why humans like music
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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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