Music Factors And Individual Differences Influencing Music Preference Of College Students

The personal preference in music is not only a common topic in everyday lives, but also an important research issue of psychological study. Preference in music can be influenced by many factors. Due to its complexity, the research within this field is difficult to obtain notable results and has remained one of the toughest topics today. This research paper attempts to use a different view angle by conducting two sets of experiments to reveal the scientific facts that affect individual's preferences in music.This report starts with a chapter of background review. It first introduces the effects of music on human's body and mind. Then it focuses on the topic of affective responses to music. This chapter examines these two aspects in chronological order, tracing many researches that were conducted over the past century. Then it gives the readers a general view of the experiment sets covered by this research, as well as the key points of the experiment design, including the experiment variables of music materials and subjects.Chapter 2 reveals the empirical findings of the experiments. Basically, the research is conducted in two sets of experiment. Eighty students in East China Normal University are selected as test subjects. They are subjected to listen to a series of music excerpts controlled by computer software. After that, they are prompted by the software to record their preferences towards the excerpts. The data are gathered to establish the relationship of the preferences and the experiment variables. The first experiment uses five unique style sorts of music to determine the individual preferences based on music styles. The second experiment separates some music excerpts into four different categories based on their elemental differences. The test subjects are asked to record their preferences by different features of the music. In thelast part, several cases are selected to discuss the correlation of preferences and individual differences.Finally, the last chapter concludes the results obtained from the two sets of experiment. The discussion starts with some explanations regarding the uniqueness of the methods applied in this research. It reveals the outcomes of the research by the common perspectives and differences. This finding indicates that the most influential factor that determines the popularity of music is particular features of music excerpts. For example, moderate and smooth music pieces are most welcomed by test subjects. Some music elements such as tempo and timbre, as well as the personal variables such as gender, personality, and experience of musical education also play important roles in preference to music.