why humans like music
In: 12
It. Beautiful. Okay?
Musical noise elicits a response in our receptors, releasing oxytocin; and on that note we may find happiness through pleasure of listening to music. Have you felt the chills during an uplifting sonatta? That is a response from your neural system to recognize good music.
The last thing I read on the subject suggested it is rooted in our brain’s optimization towards pattern recognition. Basically pattern recognition is really important to our brains and so is being right, it’s a big survival factor. Music let’s you sit there and be right over and over again for a bit as you bob along to the beat.
It gets into other things, too. The language center which we like using, social experience when listening in a group and dancing, memories with strong emotional associations, it hits a lot of buttons all at once.
We’re one of the best things on earth at identifying patterns. This brought the origins of music: the beat. Then we started using beats and lyrical patterns to pass on stories before we could write them down. Now we have Nicki Minaj.
Because patterns in music convey emotions the same way patterns in speech do. And we need to recognize emotions in speech for obvious reasons – in order to know what other people feel. So we are primed to look for these patterns and pay attention to them in speech, and coincidentally we also see them in music and get attracted to them.
Music is sound. Sounds are waves. These sound waves are actually waves of compression, and decompression of the air around us. The lower frequency sounds we can feel in our chest, while the higher frequency sounds we need our ears. It doesn’t stop there… There’s sounds we cannot detect with our ears, and are outside of the typical threshold of human ears. Even further, and we reach the visible light spectrum, and the thresholds of the human eye. The point is we have eyes, and ears, and their corresponding senses that have been developed to detect these vibrations within certain ranges. Thinking about it this way, it’s only natural that we evolved to detect these waves.
Something as rooted in vibrations as music will be detectable by us, and when detected, I’ll say, is considered a stimuli. If you’ve experienced anyone that’s fully deaf, and witnessed how they experience music, it’s quite different, and naturally so. They will feel the vibrations from the speakers any way possible. Music, and its inherent vibrations, are within the detectable ranges of the ear, and therefore will invoke some response in us.
Music, typically developed, and recorded with the goals of pleasing some audience in mind helps us to “like music,” I guess. However, music, whose existence is deeply ⁴rooted in, and is a result of vibrations, is easily detectable by humans. Coupled with meaningful lyrics, mathematically congruent harmonies, and sheer amplitude music can’t evoke powerful responses in humans. Humans have the tools to detect the vibrations that produce music. Humans liking music, is as natural a thing as liking a sunset, or enjoying a vibratory wand on sore muscles.
Thought experiments can seek to simplify understanding of a difficult to grasp topic. I implement different scenarios sometimes to better understand somethings. This can include imagining early homo sapiens in some situation. These can also include extrapolations of iterations to infinity to grasp a general relationship between things and what’s been naturally found to occur. Regarding this pondering, I’ll propose a “think of it like this🤔” scenario to assist anyone reading.
Suppose you create a mini robot in the garage. You develop the robot with light sensors, and sound input sensors, or microphones, for whatever reason. The robot has been programmed to follow and seek out red light… Maybe you did this to help the robot help itself charging with light. Now, you could shine UV light on it, put the robot in a dark room, or even place an unused, non-energized red light bulb in front of the robot, but it won’t respond to anything. There’s no input in a range to evoke a response. If you shine a red light near the robot, it responds by following the light. You’ve given the robot an input of stimuli within the proper range to get a response. Humans, and music is corresponding to the robot, and the red light in the analogy.
I’m sure there are philosophical answers in addition to my solely physical explanation.
Hope that helps.
When we “engage” / focus/ “listen” to music, our brains do more with it in the background. The brain actually tries to predict the next sound pattern and based on that, triggers dopamine and other networks associated with that pattern.
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.201743904
(link might not be as relevant, but I saw others under pay walls)
Whether that sound pattern is associated with experiences of dancing, happiness, or head-bobbing, that too, triggers more networks and might trigger more dopamine or other feels-related compounds along the way.
This mixture we get is what makes us “appreciate” music in the base level.
Neuroscientist here. This may be against the rules, but we don’t know the answer to this and can only speculate. Fwiw this is a question that has interested me since I was a grad student.
My best guess is that some property of our brains is stimulated by music as a side effect of how our brains work. Our brains have rhythms, particular frequencies that increase or decrease depending on what we’re doing. These frequencies can be in or out of sync across different parts of the brain. We think higher frequencies (faster rhythms) are communication between more distant brain regions. Rhythm in this view is the brain’s internal language that it uses to communicate internally, and to process information.
I think music can be defined as patterns of sound that pleasurably cause particular patterns of brain frequencies, or patterns of synchronisation between frequencies. Humans have optimised music to give maximum pleasure, and designed musical instruments that tickle our brains in the way they like to be tickled.
Finally, I think if we ever crack precisely why music is a thing we a) notice and b) like, we will have made a huge leap in understanding how our brains operate at a fundamental level.
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