Psychomusicology, 15, 30-45 ©1996 Psychomusicology SITUATIONAL INFLUENCES ON REPORTED MUSICAL PREFERENCE Adrian C. North and David J. Hargreaves University of Leicester This study investigated the ways in which musical preferences might vary with the listening situation. Independent groups of subjects were presented with a verbal description of 1 of 17 different music listening situations and asked to rate the importance of 27 musical descriptors, if they were to like the music experienced in that situation. Although ratings were consistent within situa- tions, the results showed that different musical descriptors were preferred for different proposed listening situations, with some indication that preference for specific musical descriptors is positively related to the degree to which they augmented the affective qualities of the listening situation. A factor analysis yielded several factors which underlay responses to the musical descriptors; these might be interpreted as representing arousal, sensuality, melancholia, spirituality, nostalgia, and sophistication. A second factor analysis of ratings assigned between the 17 situations yielded situational factors that were salient in subjects' ratings; these might be interpreted as representing activity, local- ized subdued behavior, spirituality, and social constraint. These results indi- cate that musical preferences are associated with the listening environment. Konecni (1982) criticized experimental research on aesthetic responses to music for treating "aesthetic preference and choice as if they, and the process of appreciation itself, normally occur in a social, emotional, and cognitive vacuum, as if they were independent of the contexts in which people enjoy aesthetic stimuli in daily life" (p. 498). Konecni also noted: . . .music is nowadays so frequently enjoyed in a great variety of social contexts (that) listening to music has become fully imbedded in the stream of daily life of ordinary men and women. People listen to music while working, talking, eating, engaging in sexual intercourse. . . . What music does to people at different times, why they choose to listen to it so much, and why they choose a particular type of music while engaged in a particu- lar activity-all of these are important and unanswered questions, (pp. 499- 500) The present study deals with these concerns by investigating subjects' beliefs about the extent to which music should represent given characteris- tics in different listening situations. Although this area of musical behavior hardly has been investigated, Konecni's argument is particularly important given the growing number of empirical studies that demonstrate indirectly how musical behavior inter- acts with its social context (see Hargreaves & North, 1997 for a review). These studies may be divided into two groups that deal with large and small scale effects respectively. Regarding large scale effects, Cerulo (1984) found that melodies composed in war zones were lengthy as compared with those 30 Psychomusicology • Spring/Fall 1996