Maybe they just played crappy music.

That's so odd to me. Even music I don't care for makes me at least move to the beat. I can't sit still when I listen to music! I love it, and some genre or other is always playing in my house.

Hmmm... sad. Music is life. Life is a symphony.

I spent 50 years toting music and dj gear around,
for friends and compatriots at work, and there
definitely were people who were neutral or
negative about the music -- some nearly violent.......
we had to develop a method of "turning it down"
which just involved changing the equalizer curve
to reduce the intensity of the strong stuff (coulda
used a compressor, but didn't have one).
then, gradually, we returned to the full intensity
to see if they'd complain again. . made it a game.

good music reproduced faithfully can really help
a lot of people enjoy life -- and explore the range
from Warren Kime to Liz Story to Booker T to
The Strawberry Alarm Clock to Glenn Miller to
Bob Seger to Karen Carpenter to the Pointer
Sisters to Stevie Wonder to Joanie Madden to
Chet Atkins to Ronnie Milsap to Vladimir Horowitz
to Jimi Hendrix to Mary Costa to Garth Hudson --
and there is always room for more!!! -- j

Good point Frodo. Research clearly demonstrates that anti-socials show little or no response to emotionally-laden words. $5Au will check the literature re: music.

That 5% must have been dead!!! I'm not much for country music but my mom had me check out the song "Daddy's Hands" about 10 years ago and I must admit that song should stir something in all men or daughters!!!

I wonder if there's a correlation between those who have no emotional response to music and psychopathy.

Maybe those +-5% are candidates to become psychopaths? It is said they don't feel any emotion from the crimes they commit. Maybe not feeling music is the superset to an even less feeling subset.

I'd be interested to know what percentage of listeners have a positive response to modern atonal music. It seems to have a following, even though most people dislike it.

That 5% are just shape-shifting space alien lizards from outer space. I've surfed four sites on the subject. Obama is one but his blame Bush is one also.
So it is just an invasion of cold-blooded unfeeling thus unmusical creatures instead it being a political or a philosophical anything to worry about. And they all have jobs.
Believe you me, we have a lot more Hispanic illegal aliens to worry about than insidious shape-shifting imposter people.
Trusssssst your old dino in the Gulch, there issssss nothing to worry about. Hissss-have a niccccce day.

http://mujca.com/deathlizards.htm

I myself love different kinds of music from Classic Rock, Anime Music, Christian Music and a number of contemporary artists. The most soaring piece of music is Beck's Bolero by Jeff Beck, Tribal Music-Scatterings of Africa by Johnny Clegg, Russian Metal-Slavsia by Arkona, Gregorian-Deus by Vox Nova, and Contemporary Christian-Need You Now by Plumb. That just a smattering of the music I like.

30 volunteers, and 5% had no response? If there were 20 subjects, 5% would be exactly one of them. To get an even 5% with more than one such, you need 40 subjects. 30 subjects is in the middle of that (maybe somebody brought his dog).

some would call them "psychopaths"

One can only treat this as a disability like autism. My sympathies go out to those poor individuals who have no response to music. They are unable to grasp one of the human race's great achievements in art.

does this mean that these 5 percent are a-musing? -- j

This is interesting. I mean, some people are aphasic (cannot read) and too many suffer from innumeracy (inability to think with numbers). But those are not "natural." Sure, misreading a lion paw for a deer print is consequential, but nothing is natural about differentiating p q b d - R P B - M W - O Q.

But music is probably deeper and older than language. For birds music is language. So, it would be expectable that in a state of nature people could tell music - birds, coyotes, wind in the trees …

Asperger's (a pseudo-label, but handy) posits individuals who cannot read the emotional states of others from their facial expressions. That seems "unnatural" yet, there it is. Was Gilgamesh an Aspie? (Even if so, he apparently used music - chants - to get his city walls built.)