Tekman H G
Department of Psychology, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.
Psychol Rep. 1998 Jun;82(3 Pt 1):851-60. doi: 10.2466/pr0.1998.82.3.851.
Subjects evaluated how well they liked each one of 38 short excerpts of Western music and also judged how well each excerpt was described by 23 adjectives. How well an excerpt was liked was negatively correlated with the use of the adjectives 'unpleasant', 'complex', 'tense', and 'dissonant'. The use of the adjectives 'melodic', 'pleasant', 'sentimental', and 'familiar', was positively related to how well an excerpt was liked. The correlations between the preference judgments of different excerpts were taken as a measure of similarity between the excerpts. This measure of similarity was used in a multidimensional scaling analysis with the purpose of identifying dimension that may determine preferences for music. In the six-dimensional space generated (stress value was .255) coordinates on three of the dimensions could be predicted, in part, by the use of the adjectives 'sentimental', 'fast', and a combination of 'high pitched', 'calm', and 'sad', respectively. Thus, some clues to the factors underlying musical preferences were obtained. Although a large number of dimensions were necessary and all of them could not be interpreted meaningfully here, this method may be developed as a way of conceptualizing musical preferences with a more careful selection of excerpts and more detailed assessment of their qualities.
受试者对38段西方音乐的简短片段分别进行喜好程度评估，并判断23个形容词对每段音乐的描述程度。一段音乐的受喜爱程度与“不愉快”“复杂”“紧张”和“不和谐”等形容词的使用呈负相关。“旋律优美”“愉悦”“伤感”和“熟悉”等形容词的使用与一段音乐的受喜爱程度呈正相关。不同音乐片段的偏好判断之间的相关性被用作衡量音乐片段之间相似性的指标。这种相似性度量被用于多维尺度分析，目的是识别可能决定音乐偏好的维度。在生成的六维空间（应力值为0.255）中，其中三个维度上的坐标可以部分地通过分别使用“伤感”“快速”以及“高音调”“平静”和“悲伤”的组合来预测。因此，获得了一些音乐偏好背后因素的线索。尽管需要大量维度且在此无法对所有维度进行有意义的解释，但这种方法可以进一步发展，通过更精心地选择音乐片段并更详细地评估其品质，作为一种将音乐偏好概念化的方式。
