Effects of Music Listening and Its Relationship on Music Preferences

Abstract

Individual differences of music preferences are among the most intricate psychological phenomena. While one person gets on successfully another person pays more attention on listening music on occasional preferences. They not only concern music as an integral component, they also consider the functions of music in daily life, mainly controlling, calming and amalgamating the emotions. Thus, the hypothetical assumption of the present study is that the listening to music and its strength on determining the functional value of music in individual behavior pattern. Study was conducted by two ways approach: Literature survey and a case study. Field survey was conducted using 121 respondents, and based on their records collected from each respondent. Respondents were observed for up to 5 music-listening episodes per day for 10 successive days. As expected, listeners reporting more intense experience of the functional use of music in the past (1) had a stronger intention to listen to music to attain specific goals in specific situations and (2) showed a larger overall strength of music preference. It can be concluded that the functional effectiveness of music listening should be incorporated in existing models and frameworks of music to produce better predictions of individual differences in the behavioral functions. The predictability of musical style/genre is also discussed in connection with the attained results