I think it’s safe to say that all humans who can hear, enjoys music. Not everybody likes the same genre, but what is it about music in general that makes humans so drawn to it?
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Out of thousands of people I’ve asked over the years, I’ve met like 3 people that don’t listen to music. Super creepy people. They’re dead inside. They have doll’s eyes. There’s nothing going on behind them.
Music is math. Math is existence. Music is existence. We’re hard-coded for music. The top answer is probably to respond to it as an emotional release or way to observe an idea or concept from a new/unique perspective you wouldn’t ascertain on your own.
Also, music is…..so many different things. Heart. Soul. Love. Joy. Sadness. Hatred. Empathy. Melancholy. It’s a release, and a guiding light to how your mind is operating subconsciously. If you hear a depressing song and it makes you sad…you’re probably sad, dude. If you hear a depressing song and you smile or aren’t super into it, you’re probably not depressed. Music is a compass for the soul.
I don’t wanna really go further than that, but yeah, it really bothers me when someone says something to the effect of “I don’t really listen to music.” I’m already at 200 songs today, not counting repeats. Not to gloat about how many songs I’ve listened to lol, but they serve a very necessary purpose. But so do psychopaths in war. It is what it is.
Rhythm and acoustic harmonies define music. As we learn more about brain physiology, it is becoming clearer that the dynamic activity that our neurology facilitates consists of coherent, coordinated patterns. For instance, between 30 and 50 times per second a wave of neural activity sweeps across our brain from back to front, changing and reconfiguring itself as it passes through and interacts with successive neuronal structures and configurations, including those which process sensory perception.
Scientists speculate this phenomenon is part of how our brain’s disparate structures coordinate their information to produce the seamless and coherent reality each of us perceives.
In this sense, the neurological activity that produces our experienced reality already mimics some musical elements such as rhythm and pattern progression.
It makes sense then that music’s rhythm and harmonies create feelings of satisfaction and pleasure if they constructively interact with and infuence patterned brain activity.
Because of evolution.
Why did our distant ancestors develop ears? Perhaps as a way to warn of approaching danger.
It’s not that our distant ancestors *wanted* to grow ears. That’s not how it works.
Some random mutation led to some organ that could detect pressure waves in air, and the brain learned to interpret that as “sound”. That was a huge evolutionary advantage, so that trait survived.
Later, our ancestors developed the ability to discern between different animal sounds.
And even later than that, our ancestors developed the ability to communicate via speech.
Again, none of this was “planned”. But random genetic mutations led to abilities that were advantageous to humans winning out, and that included the ability to hear.
One of the ways the genetics worked out is for certain sounds to be more pleasurable / enjoyable.
Why?
Maybe it was so we’d enjoy the sound of other humans. Maybe it was so that we’d march together with other humans because we like the sound of marching.
We don’t know for sure why. But the end result is that our brains are wired to enjoy certain sounds and patterns of sounds, because it was an evolutionary advantage for us to do so.
Music is just exploiting those patterns. Coming up with new sounds and patterns that tickle the human brain.
The most basic answer is: “We don’t know”.
On the level of genres, that’s learned. Your genre preference are typically tied to experience; what you remember fondly.
As for music in general tho, it’s a bit hazy.
But we know that a lot of animals like it, so it’s not specifically human, and we know children still respond positively to it, so it’s not an entirely learned behavior.
We just like orderly patterns of sound. It might be as simple as it being an enriching stimulus — like a puzzle — something interesting for your brain to chew on.
So, I think the real answer is we don’t know. There going to be a lot of guesses based on SOME evidence, but there is never going to be anything conclusive because we can’t really go back and time and observe the moment when humans first started to make and enjoy music.
Obviously, music can be enjoyed by more than just humans, so maybe the question shouldn’t be “why humans” but more like “where did the love of music first start?” and maybe we have a common ancestor with other animals that explains that love.
Good food tastes good. Good scents smell good. A pretty sunset is just that. A soft touch feels good. Good music sounds…good!
It’s all about the experience. Enjoy the good.
Acoustics are complex mathematical functions so your brain is actually doing what it loves best,
Math.
I recently listened to a [podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVxL_p_kToc) that covered this exact topic. There is much more known about this than the other posters are aware of.
TLDR but the whole podcast is highly recommended:
All species that can learn vocalizations, such as birds and humans, will dance and respond positively to music. Songbirds learn songs by making vocalizations that it determines to be pleasing. In this case “pleasing” means when the processing of the musical sound triggers a release of dopamine in a way that other sounds don’t. When a songbird learns a song it likes, it will sing it to attract a mate whose brain will also release dopamine in response to hearing it.
The answer to why humans like music has been researched and is understood. Just as it does with birds, music triggers a release of dopamine and dopamine makes you feel good. This phenomenon can be used for social benefit as a tool to cause the release of dopamine in other humans.
There is a compelling theory on the harder question of why human (and bird) brains can understand music in ways other animal brains cannot. The same networks in your brain that can learn speech, or generically, networks in any brain that has ability to learn vocalizations, are speculated to be necessarily receptive to music. This is because the brain must learn melody, rhythm and creative expression to control the muscles that move vocal cords in ways that intentionally shape sound to produce creative speech and song.
Here’s the real question here. Are you human?
The brain finds pleasure in structures, patterns, rhythm, predictability and the sound frequencies that operate around the speech spectrum. As for more complex forms of music, there is also a great degree of intellectual stimulation (not dissimilar to completing a puzzle, for example). We also enjoy music as a form of communication, as musical forms and ideas have developed intertextual meanings over time, which enhance and help support the message in a deeper way than say, just reading the words to a song (rhyming is a form of pattern making in language). The triad – a most basic, common form of chord – includes elements of the harmonic series which appear in spontaneously in nature.
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