says. He tried to ingratiate himself and get to know people, which meant consuming “all of these weird millet beers you have to drink if you go and introduce yourself to people.” The beer, filled with organisms that a German gut wouldn’t ordinarily encounter, poisoned him, but when he tells the story, it doesn’t sound as if he minded too much. In addition to drinking the beer, Fritz also learned to play Mafa flutes.
The way Fritz describes it, the Mafa’s skepticism eventually melted into amusement. They “decided I was some weird nerd who was engaged in doing completely useless things, like sitting around in a room and not having his own field, but at least seemed not to be dangerous.” The Mafa agreed to participate in his experiments. Working with a translator, Fritz asked his participants to listen to recordings of Mafa music and Western piano melodies. He wanted to know whether the Mafa heard emotional content in music and whether their musical preferences matched those of Westerners.
Fritz says that the response to the piano was mixed. Some listeners didn’t like the piano, generally. There were two types of listeners: “the innovative listener and the conservative listener. The innovative listener, when he listens to something he never heard before, he might say, ‘I’ve never heard something like that before, but it sounds really nice.’ Whereas the conservative listener would rate anything he hadn’t heard before as unpleasant.”
This may also be a cross-cultural truism: some people expect music to sound a certain way, and when it proves to be something else, they find it unpleasant. In the Mafa’s case, the foreign sound of a piano is so out of place that some listeners didn’t bother to decide between consonant and dissonant. It was all dissonant to them.
It’s hard to keep in mind the number of novelties that were built into Fritz’s experiment. None of the
