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Researchers say when we listen to a song, our brains predict what happens next, and that prediction dictates whether we like that song or not.

It is well established that music tastes vary over time, by region and even by social group?

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in September 2021, we show that similar prediction mechanisms are happening in the brain every time we listen to music, whithout us being necessarly conscious of it.

We used this prediction error as a sort of neural score to measure how well the brain could predict the next note in a melody.

Their traditional singing, known as yoik, differs vastly from Western tonal music due to limited exposure to Western culture.

For a study published in 2000, musicians from Sámi regions, Finland and the rest of Europe (the latter coming from various countries unfamiliar with yoik singing) were asked to listen to excerpts of yoiks that they had never heard before.

Those who most accurately predicted the next note in the song were the Sámi musicians, followed by the Finnish musicians, who had had more exposure to Sámi music than those from elsewhere in Europe.

Balkan music, for instance, is known for asymmetrical meters like nine-time or seven-time signatures.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers had a CD of Balkan music (with asymmetrical metres) played to the infants in their homes.

This means that through passive listening to the Balkan music, they were able to build an internal representation of the musical metric, which allowed them to predict the pattern and detect accidents in both meter types.

These experiments show that passive exposure to music can help us learn the specific musical patterns of a given culture – formally known as the process of enculturation.

Throughout this article, we have seen how passive music listening can change the way we predict musical patterns when presented with a new piece.

While more research is needed, these studies have opened new avenues toward understanding why there is such diversity in our music tastes.

What we know for now is that our musical culture (that is, the music we have listened to throughout life) warps our perception and causes our preference for certain pieces over others, whether by similarity or by contrast to pieces that we have already heard.