Preferences for consonance are evident in Indigenous Amazonians with higher, but not lower, levels of global integration

Abstract

It is unclear how elementary musical preferences are shaped by experience, in part due to the difficulty of measuring the presumptively relevant aspects of human experience. Previous work with an indigenous small-scale society in the Bolivian Amazon – Tsimane’ – has failed to find evidence of the preference for canonically consonant to dissonant music intervals that is widespread in Western listeners. Leveraging changing conditions in the Amazon, we tested whether consonance preferences would be evident in Tsimane’ who have more contact with global culture. We developed a survey to quantify integration with global and Bolivian markets and culture. Tsimane’ participants with greater integration showed a small but significant preference for consonance, whereas those with less integration did not. We also tested Bolivians living in a small rural town and in a large city, and US non-musicians, observing increasing consonance preference across these groups (with group differences that exceeded those between the two groups of Tsimane’). Other preferences measured with the same task did not vary across groups. The results support the conclusion that consonance preferences change with exposure to globalized culture, and indicate that globalization is inducing measurable changes in music perception in small-scale societies.