When it comes to music, it doesn’t take us long to get hooked to a certain song: In fact, researchers at New York University say it takes as little as five seconds.
For their study, researchers tasked 650 people to listen to hundreds of songs, some of which they’d never heard, to determine how they find a favorite new track. The subjects listened to full songs as well as excerpts of songs in 5, 10 and 15-second increments.
Turns out, five seconds did the trick.
Senior author Pascal Wallisch, a clinical associate professor at NYU’s Center for Data Science, noted, “Over the course of any given song, the acoustic properties change dramatically, but that doesn’t seem to matter much to the listeners…The fact that a small excerpt is enough to tell us if we like it or hate it, suggests that we respond more to the general vibe that a song brings to us rather than its musical notes per se.”
The study appears in the February issue of the journal Music Perception.