An Experiment in Music
- Dennis
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Students had standardized tests on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, which put me in an unusual position. I had to give a review lesson on Monday, followed by no lessons on Tuesday or Wednesday, followed by some different lesson on Thursday and Friday. Since not all classes would receive the Thursday and Friday lesson, I had to come up with something inessential, so that it wouldn’t matter to the classes that skipped it. Fortunately, I already had a lesson in my back pocket for exactly that situation: English language music.
Because China is so isolated, most Chinese people know very little about any other countries. It is therefore quite amusing to see how they react to foreign cultures. I often show my students videos from English speaking countries — this week, my seventh graders are learning about the environment, so I’m showing them an excerpt from Captain Planet. Last week’s unique schedule gave me the opportunity to do this on a greater scale, so I decided to conduct an experiment. I would play ten English language songs for my students and then ask them to rank those songs from 好听 (good sounding) to 不好听 (bad sounding). From this, I could make some deductions about the Chinese attitude towards English music.
First, some comments on methodology. Obviously this is measuring the tastes specifically of middle school students in Guangzhou, which is obviously far too narrow a group to represent the tastes of Chinese people on average. Additionally, to measure their opinions, I would slide my finger down a scale from good to bad and ask the students to stop me when I hit the point where they would place a given song. I asked the entire group to do this, which meant they’d have to shout in unison when I hit the right point on the scale. You can probably understand that the results I got were a very, very rough approximation of how the students really felt. Interestingly, you might expect that the biggest problem with my methodology was a lack of consensus. In fact this was rarely true; almost every class ranked the songs very similarly, and students within classes were almost always unanimous. While there are a lot of other problems with this system, I think those two facts suggest there is a degree of commonality among my students, which means you could take these results semi-seriously.
I was limited to forty-minute classes, and I needed about half that time to speak, so I could only play about two minutes of ten songs. The songs I chose were Do Re Mi from the Sound of Music, Shake It Off by Taylor Swift, Back in Black by AC/DC, That’s Life by Frank Sinatra, Miami by Will Smith, Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash, We Will Rock You by Queen, I Shot the Sheriff by Bob Marley, Riptide by Vance Joy, and What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. Most of these were just the strongest representatives I could think of for particular genres; Shake It Off is pop, Ring of Fire is folk/country/western, We Will Rock You is rock, I Shot the Sheriff is reggae, What a Wonderful World is jazz. I was restricted by the fact that I needed clean music, which is why I chose a Will Smith song to represent hip-hop. I really thought that some less cheesy rapper would have released a clean song just incidentally, but no, it seems like clean rap songs almost exclusively originate from people who set out to write them. I had a similar problem with metal, so I picked Back in Black as a somewhat “harder” rock song than We Will Rock You. I included That’s Life because I see Frank Sinatra as the most notable individual singer of all time. Riptide was meant to bring in some modernity (even though it’s over ten years old — I guess my concept of “contemporary” is a little flawed). Do Re Mi, as a song about music, was meant to be a good baseline and introduction for my students. If I were to make this list with no restrictions, I would have replaced Back in Black with Master of Puppets, Miami with Gangster’s Paradise, and Do Re Mi with any given Beatles song. Also, I’d probably exchange Riptide for a song by any recent female singer (Billie Eilish?), because my final list only has two women, something I did not realize when I was putting it together.
All that out of the way, here are the results (higher is better, lower is worse):
We Will Rock You was handily our biggest winner, with Miami second place. Ring of Fire, I Shot the Sheriff, and What a Wonderful World were almost always the bottom three, although students did not seem to hate What a Wonderful World as vehemently as the other two. Do Re Mi, Riptide, and That’s Life were pretty comfortably in the middle. Shake It Off and Back in Black were the least consistent. Most classes ranked Shake It Off highly and Back in Black low, but some (like the one in the image) placed Back in Black low, and others placed Shake It Off high. They were the only songs to significantly deviate from their typical placement more than once. Miami was the only song that consistently split opinion within classes. Generally, boys liked Miami and girls did not.
The common theme I see here is energy. There is a clear gradient of exciting songs to calm songs that runs from the top to the bottom of the list. Even Back in Black, which most classes ranked lower than the image suggests, is a lot slower than you might expect given its intensity. I would hypothesize that this is more reflective of the students’ age than their environment. There is one other pattern I noticed, though, which definitely has to do with our being in China. Of the bottom three songs, three are by black singers. Miami’s placement might seem to negate this, but students didn’t decide they liked Miami until after they had actually heard it. I told them each song’s genre and showed them a picture of the singer before playing them, and they had a negative reaction to the picture of Will Smith. Many of my friends and colleagues have expressed to me that they don’t like black people because they are dangerous, and my students sometimes say slurs when I use stock photos with black people in my powerpoint presentations. This is especially bad in Guangzhou, the city with by far the most Africans in China, and the Chinese natives are more exposed to their behavior. My Bahamian friend, a doctor who speaks Chinese fluently, says that people are ignorant but not malicious elsewhere in China. In Guangzhou, people treat her with more venom — when she first got here, her cab driver threw her luggage on the road and yelled at her.
I needed to share that context so we could interpret the experiment, but we did get away from music a bit there. The takeaway is pretty obvious here. Students in China prefer exciting, upbeat, fast-paced, contemporary music, which is exactly what I would expect from students everywhere else in the world. They also seem to prefer music they’ve already heard before. We Will Rock You was both the number one song in every class and the only song that any of my students had ever heard before. I can’t say that any of my conclusions are especially groundbreaking, but I did greatly enjoy conducting the experiment, at least.
Just for fun, here is how I rank the songs, from best to worst:
That’s Life
Back in Black
What a Wonderful World
I Shot the Sheriff
Miami
Riptide
We Will Rock You
Do Re Mi
Shake It Off
Ring of Fire
Also, I went ahead and expanded this same concept into a spotify playlist. This one has 25 songs and none of the restrictions that I had to deal with when making the list for class. You can listen to it here: