Some people like to listen to the Beatles.while others prefer Gregorian chants.When it comes to music , scientists find that nurture can overpower nature. A study shows musical preferences seem to be mainly shaped by a person's cultural upbringing and experiences rather than biological factors."Our results show that there is a profound cultural difference in the way people respond to consonant and dissonant sounds,and this suggests that other cultures hear the world differently," says Josh McDermott.a scientist in Cambridge. Some scientists believe that the way people respond to music has a biological basis and that this would overpower any cultural shaping of musical preferences , effectively making them a universal phenomenon.Some musicians.by contrast , think that such preferences are more a product of one's culture.If a person's upbringing shapes their preferences,then they are not a universal phenomenon. The trick to working out where musical preferences come from was to find and test people who hadn't had much contact with Western music.McDermott and his team travelled by aeroplane,car and canoe to reach the remote villages of the Tsimane' people,who are largely isolated from Western culture. In their experiments,McDermott and his colleagues investigated responses to Western music by playing combinations of notes to three groups of people:the Tsimane' and two other groups of Bolivians that had experienced increasing levels of exposure to Western music.The researchers recorded whether each group regarded the notes as pleasant or unpleasant. The Tsimane' are just as good at making acoustic distinctions as the groups with more experience of other types of music,the scientists find.Most people prefer consonant tones,but the Tsimane' have no preference between them."This pretty convincingly rules out that the preferences are things we're born with,'' McDermott argues. "Culture plays a role.We like the music we grew up with,"agrees Dale Purves,a scientist at Duke University."Nature versus nurture is always _ .''It's almost always a combination,he adds. What do we know about the Tsimane' in the experiment?
They prefer consonant tones. They are born with excellent music talent. They do well in telling acoustic distinctions. They have never had contact with Western music.