Entre Nous

Hey everyone!

This will probably be my final blog post, sorry to say! But it’s about love, so that should make up for it.

I had a hard time picking this week’s Rush song. They have quite a few songs about love, but not a whole lot about actually falling in love. Neil Peart has mentioned before that he’s not a huge fan of writing about a concept as clichéd as love. But “Ghost of a Chance” is about falling in love with your “soul mate” despite the odds being completely against ever encountering him or her.

Zajonc (1968) discovered a fascinating concept called the mere exposure effect: that repeated exposure to a stimulus will cause someone to like it more. The stimulus can be more or less anything: a number, a picture, a person. And you don’t have to be aware of it, either. If the stimulus is presented subliminally, the effect still works. For example, if I show you a particular foreign word several times, for a few milliseconds each time, you’ll likely prefer that word if I later ask you to rate a few different words that you’ve “never seen before.”

This applies to music, too. I have several stories about this effect in regards to music, but I’ll have mercy on you, dear reader, and only share my most salient memories.

I’ve seen this one band a few times (surprise! It’s Rush), and on their 2011 tour they played a couple songs off the album they were still working on at the time. And it was the most fascinating thing to me: As soon as they said “We’re gonna give you a taste of our new album,” about 15% of the audience just left to get another beer or whatever. On the tour after that album was released, the same thing happened! After intermission they started playing half of the new album, and multiple people around us left and never came back.

This is an example of how repeated exposure to a song causes you to like it more. People go to a concert to hear the band play their hit singles, not their new stuff with hopefully-trendy acronym song titles!

Another memorable example for me is when another band I love, Muse, released a new single from their upcoming album. They started out as a Radiohead clone, but quickly became known for some wonderfully over-the-top prog rock songs. But then last semester, they released “Madness” to the world.

I’d never seen a song have such a polarizing effect on its audience. People left comments in the YouTube videos about how they would never listen to Muse again, and others left comments saying that they would never listen to Muse’s old stuff again. At first, I was not a fan of the song. It was too minimalistic and dancelike for me. As a drummer, I typically need the song to have an interesting drum part for it to keep my attention.  But over repeated listens, I started to notice some of the subtlety to it, like the guitar in the second verse. And every time I heard it, I started to like it more.

My roommate felt the same way. So did everyone else I talked to who had listened to the band enough to know how different this song was from their usual style. I think it took an average of four listens to actually start to like the song, aside from my girlfriend who liked it instantly. I still find myself liking it more every time I hear it.

I need to figure out how that trick works.

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Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph Supplement, 9(2), 1–27.

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