If you’re annoyed by your parents constantly criticising the atonal, non-musical character of any music that you happen to like, it may be best to take a cue from Will Smith and realise that parents just don’t under stand.

No, really, they don’t. As Vice reports, two neuroscientists named Oliver Bones and Christopher Plack, of Manchester University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, respectively, recently issued a study that proves it.

Their report, titled Losing the Music: Aging Affects the Perception and Subcortical Neural Representation of Musical Harmony, explores the effect that ageing has on hearing and subsequently on a person’s ability to appreciate music.

Bones and Plack found that the brain’s ability to distinguish between certain sounds diminishes with age, which has a significant impact on a person’s tendency to appreciate certain sounds as well as engage or disengage with music.

To come to their conclusion, the two neuroscientists explored the difference between consonant and dissonant chords. When a chord is consonant it includes two or more tones that are matched, when it is dissonant it features mismatched tones.

The two types of chords create sounds that are, for all intents and purposes, opposite. Consonance is sweet-sounding and pleasant, dissonance is grating and atonal. Pop music usually relies on consonance, whereas dissonance has been a hallmark of experimental music.

As part of their study, Bones and Plack took two groups of participants, one under the age of 40 and the other over, and asked them to rate the pleasantness of various pairs of notes played in a scale.

Participants’ neural responses were recorded for their “frequency-following response”, which measured how the participant’s neurons responded to different pairs of sounds.

“Throughout the experiment the older participants found the consonant chords to be less pleasant than the younger participants,” head researcher Plack told Vice. “But the older group also found the dissonant sounds to be more pleasant.”

The scientists were surprised by their findings, as dissonant chords are not only aesthetically less harmonious, but technically less harmonious for a range of mathematical reasons. The implications were significant for the way older people hear.

If consonance seems less harmonious and dissonance less jarring, the diversity of music exists in more of a bland middle range for those 40 and over. “It was as if their perception of the difference between consonance and dissonance was massively reduced,” said Plack.

The study consistently indicated that as we age, so does our temporal coding, which controls the timing of brain cell groups firing. This directly impacts our ability to distinguish consonant sounds from dissonant ones.

“As we age, nerve cells in the brain become less able to represent rapid fluctuations in sounds,” Plack explained. “This may be why we become more entrenched in our particular music and less responsive to new ideas, or even in music generally.”

According to co-researcher Bones, if you can’t tell the difference between dissonant and consonant chords, your ability to appreciate music is seriously impacted. Essentially, you can’t enjoy one without a good sense of the other.

“We couldn’t enjoy music without dissonance, because if you don’t have a sense of dissonance you can’t enjoy consonance,” he said. “This distinction is central to Western music and it determines musical ‘key.'”

Perhaps more interesting is that the range of emotions evoked by music are actually a product of our intuition in understanding different keys. For example, think of a song that is sad as opposed to one that is happy – notice a difference in the kinds of tones used in each?

However, there is good news for those of you afraid that you’ll one day lose your appreciation of music – you can train your brain to like different types of music as it grows older, not unlike training a muscle.

“If you listen to a lot of music and think musically you can actually strengthen your neural responses to music,” Plack said. “So the more you listen to music, the more responsive your neurons become.”

So, if you want your parents to stop complaining about your music and actually begin to appreciate it, just make sure you keep blasting it in your room, in the car, and anywhere else you can think of. They’ll love it no time, it’s science.

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