You've heard of love at first sight. How about love at first sound?
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
You've heard of love at first sight. But how about love at first sound?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU")
WHITNEY HOUSTON: (Singing) And I will always love you.
ASMA KHALID, HOST:
Researchers at NYU wanted to find out how long it takes for a person to love or hate a song.
PASCAL WALLISCH: We picked 260 songs, eight genres and seven subgenres, so for instance, jazz and, you know, different versions of rock and all that.
MARTÍNEZ: Pascal Wallisch is a neuroscientist at NYU. He and his fellow researchers took those songs and chopped them up.
WALLISCH: We cut 3,120 clips, short segments from those songs.
KHALID: Then they played those clips for more than 600 people and asked them to rate them.
WALLISCH: Love it...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RESPECT")
ARETHA FRANKLIN: (Singing) R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.
WALLISCH: ...Strongly like it...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY")
QUEEN: (Singing) Thunderbolts and lightning very, very frightening me. Galileo.
WALLISCH: ...Slightly like it...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEARTBREAK HOTEL")
ELVIS PRESLEY: (Singing) Heartbreak Hotel, where I'll be...
WALLISCH: ...Indifferent...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SILLY LOVE SONGS")
WINGS: (Singing) Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs.
WALLISCH: ...Slightly dislike it...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MY HEART WILL GO ON")
CELINE DION: (Singing) Wherever you are.
WALLISCH: ...Strongly dislike it...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M TOO SEXY")
RIGHT SAID FRED: (Singing) I'm too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt.
WALLISCH: ...And hate it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHE BANGS")
RICKY MARTIN: (Singing) She bangs. She bangs. I'm wasted by the way she moves, she moves.
MARTÍNEZ: Researchers kept playing shorter and shorter clips. They wanted to see how quickly people form an opinion of a song. It didn't take long.
WALLISCH: The shortest we tried, shortest we tested was five seconds. And five seconds are perfect, basically.
KHALID: So it turns out, first impressions are lasting ones. Participants stood by their initial opinions even after they heard a longer clip of the song. And the researchers also made some other discoveries along the way.
WALLISCH: The first one is, pop music is popular. People like pop music. That's probably not surprising. Rock music was probably the biggest discrepancy between what they thought they would like and what they actually like. They liked rock music much more than they themselves thought they would like it. And finally, liberals pretended to like jazz more than they actually did. Whereas conservatives were honest about that. They said they didn't like it and they didn't like it.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAVE BRUBECK'S "TAKE FIVE")
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, but that one's a good one. No matter what kind of music you like, remember these words from Oliver Wendell Holmes - take a music bath once or twice a week, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAVE BRUBECK'S "TAKE FIVE")
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