why humans like music
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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.
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