Music Preference 1 - Brent Hugh's personal and business web pages

Music Preference 19
is the hardening of attitude over time necessary in order to develop refined knowledge? Three
reasons are apparent; the basis for all three is the insight given by the neural-network model of
learning: the purpose of attitudes is to determine how information is processed and turned into
knowledge.
1. Attitude affects interest and interest affects knowledge. A listener equally interested in
every different kind of music would not have time or mental capacity even to listen in detail to
each of the thousands of musical styles that have existed in world history. In order to develop
detailed knowledge, a few styles must be relatively preferred and the remainder relatively
neglected. Time and effort is put into listening to and gaining understanding of the preferred
styles; the result is a more detailed knowledge of the preferred styles and a less detailed
knowledge of the non-preferred styles. Early in life when the basic discrimination between music
and non-music is learned, strong preferences are not necessary or helpful; listening to any kind of
music will do. On the other end of the spectrum, a musician learning to make fine distinctions
among, say, the early, middle, and late periods of Beethoven's piano music, between the musical
styles of Palestrina and Vittoria, or between Heavy Metal and Gothic Metal, must do
considerable listening to a small segment of the musical repertoire. Without strong interests and
preferences to guide this listening, the necessary focused listening and learning would not take
place.
2. Attitude affects cognition. One of the primary functions of the brain is to filter the welter
of sensory and perceptual input that continually inundate it, choosing the few perceptions of
highest interest and importance to pass along to the areas of higher brain function. Further
processing is done to filter some perceptions into short-term memory and reject others, and yet
further processing to filter some contents of short-term memory into long-term memory and