April 17, 2005

How much mediocre music can you stand to listen to? Researchers at Columbia University's Music Lab are doing a study to find out.

Well, they say that they're studying how people form their musical tastes. Anyone can sign up for the study, which involves listening to songs from unsigned bands and rating them. After rating a song, you get the option of downloading it. I've listened to about a dozen songs, and I still haven't found one that's worth downloading, but maybe that's just me...

posted by klausness 19 years ago
  • I like music that I don't like. Seriously, the AM radio in my car trained me to like anything. I was forced to understand that every piece of music has something enjoyable inside it. The thing is that sometimes it's less obvious and takes more effort to discover it. The trick is figuring that out.
  • I can see your point for music that I actively dislike — there's something going on in the music that's getting a reaction out of me, even if it's not the intended one, and maybe I just need to understand that thing better. But what struck me about most of the music used in this study was not that it was bad, but that it was mediocre. There seemed to be little to like or dislike there.
  • Klaus: When listening to these, I kept thinking: "Maybe they intentionally chose boring, mid-tempo alternarock/emo because it's easier to analyze..." My advice for all of these bands is: find a fucking hook. Jesus. Hookless rock is the devil. Listening to this stuff is like driving past stripmalls... (But I've just been listening to Underwater Moonlight, so maybe my scale's miscalibrated).
  • Have to agree on the AM radio aspect -- all radio, in fact, is an exercise in learning to appreciate material that I wouldn't have chosen for myself, or else I'd be listening to a tape/CD/mp3 instead. I go through long periods where I listen to no radio but it's alwasy refreshing to have the unpredictability and novelty of material you haven't chosen. It's all about expectations. I have a friend who feels the same way about movies -- that there's something good inside every one, and he means it -- he's sat through some god-awful schlock and still manages to enjoy every one. Thing is, this sounds to me like having no taste at all. Are we more likely to think it's tolerance or open-mindedness when it's music?
  • They must be timing how long it takes you to rate the song and how many songs you manage sit through as some sort of pain threshold experiment, like Psycho Mantis electrocuting Solid Snake. I only listened to about a dozen chosen at random, but all of the songs sounded more or less the same: guitars with some guy alternately badly singing and screaming. No variety at all.
  • Wow, thanks for the warning. I had this site in my list o'things to check out, and I can tell based on the comments here that I'd be better off spending my time chasing down music from some of the MP3 blogs our own forksclovetofu recommends.
  • So, this is a formal study to rate your music preferences, but they blatantly show the number of times a song has been downloaded...and that number is static (the numbers haven't changed since my last visit a few weeks ago), so the experiment is to determine whether the posted number of downloads of a song influences how you rate the quality of said song and possibly whether more people will jump on the bandwagon and download the songs with the highest downloads more than the songs with just a few downloads. I ain't gonna be no starving students' stinkin lab monkey)or stinkin' students' starving lab monkey, as the case may be).
  • I think you have it, writtenroll.
  • Not to come down on anybody, but I think some of you haven't thought of the beneficial effects of taking part in such a study. Money talks and bullshit walks. I'd wager that a comprehensive MIT's study's summary would not be summarily dismissed... (Translation: IF this is a study of the sort mentioned above, then it would do a lot more good if people like yourselves who hate mediocre crap spoke up and filled out that end of the response spectrum. Otherwise, we get a skewing towards those who like this sort of thing. And the end result of that just might be more such aural turds being jammed into your ears.) Just a thought. After all, we may all be wrong about the purpose of the site.
  • ...he's sat through some god-awful schlock and still manages to enjoy every one. please ask him what part of Gigli he enjoyed.
  • klausness's comment sounds a lot like what happened with Komar and Melamid's Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Songs. If you never hear them, the most wanted is Celine Dion-like schlock that does elicits no strong reaction. But the most unwanted song is 20 minutes of opera-rap-cowboy-commercial-jingle-political-children's choir-bagpipe music. You can definitely point out what you don't like.
  • "does elicits"? Ugh.
  • Like Wolof, I suspect that writenroll is right, especially given that the download counts apparently haven't changed. Which would make this a poorly designed study, because subjects shouldn't be able to figure out the correlation that's being investigated (since they could then try to skew the results by doing what anatinus seems to be suggesting). On the other hand, maybe those download counts are a red herring, put there to keep us from guessing the real purpose of the study...
  • This looks hysterical! I'm puttin' it on th' Hut.