ABSTRACT
As music in its many diverse manifestations is a universal trait of the species - there has never been any culture or period in human history that lacked music - one would naturally expect familiarity to play a basic role in our musical experiences and behaviour. Over the last several decades music psychology has provided abundant evidence that familiarity is indeed at the root of our cognition of and affective responses to music. A frequently employed term in this connection is the 'experienced listener'. Familiarity also appears to play a major role in shaping people's affective responses to music. Cross-cultural comparative research indicates that listeners who are familiar only with the music of their own culture have difficulty in perceiving the affective content of music from another culture; they also develop unconventional affective responses to music in an unfamiliar idiom, such as a distinct feeling of unease or discomfort in the face of a largely incomprehensible musical syntax.
