archive

Your musical taste

Tuomas Eerola (Durham), Jonna K. Vuoskoski (Jyvaskyla), and Hannu Kautiainen (Helsinki): Being Moved by Unfamiliar Sad Music is Associated with High Empathy. Why does great music give you the chills? It’s probably thanks to evolution, but only two-thirds of people get them. Your culture — not your biology — shapes your musical taste. When music is violence: From trumpets at the walls of Jericho to pop songs as torture in the Iraq War, sound can make a powerful weapon. Silvia Killingsworth on how sometimes lyrics are just meaningless phonemes. What killed the jingle? Marketing ditties once had a distinctive, hokey sound, but today’s advertisers have ditched them for standard pop songs. The loss of music: Music itself is not being destroyed, but it is being changed, and some valuable things are being lost.