Harin Lee talk on Aesthetic Taste Around the World

Aesthetic taste of people around the world

Why do we find certain patterns, colours, and sounds more appealing than others? Understanding the origins of aesthetic preferences requires determining whether they reflect universal cognitive mechanisms or culturally specific learned patterns. In this talk, I will present findings from a global experiment involving 31,288 participants across 61 countries and one small-scale society, the Tsimané villagers living in the Bolivian rainforest. Participants judged their aesthetic preferences for shapes, curved lines, colour combinations, musical harmony, and melodies, where stimuli were generated through parametric variations in real time. I will discuss how aesthetic tastes vary across cultures and how these differences may be explained by demographic factors, while also identifying universally preferred features that appear consistently across all cultures.

Harin Lee is a Junior Research Fellow at King's College, University of Cambridge combining big data analysis with cross-cultural experiments. His research focuses on the psychological foundations of music cognition, the characteristics and evolutionary patterns of music globally, and how one’s aesthetic taste is shaped by the environment. Harin’s work spans field experiments with Tsimané villagers in the Bolivian Amazon to developing online paradigms investigating cultural evolution in artificial worlds. He earned his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, MSc in Music, Mind, and Brain from Goldsmiths, and completed a research internship at Deezer, Paris. He is one of the founders of ‘aiar’, an art-science collective that integrates real-time brain imaging into live audiovisual performances, including recent events at venues such as Berghain, Berlin. Website: http://www.harinlee.info

The MMB & PANC Speaker Series 2025–26 in Psychology is a joint event between the MSc Music, Mind and Brain (MMB) and MSc Psychology of Aesthetics, Neuroaesthetics, and Creativity (PANC) at Goldsmiths, University of London. The series brings together world-leading researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of psychology, aesthetics, music, creativity, and the arts.

Please join us in person if you can. Or click here to join the lecture on Teams.

Dates & times

Accessibility

If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.