Unknown pleasures: techniques of taste in the algorithmic recommendation of unfamiliar art music

ABSTRACT

Research into cultural tastes has commonly sought to analyze and understand preferences in terms of notions of familiarity. Such approaches are inadequate, however, when it comes to examining our engagement with unfamiliar cultural content. This paper responds to this gap by examining how people respond to algorithmic recommendations of culture through a case study of unfamiliar Australian art music. It firstly identifies three different “techniques’ by which audiences engage with and value music: functional, emotional, and intellectual. The analysis then examines how these techniques, together with measures of familiarity and the acoustic “materiality” of the music itself, combine to predict the affective ratings given to music recommendations. The findings show that audiences display a surprising capacity to engage with the unfamiliar. The paper argues for the need to develop more nuanced understandings of the relationship between familiarity and preferences which are capable of accommodating a taste for the unfamiliar.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• taste
• familiarity
• aesthetics
• algorithms

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Associate Professor Liam Magee at Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society for his feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Australian Music Centre is a national service organisation promoting Australian art music. Its mailing list subscriber base will likely have a high degree of familiarity with this genre.

2 ABC Classic FM is Australia's largest classical radio network, broadcasting predominantly pre 20th century music. Participants recruited through this channel will likely be familiar with the broader genre of classical music, but are unlikely to be well-acquainted with Australian art music.

3 The Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) is an organisation whose members predominantly have an interest in non-classical genres and are likely to be unfamiliar with Australian art music.

4 The music of composers working in the modernist tradition is characterized by features such as dissonance, complexity and non-traditional tonality. Music by minimalist composers typically includes a focus on the modulation of repetitive rhythmical elements.