It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, June 07, 2023
Order in chaos: Atmosphere’s Antarctic oscillation has natural cycle
Researchers discover natural 150-day period in north-south oscillation of Southern Hemisphere’s westerlies
IMAGE: PEDRAM HASSANZADEH IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AND OF EARTH, ENVIRONMENTAL AND PLANETARY SCIENCES AT RICE UNIVERSITYview more
CREDIT: CREDIT: RICE UNIVERSITY
HOUSTON – (June 6, 2023) – Climate scientists at Rice University have discovered an “internally generated periodicity” — a natural cycle that repeats every 150 days — in the north-south oscillation of atmospheric pressure patterns that drive the movement of the Southern Hemisphere’s prevailing westerly winds and the Antarctic jet stream.
“This is something that arises from the internal dynamics of the atmosphere,” said Pedram Hassanzadeh, co-author of a study about the discovery in the open-access journal AGU Advances. “We were playing with some new equations that we had derived for the atmosphere’s turbulent circulation, and we found they predicted the possibility of natural periodicity in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). We were skeptical, but we went to the observational data and we actually found it.”
Co-author Sandro Lubis said, “It was really a surprise, because it goes against the conventional wisdom that the atmosphere is all chaos and disorganization.”
“It has been very important to the climate community,” said Hassanzadeh, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice. “People always look at the SAM because it affects so much in the Antarctic: the ice, the ocean, the ozone layer, almost everything. But the oscillations, which you can see in the north-south movements of the jet stream winds, happen randomly with timescales of 10-20 days.”
Lubis, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and former postdoctoral research fellow in Hassazadeh’s lab at Rice, said the 150-day oscillation clearly influences the variability of the hemispheric-scale precipitation and ocean surface wind stress, which suggests it could have broader impacts on the weather and climate of the Southern Hemisphere and its ocean and cryosphere.
Hassanzadeh and Lubis each said the paper’s biggest impact will likely be in the arena of climate modeling.
“Significantly, we found that many state-of-the-art climate models cannot reproduce this periodicity,” Lubis said. “This helps explain some of the previously reported shortcomings of these models in simulating the SAM variability. Based on those findings, we were able to propose new metrics and ideas for evaluating how well climate models simulate the SAM and for understanding their shortcomings and potentially improving them.”
The jet stream results from two large-scale features of Earth's atmospheric circulation, the tendency for air to sink in the subtropics, about 30 degrees latitude north or south of the equator, and to rise as it nears the pole, around 60 degrees latitude. Where air sinks, pressure increases and areas of high pressure develop. Where air rises, pressure drops, resulting in areas of low pressure.
The mid-latitudes between the 60th and 30th parallels, in both hemispheres, are therefore bounded by globe-wrapping bands of low pressure on their poleward sides and high pressure on their subtropical sides. The low pressure zones correspond with strong upper-level winds known as the polar jet stream, which trace almost circular, or annular, paths around the poles.
The polar jet stream around Antarctica regularly migrates between southerly tracks that hug the icy continent and northerly tracks that cross or come near Australia, South Africa and South America. These north-south oscillations typically last about two weeks, but their timing and duration are random.
The oscillations correspond with balanced air pressure anomalies of one sign near the 60th parallel and the opposite sign near the 30th parallel. The SAM is a statistical index of these anomalies, which oscillate in a seesaw pattern, rising and falling on opposing boundaries as the westerlies move north and south.
When the SAM index is positive, the jet stream is enhanced and cold air stays bottled up around the pole. When the index is negative, atmospheric lows — and rain and storms — are more frequent in the mid-latitudes.
Hassanzadeh said the discovery of the SAM’s 150-day periodicity came from rethinking the conventional mathematical and statistical approaches to understanding atmospheric circulation.
“For whatever you’re interested in, like wind or temperature, you can reduce it to the leading pattern, the second leading pattern, the third leading pattern, and so on,” he said. “And the way this statistical analysis, called principal component analysis, has been done, the patterns are all supposed to be independent of one another.”
Based on previous studies by other groups, Hassanzadeh and Lubis thought, some of the patterns might be dependent at some lag times.
