While my son Cody was growing up we spent a lot of time in the car/truck where 90% of the time I had Pink Floyd playing on the CD player. So he had listened to Pink Floyd for more than 8 years, sometimes awake and other times asleep.The important caveat is that early exposure doesn't determine someone's future musical taste. It appears to increase the probability that certain sounds, artists, genres, or musical characteristics will remain familiar and emotionally meaningful later.
One of the strongest effects is called the mere-exposure effect. The basic idea is that repeated exposure to something tends to increase our familiarity and liking for it. This happens with music too. A child who repeatedly hears Pink Floyd from a parent may develop a familiarity with their melodies, guitar sounds, production style and vocal characteristics long before they are consciously choosing music for themselves.
There's also something particularly interesting about childhood memory. Music is unusually powerful at triggering autobiographical memories. If your son heard Pink Floyd while spending time with you, the music may eventually become associated not just with the sounds themselves, but with feelings of safety, family, home, car rides, bedtime, etc.
So decades later, hearing Comfortably Numb isn't necessarily just:
“I like this song.”
It can unconsciously be:
“This sounds familiar. This feels like home.”
There is also a developmental component. Children's brains are highly receptive to patterns in sound. Early exposure helps establish what kinds of melodies, rhythms, harmonies and timbres sound normal and familiar to them. As they get older, they begin exploring music independently, but that early musical "vocabulary" doesn't necessarily disappear.
And there's a particularly neat phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump. Adults tend to have disproportionately strong memories for music and other experiences from adolescence and early adulthood. So there can actually be two waves of influence:
If Pink Floyd was already familiar to your son when he reached adolescence, he may have had a substantial head start in developing a personal connection to them.
There's another factor in your particular example: Pink Floyd is musically distinctive. Their atmospheric sound, long-form compositions, guitar textures, synthesizers and unusual production can become a recognizable musical "signature." Someone exposed to that sound repeatedly might subsequently find related music more appealing.
And parents can have a surprisingly large influence. Studies of musical preferences have found that music heard during childhood and adolescence is often disproportionately represented among people's enduring favourites. But children don't simply copy their parents forever. They frequently take the parental musical foundation and then branch out into related—or sometimes dramatically different—genres.
So your son's experience could look something like:
Dad plays Pink Floyd → repeated exposure → familiarity → positive emotional associations → Pink Floyd becomes part of his musical vocabulary → adolescence gives him the opportunity to claim it as his own → lifelong favourite.
And there's a lovely twist to it: once he became old enough to choose Pink Floyd himself, the music stopped being merely “Dad's music” and became his music.
So yes, there's a legitimate scientific explanation for what you're seeing. You may have accidentally spent his childhood conducting a very successful Pink Floyd experiment. 😂🎸
If you'd like, I can also explain why music from roughly ages 10–20 seems to have such an extraordinarily powerful hold on people throughout adulthood. That's an especially fascinating part of music psychology. Make a comment!
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