Effects of Repeated Listening on Connotative Meaning of Serious Music

Abstract

To test hypothesis that repeated listening alone increases enjoyment of serious music, 32 high school and college Ss listened to 9 selections representing different musical modes and periods for 10 days. Ss responded on 16 Semantic Differential scales. Significant increases occurred for 6 evaluative scales. Only 1 non-evaluative scale showed significant change. All works but 1 showed significant increase on at least 2 evaluative scales.

Exposure effects on music preference and recognition

“…After the last repetition, most subjects declared "that the aesthetic effect is improved by hearing the music repeatedly" (p. 474). This frequency-affect relation has been confirmed in many subsequent studies (Gilliland & Moore, 1924;Heingartner & Hall, 1974;Johnson, Kim, & Risse, 1985;Krugman, 1943;Lieberman & Walters, 1968;Moore, 1914;Mull, 1957;Verveer, Barry, & Bousfield, 1933;Washburn, Child, & Abel, 1927;Wilson, 1979; but see Brickman, Redfield, Harrison, &Crandall, 1972, andHeyduk, 1975, for negative results) for a large variety of music. Mere exposure effects on affect judgments have been obtained with classical music (both tonal and atonal: see, e.g., Gilliland & Moore, 1924;Mull, 1957),jazz (see, Copyright 1998 Psychonomic Society, Inc. 884 e.g., Verveer et aI., 1933), Korean (Johnson et aI., 1985), and Pakistani (Heingartner & Hall, 1974) music, as well as random tone sequences (Wilson, 1979).…”

Back to the inverted-U for music preference: A review of the literature

“…First, it must be reiterated that Berlyne and others clearly identified the inverted-U as consisting of up to three segments of a curve, as noted in our introduction. However, a number of articles reporting monotonic results (e.g., Bradley, 1971; Heingartner & Hall, 1974; Lieberman & Walters, 1968) have solely been interpreted as rejecting the inverted-U (either by the authors, or in subsequent reviews) rather than supporting both monotonic increase and a segment of an overarching inverted-U relationship. Second, the majority of articles in this review were limited to strictly linear analyses meaning that quadratic relationships may have remained hidden in the data.…”

Affective consequences in adults and children of repeated exposure to auditory stimuli.

“…The hypothesis has not been adequately tested using auditory stimuli, and existing results are not as clear-cut as with visual stimuli. A number of experimenters have attempted to determine how liking for music is related to frequency of exposure, but most of the studies suffer from serious methodological shortcomings (Krugman, 1943;Lieberman & Walters, 1968;Mull, 1957;Washburn, Child, & Abel, 1927). For example, all of these authors employed music of Western composers, many of them well known.…”