“We relaxed some of the assumptions, created a new mathematical model and then wrote a very technical paper showing that it was a better model,” Lubis said. “And at some point we looked at the model and said, ‘This says there is a periodicity. Of course, that cannot be right! But let’s go to the data and look.’”
Hassanzadeh said the 150-day periodicity occurs because the SAM’s leading patterns of north-south movements are not independent. Rather, they interact with and are acted upon by other leading wind patterns.
“The leading pattern is the SAM, the regular movement of the jet to the north or south,” Hassanzadeh said. “The second pattern is the jet stream becoming faster or slower. The way this periodicity works is that the first pattern, the SAM, reinforces itself and makes itself stronger. And the second pattern also makes the SAM stronger. But then, when the SAM becomes very strong, it starts reducing the second pattern, which in turn reinforces the SAM less.”
Hassanzadeh said the next step in the research is investigating why some state-of-the-art climate models fail to capture those interactions and the 150-day periodicity of the SAM.
“In the long run, our hope is that this new knowledge will help improve model accuracy for climate change projections,” he said.
The research was supported by the Office of Naval Research (N00014-20-1-2722), the National Science Foundation (2046309, 1921413) and the Department of Energy (DE-AC05-76RL01830). Computational resources were provided by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Rice University Center for Research Computing.
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Peer-reviewed paper:
“The Intrinsic 150-day Periodicity of the Southern Hemisphere Extratropical Large-Scale Atmospheric Circulation” | AGU Advances | DOI: 10.1029/2022AV000833
https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2023/06/0605_SAM-fig-lg.jpg CAPTION: Panels showing lagged composited differences for (b-d) anomalous total precipitation, (f-h) zonal wind stress, and (j-l) meridional wind stress for the Southern Hemisphere below the 20th parallel. Composites were computed by first averaging the anomalies at lags of 0, -75, or +75 days with respect to dates local maxima or minima reached, and then calculating the difference (maxima minus minima) for each lag. (Figure courtesy of Hassanzadeh Group/Rice University)
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/sam/ CAPTION: The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is a climate driver that can influence rainfall and temperature in Australia. The SAM refers to the (non-seasonal) north-south movement of the strong westerly winds that blow almost continuously in the mid- to high-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. This belt of westerly winds is also associated with storms and cold fronts that move from west to east, bringing rainfall to southern Australia. The SAM has three phases: neutral, positive and negative. Each positive or negative SAM event tends to last for around one to two weeks, though longer periods may also occur. The time frame between positive and negative events is quite random, but typically in the range of a week to a few months. The effect that the SAM has on rainfall varies greatly depending on season and region. (Figures by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,240 undergraduates and 3,972 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
Figure describing the 150-day periodicity of the Southern Annular Mode (SAM)
Panels showing lagged composited differences for (b-d) anomalous total precipitation, (f-h) zonal wind stress, and (j-l) meridional wind stress for the Southern Hemisphere below the 20th parallel. Composites were computed by first averaging the anomalies at lags of 0, -75, or +75 days with respect to dates local maxima or minima reached, and then calculating the difference (maxima minus minima) for each lag. (Figure courtesy of Hassanzadeh Group/Rice University)
CREDIT
Figure courtesy of Hassanzadeh Group/Rice University
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Feral swine are considered one of the top invasive species of concern in North America because of the damage they do to agricultural and natural systems. To best manage them, resource management agencies need to know more precisely where and when to implement control methods. A new study by a Penn State-led research team developed a method to help guide control efforts in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Descended from wild European boars imported centuries ago that bred with escaped domestic pigs, feral swine cause widespread damage to ecosystems by wallowing — rolling about or lying in water, creating muddy depressions — and rooting, destroying vegetation. Controlling feral swine can be logistically difficult and costly due to the large areas they traverse, their early reproductive age and their large litter sizes.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a 522,427-acre park, divided almost evenly between the states of North Carolina and Tennessee. Besides the damage that wallowing does to the fragile ecosystem that has not evolved with native animals that wallow, the behavior is a significant source of silting and contamination of streams inhabited by native brook trout, which have a low tolerance for contaminated or silted waters.
