Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony   is learnt and not based on natural ability, a new study by University of Melbourne researchers has found. The researchers said previous theories about how we appreciate music were based on the physical functions of sound, the ear itself and a born ability to hear harmony. The study shows that musical harmony can be learnt, and it is a matter of training the brain to hear the sounds. So if you thought that the music of some foreign culture (or Jazz) sounded like the crying of cats, it's simply because you haven't learnt to listen by their rules. The researchers used 66 volunteers with a range of   musical training and tested their ability to hear combinations   of notes   to determine if they found the combinations familiar or pleasing. They found that people needed to be familiar with combinations of notes. If they couldn't recognize the notes, they found the notes _ . This finding put an end to centuries of theories claiming   that physical functions of the ear determine what we find attractive. The study found that trained musicians were much more sensitive   to unpleasant notes than non-musicians. When they couldn't find the note, the musicians reported that the sounds were unpleasant, while non-musicians were much less sensitive. This shows the importance of training or nurturing   the brain to like particular sound of combinations of notes, like those found in jazz or rock. Depending on their training, a strange chord   sound was pleasant to some musicians, but very unpleasant to others. This showed us that even the ability to hear a musical note is learnt. To confirm   this finding, they trained 19 non-musicians to find the notes of a random   selection of western chords. Not only did the participants' ability to hear notes improve rapidly; the chords they had learnt sounded more pleasant--regardless of   how the chords were played. The question of why some combinations of musical notes are heard as pleasant or unpleasant has long been debated. " We have shown in this study that for music, beauty is in the brain of the beholder ," a researcher said. According to the passage, why do people sometimes find foreign music quite unpleasant?
Because they don't like the person playing the music. Because they have no talent for music at all. Because they have no idea about how to listen. Because they hear music too often.