Loui and Wessel demonstrate that learning a musical grammar and developing a preference for its exemplars are dissociable consequences of exposure. Participants encountered melodies generated from a finite-state grammar in the unfamiliar Bohlen–Pierce system. In Experiment 1, fifteen melodies repeated twenty-seven times each produced recognition and generalisation to new grammatical melodies without differentiated preference. In Experiment 2, ten melodies repeated forty times each generated stronger recognition and greater liking for familiar items but unsuccessful grammatical generalisation. The iconic result is therefore distributional: exposure to a broader set supports abstraction of structural regularities, whereas denser repetition of fewer items favours item-specific recognition and preference. Their experimental operation replaces “amount of exposure” with the architecture of exposure—set size, repetition density and variability. The work bridges statistical learning and aesthetics by showing that becoming able to inhabit an unfamiliar musical system and becoming attached to particular objects within it are related but independent processes, undermining any universal repetition-to-liking threshold.