Feral swine’s voracious appetite reduces natural food stocks such as acorns, which directly effects deer, black bears and other native species that inhabit the park. They are also carriers of diseases dangerous to both humans and wildlife.
The research involved trapping, anesthetizing and fitting 16 female feral swine with global positioning system — better known as GPS — collars to track where the invasive animals traveled within the park.
“Using these locations, we developed predictive models for the summer and winter to determine the most likely places to find feral swine,” said team leader Frances Buderman, assistant professor of quantitative wildlife ecology in the College of Agricultural Sciences. “We created a straightforward method that accounts for general, large-scale space-use, and fine-scale preferences for specific habitat.”
In findings recently published in Biological Invasions, the researchers reported that in summer, feral swine used lower slopes regardless of elevation, especially those closer to human dominated spaces such as along paved and gravel roadways. When moving around the landscape in winter, feral swine showed a preference for higher elevations with lower slopes. They also avoided trails, highly developed areas and oak-dominated areas of the park.
Importantly, the work looked at two different scales of habitat preference, Buderman explained.
“Most animals limit their daily movement to a general area, or home range, and within that home range, they select certain areas more than others,” she said. “However, these fine-scale preferences might not explain why they selected that home range in the first place. For instance, if you looked at my daily movements, you would say I like college campuses, but I wouldn’t choose to live in the town with the most college campuses."
In terms of feral swine, although in the winter they preferred higher elevation areas with less oak habitat within their home ranges, their home ranges were located in lower elevation areas with more oak habitat relative to the entire park landscape. When acorns were abundant, they constituted up to 84% by volume of the documented diet of feral swine in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, according to researchers.
Focusing on only one type of selection, such as within home-range, can lead to erroneous extrapolations when considering the park as a whole, Buderman pointed out.
The research could help result in more effective control of feral swine in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, according to Buderman — an expert on animal habitat selection, space use and movement — because it resolves some misconceptions. The park is huge, and managers need to consider individual differences, seasonal variation, and multiple levels of habitat selection.
Wildlife managers can use these models to better focus feral swine surveillance and management in the park, Buderman explained, adding that managers can identify areas of high use by season and plan control activities that are both accessible and highly efficient.
This research was a large collaborative effort, and included contributions from P.J. Helm, Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries, University of Tennessee; J. D. Clark, U.S. Geological Survey, Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, Southern Appalachian Research Branch, University of Tennessee; R. H. Williamson and J. Yarkovich, National Park Service, Great Smoky Mountains National Park; and J. M. Mullinax, Department of Environmental Science and Technology, University of Maryland.
Funding for this study was provided by the National Park Service, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Tallassee Fund and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
JOURNAL
Biological Invasions
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Observational study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Animals
ARTICLE TITLE
A multi-level modeling approach to guide management of female feral hogs in great smoky mountains National Park
Unraveling the historic journey of the mung bean: A tale of evolution, migration and climate adaptation
The mung bean, a historic staple food, has provided cheap and nutritious protein for millions across continents for millennia. Researchers at USC Dornsife are using genomic testing to uncover two game-changing variants for crop breeders
The mung bean, commonly known as green gram, has played a pivotal role as a cheap protein source in regions where access to meat is limited. Spanning over 4,500 years, the cultivation of this humble legume has sustained civilizations throughout its history. While its migration routes and cultivation expansion have been a mystery, a new studyby researchers at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences that was published in eLife reveals insights into the circuitous odyssey of this resilient crop.
The study, co-led by Sergey Nuzhdin, professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife, employed cutting-edge genomic techniques to trace the evolutionary trajectory of the mung bean. The team analyzed mung bean seeds from three global seed banks, including the Australian Diversity Panel, the World Vegetable Center in Taiwan and the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in Russia.
The research unveiled a distinctive path of cultivation and shed light on the factors influencing its expansion. Contrary to previous assumptions — based on the geographical proximity between South and Central Asia — genetic evidence suggests that the mung bean first spread from South Asia to Southeast Asia, and then finally reached Central Asia, including Western China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran and Russia.
Adapting to climate
Nuzhdin and his team of international scientists used an interdisciplinary approach that looked at population information, environmental conditions, empirical field and laboratory investigation, and historical records from ancient Chinese sources. Through this analysis, they discovered that divergent climatic conditions and farming practices across Asia shaped the mung bean’s unique trajectory, not deliberate human cultivation choices.
