TRANSCRIPT:
Ben Henry: You’re listening to Consilience, a podcast from The Scientist magazine. This month, we’re bringing you stories about music and the brain. I’m Ben Henry.
Our first story is about why we like the music that we like. To help me untangle the research on this topic, I’m talking with Diana Kwon, a staff writer for The Scientist magazine. Diana, thanks for talking with me.
Diana Kwon: Thanks for having me.
BH: So, you wrote a piece in the March issue of The Scientist called “Musical Tastes: Nature or Nurture.” That story starts in the late nineteen nineties, with a study by two Harvard psychologists, Marcel Zentner and Jerome Kagan, who wanted to know whether four-month old infants preferred consonant musical chords over dissonant ones.
DK: From my understanding it’s the first time somebody actually sat down and said: Okay, let’s take some babies and see what type ...
