Music genre as cognitive schema: extramusical associations with country and hip-hop music

Popular music genre can be considered as a culturally shared cognitive schema consisting of associations between the sound of the music and extramusical concepts. Understanding the similarities and differences in concepts associated with various genres may improve the efficiency with which music is used for communication. Two online experiments presented brief portions of instrumental country or hip-hop music to 284 participants at a large midwestern US university. The first experiment tested for differences between concepts associated with country and hip-hop music. The second experiment examined the ability of the same music genres to influence person perception in regard to those same concepts. Significant differences were found not only in concepts typically used to define the genres, such as ethnicity, rural—urban classification and age, but also in other concepts that play an important role in communication research and persuasion, such as trustworthiness, friendliness and political ideology.