Nuzhdin was surprised that the evolution was not solely driven by human activity through domestication but instead was intricately intertwined with the mung bean’s adaptation to diverse climates encountered throughout its journey.
What the research unraveled was the existence of two distinct adaptations of the mung bean, each favored in specific geographic locations. The southern variant, originating in South Asia before 1068-107 CE, is characterized by larger seeds, favoring higher yields in regions with scorching climates. In contrast, the northern variant, originating in northern China around 544 CE exhibited drought tolerance and a short vegetative period during the summer planting season. The mung bean later spread to the rest of China and Southeast Asia including Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan.
Genetic variations
While the study’s historical revelations are compelling in their own right, their implications have relevance to new ways of breeding crops. The mung bean’s genetic makeup, including its short growing season and resilience to extreme heat, hold significant potential for mitigating the impact of climate change on agriculture. Particularly in Southeast Asia, where prolonged heat waves and the severity and impact of flooding threaten valuable agricultural areas, these genetic variants could prove to be a game-changer in the face of climate change.
"Our findings offer a critical roadmap for breeders aiming to enhance mung bean production in the face of climate change predictions, especially in the southern regions. This fundamental research holds immense importance in guiding the selection of genetic materials for breeding programs," Nuzhdin said.
About the study:
The study, “Environment as a Limiting Factor of the Historical Global Spread of Mung Bean,” was published in eLife. The USC components were funded by the United States Agency for International Development and the Zumberge Foundation. Funding was also provided by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan; the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research; the strategic long-term donors to the World Vegetable Center; The Republic of China (Taiwan); the UK government; Germany; Thailand; Philippines; Korea; and Japan. The Russian Scientific Fund Project and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation also contributed.
ITHACA, N.Y. – Shallow lakes and ponds emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but emissions from these systems vary considerably and are not well understood.
Now, a new Cornell University-led study measures methane and carbon dioxide emissions from 30 small lakes and ponds (one acre or less) in temperate areas of Europe and North America, revealing that the smallest and shallowest bodies of water exhibit the greatest variability over time.
The paper marks an important step toward calibrating climate models so they better predict emissions from inland waterbodies, and it points to the need to study small waterbodies more closely.
“This study helps understand both the drivers of greenhouse gas concentrations, and importantly, what makes some ponds more variable in their concentrations,” said Meredith Holgerson, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the study, published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography.
“The paper points to patterns across a broad geographic range, such that we can actually get in and predict which waterbodies are going to vary and will be most variable, and it confirms that we need to go out and sample frequently,” said Nicholas Ray, a postdoctoral researcher in Holgerson’s lab and the paper’s first author.
Holgerson and colleagues have previously estimated that shallow lakes and ponds may contribute 5% of the global methane emissions to the atmosphere. But without accurate measurements across many water bodies, they said, the true number could be as little as half or as much as twice that percentage.
While some small lakes and ponds emit greenhouse gasses in consistent, predictable amounts, others are highly variable. Understanding these dynamics is important as carbon dioxide and methane act as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, with methane being 25 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
Each body of water analyzed was sampled over the 2018 and 2019 summers at three times in three locations, including the deepest point and then two locations on opposite ends (but not too close to the shore).
“One key result we found was that the smaller the system is, in regard to surface area, the higher emissions are likely to be,” Ray said.
For carbon dioxide, samples were consistent in all parts of the waterbody, which revealed that researchers likely only needed to collect a sample from one location to get an accurate prediction of the whole body of water. Methane, on the other hand, required samples from multiple locations to get an accurate measure. Also, for methane, shallower systems were more variable, suggesting stratification of the water column in deeper water may prevent gases from rising to the surface.
For carbon dioxide, the amount of plant life in the water played a large role in variability over time. For methane, variability was more driven by the water depth and likely associated with stratification in the water column.
Among other uses, the study sets the groundwork for informing a New York state climate mitigation strategy to build more ponds to help farmers better handle droughts.
“We’re working to identify how ponds can be built, or if there are simple management strategies people can employ, to minimize emissions,” Ray said.
