Why do humans like music, when it’s just only words being said….just differently.
In: Biology
It’s not about the words, so much as the rhythmic patterns. We as humans love patterns from the very core of our brains. If something repeats consistently we’re happy. Music has consistent and rather quick patterns in the rhythms, and coupled with pleasant sounding instrumentation and lyrics makes our primate brains go wild with happy chemicals.
Oh, this is a very interesting question that has baffled neurobiologists and psychologists and they have failed to answer. There is an interesting book by Oliver Sacks (the guy who wrote “Awakenings”, the true story that later became a movie with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams and the famous book “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”) called “Musicophillia” that ponders on your question.
Oh, ElI5: Clever people ask this question too, they cannot find the answer. There is a book by a very very clever man that doesn’t answer it either but is fun to read.
Neanderthals were making music with bone flutes and there is some neuropathological evidence that we were singing tunes before we properly developed language.
Music is hard wired into our brains. It fires up every part of our brains, just not all at once. Music releases dopamine and can help with pain control.
It helps with memory and retention of information. If you want to remember something, sing it.
Music activates different neurons in the brain. There are neurons that get lit up of for timbre, rhythm, pitch, tune, as well as lyrics. These neurons are all in different parts of the brain too which makes them more robust, more resilient, e.g. if you have dementia and one cluster of these neurons gets taken out, the others might still be there.
The neurons activated by music are also more “primitive”, while language processing is a later brain evolution. They’re more closely connected to emotions. Think of it this way… almost everyone in the world self-medicates with music! Researchers have found this also works for chronic pain management. There are times when a combination of music plus advil together are enough to alleviate the pain, saving you from having to take opiods.
There’s a therapeutic trick for patients with Parkinson’s. As a toddler you took two years developing the neuronal circuits to help you walk smoothly. With Parkinson’s those circuits get damaged. What therapists do is play music at the tempo of the gait, 30-60mins a day, for a few weeks. The brain reroutes and uses the “music tempo” parts of the brain. The beneficial effect on a patient’s gait lasts about 6 months. Relatedly, when you get dementia and steadily lose more and more of your memories and sense of self, it’s often the music you heard as a teenager that becomes where you retreat to. In dementia we lose our newest memories first. 10-12 years old is when we were growing millions of neuronal connections per day, forming our identity.
In 2017, the head of the NIH (National Institute for Health in the US) had a hunch about music-as-medicine and set up a research panel with $40mil in funding. Since then, there have been thousands of scientific studies on music.
I learned all this from neurologist/psychologist/musician/author Daniel Levitin, on his book tour for his recent book “I Heard There Was A Secret Chord”.
The patterns of music also hit parrots and other language mimicking birds. It has something to do with our recognition of language. Perhaps you could phrase it the opposite; understanding words over-rides our dancing.
Music can exist perfectly fine using no words at all. Rather, it’s the emotive connotations of octaves and patterns. Words can emphasize or even degrade music by providing further context. They can even become humorous if words don’t match the emotional context of the symphony.
Music is an extent of language, even when no words are present. Our brains naturally understand certain tones and patterns as having emotional associations.
The question is a bit flawed. Music doesn’t even need words, and a lot of music doesn’t have lyrics. However, lyrics in songs can evoke an emotional response based on anything from empathy to psychopathy. We might be able to relate to them in some way (e.g. that girl/guy broke my heart/is hot/died) or it may be cathartic to sing along to them because they are words we would not normally speak in typical conversation. Such words don’t need to be sung and similar emotional responses can come from reading books, poetry and blogs, or listening to someone speak them at a political rally or a ted talk.
Simply put, words are powerful whether spoken, sung, screamed, whispered, written or signed. In music, they contribute to the other sounds we hear that invoke other emotional responses that can result in a cumulative effect.
Music has nothing to do with words. It’s insanely sad that so many people, especially younger ones, think music = lyrics. No wonder the charts are all terrible pop music.
Making music is a great way to help digest stress and commune with nature and our people. It’s a great way to tell stories, it regulates our breathing and heart rate, and builds a sense of “us”. Also, without light at night, and doing tedious tasks during the day, it’s an obvious activity to pass the time.
Rhythm is a way to accurately anticipate just a bit into the future, even in music you’ve never heard before. You catch on to a new rhythm quickly, it feels good.
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