Differences of taste in popular music: An fMRI study

In this study 10 participants listened to the most pleasant and unpleasant musical excerpts which are selected by them, in an fMRI experiment where neurological data are gathered and analyzed. Also interviews are made with these participants in order to investigate the cultural background of their musical tastes. In this sense these data are gathered and analyzed by applying the theoretical and methodological tools of two distant disciplines, namely ethnomusicology and neurology. And these two kinds of data are compared correspondingly, also. So the aim of this thesis research is to investigate the mutual correspondence of neurological and cultural data. The current literature on musical tastes are based on both studies of applied sciences such as psychology and neurology, and studies of humanities such as ethnomusicology and cultural studies. This study can be said to be first in the literature by using the tools of these two distant disciplines. However the studies of musical taste from psychology and neurology disciplines neglected cultural dimensions and almost used only classical western music excerpts, determined by the researchers. On the contrary in this study both musical excerpts are selected by the participants and consist of popular music excerpts. These two points are also new attempts in the literature. fMRI scans are statistical analyzed by using the software SPM2 (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm). As a result of this analysis, differences of pleasant and unpleasant musical excerpts related with brain activations are found to be meaningful. Also as a result of interviews cultural data are also found to be meaningful related with musical tastes of participants. Finally two different types of data gathered from neurological and cultural analyses are found to be supporting each other.