A Test of Consensus in Aesthetic Evaluation among Professional Critics of Modern Music
2010; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2190/em.28.2.h
ISSN1541-4493
Autores Tópico(s)Aesthetic Perception and Analysis
ResumoTo evaluate the approximate level of aesthetic consensus among a large sample of professionals, modern music critics were sampled from known music rating books that rated comparable genres of music, including the ratings of 352 critics and 5161 albums of randomly chosen musicians. All critic pairs who had rated at least 30 albums in common were analyzed ( N = 139 pairs). Overall, 87.0% of critic pairs showed significant positive correlations in their album ratings, and another 2.9% showed marginally significant positive correlations (average r = .49). Not a single significant negative correlation occurred, and nonsignificant correlations occurred in only 10.1% of the critic pairs. Overall, reasonable aesthetic consensus appears to exist among most modern music critics, even without specific, agreed-upon rating scales, methods or assumptions, and despite preliminary evidence that not all professional critics are equally good at what they do. The superiority of correlation measures over agreement measures of aesthetic consensus is also discussed.
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