Photo via Wikimedia Commons
The songs you’re into in your early 20s have the greatest lasting emotional impact, but according to a new study in the journal Psychological Science, your childhood and your parents shaped your tastes before then. The study found that today’s college students, on the cusp of making lifelong favorite songs, have a proclivity towards the music of the early 1980s, when their parents were in their early 20s.
The researchers had 62 college students listen to two top Billboard hits per year from 1955 to 2009, from “Rock Around the Clock” to “Poker Face.” Then the students answered questions about how the music made them feel, if they wanted to hear more music like it, and who they remember listening to it with.
Generally the trend was to have stronger memories of music released more recently, intuitively enough. But researchers also discovered “reminiscence bumps” for songs from the early 80s and a smaller one for the 60s—potentially when the research subjects’ grandparents were in their early 20s—before the subjects were born. In a nod to baby boomer self-appraisal the study allowed that maybe that 1960s music is just the best.
Researchers seemed especially interested in the generational echoes in musical taste dating back to grandparents. "These new findings point to the impact of music in childhood and likely reflect the prevalence of music in the home environment," said lead researcher Carol Lynne Krumhansl.
I poked around the survey for the next study, which is now online and covers Billboard songs dating back 100 years. In this survey there are clips from 10 songs that play in 40-second sound byte that you then rate how well you know the songs, your reaction to them and whether you associate them with any memories.
It’s tricky evaluating 10 songs at once, but Krumhansl explained that the goal was to evaluate people’s reaction to an era, not to a specific song. So even though I liked the Blondie song that I heard in the clip, it was coupled in with some early 80s smooth soul music and I was a little bit more tepid in my responses. I guess that makes sense, since asking someone “Do you want to hear more songs like Elvis’s ‘Hound Dog,’” leaves the door open to people wanting to hear more rock songs, more country songs or maybe just more songs about animals.
Researchers were also faced with the difficult task of gauging emotional reactions to music. The subjects, using a scale of 1 to 10, “rated the following emotional responses to each clip: sadness, happiness, angriness, tenderness, fear, nostalgia, and energized (0 = clearly does not describe my feelings, 5 = somewhat describes my feelings, 10 = clearly describes my feelings).” The difficulty seems clear: Does hearing a sad song that you love make you sad, or does it make you nostalgic or energized? Can music from a specific year, but not specific genre, really make someone feel romantic?
There’s also the issue of using the Billboard charts as your indicator, as one’s taste for Billboard’s lists can wax and wane with the eras. For instance, I have a lot of favorite albums that came out in 1977, a seminal year in punk that saw the release of Television’s “Marquee Moon,” Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation,” Talking Heads “Talking Heads ’77,” as well as other ground-breaking records like Fela Kuti’s “Zombie” and David Bowie’s “Low.” So even if I actually prefer the late 70s tunes, I would probably prefer a Billboard chart from the early 60s, rather than having to listen to Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright).”
Of course, people like me might just be outliers, and our picky, contrarian attitudes just get sorted out in the course of more surveys.
It’s interesting that even though today’s college students grew up in an Internet-laden, post-Napster era, when radio had a waning influence, that they still were more familiar with Billboard-songs as they came out more recently, suggesting that the internet’s great relativising effect on time are still somewhat exaggerated.
At least as far as popular music goes, though, it looks like the music your parents are kicking it to is getting seared into your brain and holds a special place in your heart, just as the music that your grandparents kicked it to got stuck in your parents’ heads and habits and eventually found its way to your baby ears. Or maybe the baby boomers are just a big profitable demographic and stuff from their youth is just always going to be around.