Researchers from University of St. Gallen and Columbia Business School published a new Journal of Marketing article that examines how the perceived meaning of manual labor can help predict the adoption of autonomous products.
Whether it is cleaning homes or mowing lawns, consumers increasingly delegate manual tasks to autonomous products. These gadgets operate without human oversight and free consumers from mundane chores. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that people feel a sense of satisfaction when they complete household chores. Are autonomous products such as robot vacuums and cooking machines depriving consumers from meaningful experiences?
This new research shows that, despite unquestionable benefits such as gains in efficiency and convenience, autonomous products strip away a source of meaning in life. As a result, consumers are hesitant to buy these products.
The researchers argue that manual labor is an important source of meaning in life. This is in line with research showing that everyday tasks have value—chores such as cleaning may not make us happy, but they add meaning to our lives. As de Bellis explains, “Our studies show that ‘meaning of manual labor’ causes consumers to reject autonomous products. For example, these consumers have a more negative attitude toward autonomous products and are also more prone to believe in the disadvantages of autonomous products relative to their advantages.”
Highlight Saving Time for Other Meaningful Tasks
On one hand, autonomous products take over tasks from consumers, typically leading to a reduction in manual labor and hence in the ability to derive meaning from manual tasks. On the other hand, by taking over manual tasks, autonomous products provide consumers with the opportunity to spend time on other, potentially more meaningful, tasks and activities. “We suggest that companies highlight so-called alternative sources of meaning in life, which should reduce consumers’ need to derive meaning specifically from manual tasks. Highlighting other sources of meaning, such as through family or hobbies, at the time of the adoption decision should counteract the negative effect on autonomous product adoption,” says Johar.
In fact, a key value proposition for many of these technologies is that they free up time. iRobot claims that its robotic vacuum cleaner Roomba saves owners as much as 110 hours of cleaning a year. Some companies go even a step further by suggesting what consumers could do with their freed-up time. For example, German home appliance company Vorwerk promotes its cooking machine Thermomix with “more family time” and “Thermomix does the work so you can make time for what matters most.” Instead of promoting the quality of task completion (i.e., cooking a delicious meal), the company emphasizes that consumers can spend time on other, arguably more meaningful, activities.
This study demonstrates that the perceived meaning of manual labor (MML) – a novel concept introduced by the researchers – is key to predicting the adoption of autonomous products. Poletti says that “Consumers with a high MML tend to resist the delegation of manual tasks to autonomous products, irrespective of whether these tasks are central to one’s identity or not. Marketers can start by segmenting consumers into high and low MML consumers.” Unlike other personality variables that can only be reliably measured using complex psychometric scales, the extent of consumers’ MML might be assessed simply by observing their behavioral characteristics, such as whether consumers tend to do the dishes by hand, whether they prefer a manual car transmission, or what type of activities and hobbies they pursue. Activities like woodworking, cookery, painting, and fishing are likely predictors of high MML. Similarly, companies can measure likes on social media for specific activities and hobbies that involve manual labor. Finally, practitioners can ask consumers to rate the degree to which manual versus cognitive tasks are meaningful to them. Having segmented consumers according to their MML, marketers can better target and focus their messages and efforts.
In promotions, firms can highlight the meaningful time consumers gain with the use of autonomous products (e.g., “this product allows you to spend time on more meaningful tasks and pursuits than cleaning”). Such an intervention can prevent the detrimental effects of meaning of manual labor on autonomous product adoption.
The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Shrihari (Hari) Sridhar (Joe Foster ’56 Chair in Business Leadership, Professor of Marketing at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University) serves as the current Editor in Chief. https://www.ama.org/jm
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A simple sponge has improved how robots grasp, scientists from the University of Bristol have found.
This easy-to-make sponge-jamming device can help stiff robots handle delicate items carefully by mimicking the nuanced touch, or variable stiffness, of a human.
Robots can skip, jump and do somersaults, but they’re too rigid to hold an egg easily. Variable-stiffness devices are potential solutions for contact compliance on hard robots to reduce damage, or for improving the load capacity of soft robots.
This study, published at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023, shows that variable stiffness can be achieved by a silicone sponge.
