Some like it sharp: Song familiarity influences musical preference for absolute tuning

Abstract

Listening to music is an enjoyable activity for most individuals, yet the musical factors that relate to aesthetic experiences are not completely understood. In the present paper, we investigate whether the absolute tuning of music implicitly influences listener evaluations of music, as well as whether listeners can explicitly categorize musical sounds as “in tune” versus “out of tune” based on conventional tuning standards. In Experiment 1, participants rated unfamiliar musical excerpts, which were either tuned conventionally or unconventionally, in terms of liking, interest, and unusualness. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to explicitly judge whether several types of musical sounds (isolated notes, chords, scales, and short excerpts) were “in tune” or “out of tune.” The results suggest that the absolute tuning of music has no influence on listener evaluations of music (Experiment 1), and these null results are likely caused, in part, by an inability for listeners to explicitly differentiate in-tune from out-of-tune musical excerpts (Experiment 2). Interestingly, listeners in Experiment 2 showed robust above-chance performance in classifying musical sounds as “in tune” versus “out of tune” when the to-be-judged sounds did not contain relative pitch changes (i.e., isolated notes and chords), replicating prior work on absolute intonation for simple sounds. Taken together, the results suggest that most listeners possess some form of absolute intonation, but this ability has limited generalizability to more ecologically valid musical contexts and does not appear to influence aesthetic judgments of music.