Philosophical Notes: If You Like Monet, You Like Taylor Swift?

If you like Schoenberg, do you like Cy Twombley? If you like John Coltrane, do you like Jackson Pollack? If you like Mahler, do you like Anselm Kiefer? If you like the Beatles, do you like Ansel Adams?

That isn’t exactly the point of this study in Current Biology, which looks at human responses to common images (a park bench, a brick wall) and common sounds (hands rubbing, boiling water). But the study is suggestive of a larger taste correlation between senses. The researchers found a high correlation between likable everyday sounds and likable everyday images. They say “If people have independent aesthetic tastes in different modalities, then we would expect no relationship between the two scores [for images and for sounds]. But if there is also a more general aesthetic taste typicality that is shared across modalities, then we would expect some relationship between the two scores.” They found a correlation around 0.6 for individuals’ responses to images and sounds, suggesting that there may be some common factor at work.