The structure of musical dislikes.

Abstract

The current study explored the structure of rationales for musical dislikes. In an online survey, participants (N = 627) evaluated self-selected styles and artists in a slight and strong degree of dislike condition with respect to 41 reasons for musical dislikes distilled from a previous interview study. After constructing nine subscales of reasons, a latent profile analysis identified two profiles of explanatory strategies for disliked music. The highbrow profile included reasons such as the music being Too Simple, or Not Authentic, having No Impact on the listener, and a perceived Social Incongruence, and was mainly associated with a dislike of German schlager, traditional music, and pop. The lowbrow profile included reasons such as the music being Too Niche and Too Complex and was associated with a dislike of jazz, classical music, heavy metal, and techno. A correlational network revealed that Displeasure can occur in relation to Social Incongruence, or in relation to Too Niche music. No Impact occurs in response to music regarded as Too Simple or Not Authentic. A strong dislike is consistently characterized by higher Displeasure, while Social Incongruence and Not Authentic were reasons to strongly dislike artists from mainstream styles. Hence, investigating fundamental musical value judgments, the current study shows that musical dislikes are a complex, multidimensional component of musical taste. The results have implications for the psychology and sociology of music, widening our understanding of people's attitudes toward music and its role in everyday life.

Music and Boredom: A First Insight Into an Unexplored Relationship

“…A list of 14 musical styles was presented (metal, techno, German schlager, German traditional music, pop, rap/hip hop, classical, rock, jazz, electronic dance music (EDM), house, reggae, country, blues; Merrill et al, 2023; schlager is literally defined as "hits"; originally, the German word for all popular music, now a specific style of German pop, partly mixed with traditional music with mainly German lyrics, which has its historical traditions, social networks, and market segments; Mendívil, 2008) and each one was rated according to how interesting or boring the participant found them on a 7-point scale from very interesting (1) to very boring (7) (Fig. S2 and Table S2 in supplementary materials).…”

“…Previous research has proposed that high arousal might occur together with high mental alertness or forced attention in combination with a monotonous task, or occurs in response to an overload of information (Fahlman et al, 2013;Thackray, 1981). Particularly metal is dominated by an overabundance of features, leading to high stimulation together with a perceived overload (Merrill et al, 2023), which might propose a perfect example of the combination of high arousal and boredom.…”

“…In line with boredom, this music is perceived to be dull and uninspired and in response, one gets frustrated or annoyed by the music which is then communicated as an overall feeling of displeasure. As the current reasons for boring music overlap with the reasons for disliked music (Ackermann & Merrill, 2022;Merrill et al, 2023), it can be suggested that boring as a judgment reflects one form of dislike.…”

“…A variety of feelings and reactions can occur when a person listens to music. While the positive effects of music listening have been studied quite well, studying negative effects has only recently gained more interest (Ackermann & Merrill, 2022;Merrill et al, 2023;Peltola & Vuoskoski, 2021). One of the reported "negative" effects when perceiving art is boredom (Coutinho & Scherer, 2017;Schindler et al, 2017), which is probably an often-occurring emotional state when engaging with art-or when disengaging from art.…”