STANDARD OF TASTE

THE READING · THE ARGUMENT

Why this exists

The argument. Each step is labelled with what supports it: evidence, an assumption, or an inference from the steps before.

  1. 1Mood influences what people choose to hear.EVIDENCEDKnobloch & Zillmann (2002), "Mood management via the digital jukebox", Journal of Communication 52(2), doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2002.tb02549.x; population-level patterns in Park, Thom, Mennicken, Cramer & Macy (2019), Nature Human Behaviour 3, doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0508-z.
  2. 2The influence runs both ways: people choose music that matches a feeling and music that changes it.EVIDENCEDKnobloch & Zillmann (2002): participants put in a bad mood chose energetic, joyful music for longer.
  3. SoSo the same listening pattern can come from opposite feelings: a reading cannot decode one person's feeling from their listening, but it can name the pattern, and the person supplies the feeling.INFERENCE
  4. 3Almost nobody can describe their own taste in words beyond naming genres and artists.EVIDENCED, qualitatively
  5. 4People do not already have words for how their recent feelings show up in what they reach for.ASSUMED
  6. ThereforeYour recent taste carries cues about what you have been feeling, and because almost nobody can describe their own taste, putting its pattern into words gives you language for how those feelings show up in what you reach for.INFERENCE
OBJECTION
The strongest objection is the Barnum effect: people accept generic descriptions as accurate about themselves, so a reader agreeing proves nothing.Forer (1949), "The fallacy of personal validation", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 44(1).
REPLY
The reply is receipts and arguability: every line of the reading points at specific plays, so it is true of this listening and not of everyone, and the reader can reject any line.
HELD OPEN
One objection has no full answer: putting the reasons for a preference into words can change the preference.Wilson & Schooler (1991), "Thinking too much", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60(2), 181–192. Held open, not answered.

Three things common sense says, and the project rejects.

Common sense: your taste is your history, your all-time favourites and years of plays. Rejected: for understanding yourself now or making something new, only what you are reaching for now or starting to reach for counts; what you used to like and no longer do has no value.ASSUMED
In the interviews behind this project, almost nobody could describe their own taste in words; the published prompt guides for music generators report the same failure, that people name artists and genres and cannot break down the sound.EVIDENCED, qualitatively.
Common sense: there's no accounting for taste. Rejected: taste is subjective but still has a standard, because bad judgment comes from defects that can be removed (Hume).A philosophical position (Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste", 1757), not an empirical claim.

The bridge. Why the reading ends where the hearing tests begin.

What you can hear decides which words in your prompt are worth spending.ASSUMED

Questions, answered straight

Is the reading telling me how I feel?
No. It names a pattern in the plays and offers two things it might mean, as questions. The same pattern can come from opposite feelings, so which one is right, if either, is yours to say.
Whose plays does it read?
Three illustrative listeners who do not exist. Their plays are generated from habits written for them, and nothing on this site reads anybody's real listening history.
Where is the argument weakest?
At the fourth premise, which nothing supports yet, and at the step from naming a pattern to saying anything about a feeling. That step is why the reading offers and the reader decides.

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