Music is one of life's passions - it can bring you up, or bring you down incite hatred or incite love. Though some songs are universally loved others are universally hated - what grates on one person's nerves can be music to the ears of others.
Achey Breaky Heart, My Heart Will Go On and I Will Always Love You are examples of songs people love worldwide. Each spent weeks at number one on the singles chart, but some people hate them.
So why is it that we loathe some songs so much we can almost break a finger trying to change station when they come on the radio?
Sally Jo Cunningham from Waikato University's Computer Science Department has been researching this.
She is part of the department's digital libraries group, working on music, whose goal is to do for music what Google has done for text.
"The ultimate goal is to make it easier for people to find songs they're looking for and to find new songs that they are likely to enjoy. One step along that way is to figure out what songs they might hate," Cunningham says.
The computer must be able to differentiate between songs and to do that the researchers have to establish what makes people like or dislike songs.
Along with her fellow researchers Cunningham has conducted a worst song in the world survey inspired by the Bad Songs Survey by humorist Dave Barry.
The research has found songs that stick in your head, have repetitive lyrics, a simple beat and don't have a proper resolution are the major factors in disliking music.
Cunningham says her personal pet hate, Achey Breaky Heart, is one of the songs that people tend to really dislike. She places the song in the category of novelty songs - that is, songs that people tend to really like at first but where the novelty wears off in a big way after a period of time.
"Music is very personal and sometimes things touch us individually, there's something in the lyrics, or something that reminds us of a personal association... and if it's a song with a personal association it can last forever," Cunningham told Breakfast.
The difficulty of the study is building the factors that make people like or dislike a song into a computer programme.
"Some of them we can build into a programme. Looking for repetitive lyrics, there are lyrics available for practically all popular songs and a bit of text processing can pick out the ones that go on forever," Cunningham says.
But some factors are impossible to encode into software.
"The personal association's for example. People were writing in... 'this looks like a perfectly reasonably song, but I associate it with my ex-husband'," says Cunningham.
The next step in the research is looking at factors that make people like songs.
Research into musical likes and dislikes has been conducted overseas and things people like tend to be the flipside of the things they hate.
Cunningham says songs that are interesting musically; don't have the same repetitive lyrics, chords and or rhythm seem to be more popular.