“Robotic arms are too rigid so they cannot make such a soft human-like grasp on delicate objects, for example, an egg.
“What makes humans different from robotic arms is that we have soft tissues enclosing rigid bones, which act as a natural mitigating mechanism.
“In this paper, we managed to develop a soft device with variable stiffness, to be mounted on the end robotic arm for making the robot-object contact safe.”
Silicone sponge is a cheap and easy-to-fabricate material. It is a porous elastomer just like the cleaning sponge used in everyday tasks.
By squeezing the sponge, the sponge stiffens which is why it can be transformed into a variable-stiffness device.
This device could be used in industrial robots in scenarios including gripping jellies, eggs and other fragile substances. It can also be used in service robots to make human-robot interaction safer.
Mr Yue added: “We managed to use a sponge to make a cheap and nimble but effective device that can help robots achieve soft contact with objects. The great potential comes from its low cost and light weight.
“We believe this silicone-sponge based variable-stiffness device will provide a novel solution in industry and healthcare, for example, tunable-stiffness requirement on robotic polishing and ultrasound imaging.”
The team will now look at making the device achieve variable stiffness in multiple directions, including rotation.
Paper:
“A Silicone-sponge-based Variable-stiffness Device” by Tianqi Yue at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023.
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
A Silicone-sponge-based Variable-stiffness Device
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
7-Jun-2023
Science shows why our taste in music can’t be siloed into catch-all genres
Scientists have made the case for measuring musical tastes on sub-genre level to gain a more nuanced understanding of sociocultural differences of musical taste
Liking certain things or styles is an important aspect of peoples’ identities and social lives. Tastes can influence the ways humans act and judge. How to best describe musical taste reliably is – due to the ever-changing diversification and transformation of music – difficult and open to debate.
Using an approach which also considered sub-genres, researchers in Germany surveyed more than 2,000 people on their musical taste and took a closer look at the fans of five genres: European classical music, electronic dance music (EDM), metal, pop, and rock.
“Our analyses revealed that people who like the same genre can have very different tastes if asked which sub-genres they like,” said Anne Siebrasse, a doctoral student at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and lead author of the study published in Frontiers in Psychology. “Accordingly, fans of certain genres should not be perceived as homogeneous groups with the same tastes. Instead, we need to acknowledge differences within these groups that are also related to age, gender, education level, lifestyle, or personality traits.”
Subgroups with different preferences
“When people talk about their musical tastes, they often use genre terms. However, on a genre level, fans of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would all be rock fans, however they themselves would probably see huge differences,” Siebrasse continued.
To represent these differences empirically, her co-author Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann designed a questionnaire through which participants indicated how much they liked sub-styles associated with the examined genres. By systematically recording liking at genre and sub-genre levels, the researchers obtained a more differentiated picture of musical taste.
As the researchers considered attitudes towards sub-genres, several taste classes emerged. Three of these classes liked all sub-genres to roughly the same degree – very much, moderately, or rather less, the authors wrote. Two taste classes, however, differed in that they preferred sub-styles that were either more challenging or easier to process, respectively. Across all genres, subtypes that represented the mainstream variant were generally preferred over more challenging alternatives.
The researchers also found that sociodemographic and personality variables, including age, milieu-related attitude, and openness, could predict belonging to a genre group or within-genre taste class. For pop music, for example, the researchers found a clear age effect. It showed that peoples’ preferred pop music correlates with subgroup age. The pop music people liked best was from the decade during which they were around 20 years old.
The wider picture
What Siebrasse and Wald-Fuhrmann achieved is a more accurate representation of the actual musical taste of the German resident population than previous studies produced. Some of their results, such as the identification of within-genre taste classes are likely applicable across countries and cultures. Other results, however, including genre-specific findings may be dependent on the history and role of a genre within its respective musical world.
“We have taken an important step towards enabling the further development of questionnaires for researching musical taste,” Siebrasse said. “In the future, our approach should be extended to other genres and regions. A further step could also be to combine this type of survey with specific sound examples.”
You don't know a person('s taste) when you only know which genre they like: Taste differences within five popular music genres based on sub-genres and sub-styles
