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Most classical music lovers can rattle off at least a few different reasons why they love the genre that spans many centuries of Western music. They might list objective reasons like its musical sophistication as compared with the usual pop radio fare, or the studies that talk about relaxation and\/or mental stimulation associated with listening to classical music. They may talk more subjectively about the emotions it evokes.<\/p>\n
Science, however, tells us that the roots of musical preferences lie much deeper in the very brain itself. Before there can be any emotional interpretation of the music, the sound is processed by the auditory system. It\u2019s an area where the research is in its infancy, and ongoing. Emily Hurwitz, an undergraduate researcher in the Music Cognition Lab at Cornell University, describes it in a recent interview with the Cornell Sun<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are a lot of similarities between how we process music and speech, and there are a lot of different opinions about whether we are using the same or different pathways and mechanisms for each.\u201d<\/p>\n That processing goes something like this:<\/p>\n The first sound that results in the primary auditory cortex is a standard pitch. Other regions of the auditory cortex add more complex elements like timbre and specific sound quality. To add to the complexity, prior research has revealed that multiple areas of the brain become activated by listening to music \u2014 many of them not specific to music processing, such as emotional processing. Rhythmic processing on its own involves multiple overlapping structures of the brain.<\/p>\n \u201cThe limbic system, which includes areas such as the amygdala and hippocampus, is involved in the processing of emotion in music,\u201d Hurwitz told the Sun <\/em>reporter.<\/p>\n How does this result in our very individual musical preferences? It turns out that is a fairly complicated question as well, and one that is undergoing study all over the world. A large study of over 4,000 participants in the UK led by Cambridge University psychologist and researcher David Greenberg found a distinct correlation between brain types or thinking styles and musical preferences. The study divided the subjects into three categories.<\/p>\n After reviewing the results of thousands of interviews, Greenberg and his team found the Type E thinkers tended to like low energy songs with emotional depth, including sad songs, and genres like soft rock and singer-songwriters. Type B personalities tended to display a broader range of preferences than either of the other types, not surprisingly. Type S thinkers, conversely, tended to prefer more intense and structured music like heavy metal \u2014 or classical music in the avant-garde vein. They showed a preference for pieces like Scriabin\u2019s Etude opus 65 no 3<\/em>, for example.<\/p>\n\n
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