Why do we like music anyway?

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When you think about it the whole concept is kinda weird. I mean, if we were visited by a race of aliens that didn't have music and they asked us why we made it could you explain why? I couldn't.

I think it confuses us by how both close and abstract the relationship is. We're not used to thinking of ourselves as mathematical entities but in a lot of ways music kinda evidences that.

Aliens be like...pfff... you mean you *haven't* figured out why you like it yet!?

Hmm that is a good question, I mean I am a metalhead so I am certainly into music largely metal but I listen to lots of other stuff to. That said I can't really say why exactly I like it...I just enjoy it. Though I think I am rather sensitive to music which is great when it is something I like. But when it comes to music I don't like it can certainly be problematic.

It could be that all those thousands of years ago, a drum beat made a tribe more cohesive. A more cohesive tribe is better at survival. Maybe a love of music is a side effect or our evolution, like snoring, or maybe it's part of it, like laughter.

The brain is a pattern recognition. Music is a pattern, or more correctly several patterns. They each have predictability and surprise. I think we like the music that sits in our predictability, and pushes the walls of surprise. ...Until our pathways become accustomed to the links made, then more surprise is needed. I guess listening to music brings with it the emotions and experience of every time you've listened to it.

Studies have been done, and unless you are classically trained, people have no preference between arrangements of two frequencies. If you play a note at 440Hz and one at 532.15739Hz your brain won't care. But play a C and a C#, or a detuned note, and most people would dislike it. The dissonance is a negative input - it does not conform to what we expect it want.

I have absolutely no interest in music. I never listen to it because it doesn’t do anything for me. People are always dumbfounded when I say that, but most music doesn’t make me feel anything.

Something I've noticed that it does for me really well - it communicates ideas, either sometimes in strictly melodic terms and at others both melodic and vocal, that are too profound for language alone to communicate. Emotion generally is a list of abstract and highly charged objects that words can sort of frame but quite often can only offer a shallow hint at the actual content of.

Another thing, and this is perhaps going off the deep end a little, is if the musician or band is strong enough it can sometimes feel like you're hearing the authority of God/god coming through it - whether that's in the sense of a central self type character, a collective unconscious, perhaps defining God/god as the most simultaneously sublime, beautiful, and terrifying thing you could imagine, whatever it is it can feel like something's thundering forth that's larger than human and in a technical sense I think that's correct because especially when you have two, three, or more really strong musicians get together and even further accelerate each other you'll get a result much larger than the sum of it's parts. Back in the mid 2000's I would have said Muse was a good example of this, Sublime, Tool, or Jane's Addiction back in the 90's, most recently I think Submotion Orchestra nailed this with their Kites album, Sevdaliza took aim at it with ISON, and different bands seem to nail this one in their own distinct sort of way where the musicians seem to practically deify the authority already latent in the vocalist.

Music is basically everything to me. About anything, any vibe, its one of the most important things on earth

I think that music is not just a collection of words and melodies, it is a soul, it is a passion, it is a motivation, it is something that can move you during the day, it is a fire. I do not know why this effect and how it works at all, but without music, life would be unprincipled. Headphone music is usually cool, but sometimes listen to live music. It makes it possible to feel everything still deeper.

I think music makes perfect sense as to why humans first created it. The natural world has a significant auditory component: breeze, wind, birdsong, rustling leaves, thunder, waves, crackling fire, howling animals, running water, etc.

Why wouldn't humans have a desire to imitate those sounds and create music? I think adding lyrics was a way to tie human experience to the natural world (music).

I like music because I can feel it in a synesthesia way. Music isn't just auditory and cerebral for me. It affects my whole body. You know that wave of feeling that rushed through you as a child when you were swinging high on a swing set? I can get that all over my body when I listen to many kinds of music I like. Some songs are more powerful that others in that feeling.

I agree with points made here above me and would like to add from my knowledge:

Music was played far before man could utter a word or speak a language. That's why it is an evolutionary attribute for us to like at least a certain type of music unrelated to the language context (taste differs amongst cultures and individual people based on what they are used to)

The reason we like music in contrast to just plain sounds for example those of raindrops, car engine, door opening/closing is that "conventional music" is ordered. Order and recognition of patterns in music calms us just as symmetry in people's faces or shapes in nature.

Calmness means control and when in control one doesn't need to prophesize unknown variables. By not needing to be on constant alert the senses rest thus we enjoy. This type of mood is the exact opposite of what in psychology is called "learned helpnessness" -when you are unable to forsee unfortunate events coming and have no means to stop them when they do. Essentially everyone's worst nightmare.

Music, food, and drink are almost universal.

I feel kind of similar but for different reasons. If music disappeared tomorrow, forever, I would feel relief and happiness. But the reason I dislike music is that it makes me feel too much and I can't handle it. It's like a drug and I have no desire to be out of my mind on any drug.

Some people like some genres of music

Some people like different genres of music

Some people don't like any music



Part of it could be, that listening to music makes it easier to stop thinking too much

That's a very good question. I don't know the answer but I think it all depends on people, everyone has different taste in music and some people don't listen to any music at all. My grandparents for example owned no CD player and no records, they didn't listen to any music, not even when they were young people. It's all about what the person likes I guess .

Me personally, I love music. I find it relaxing and inspiring, I work in the music field and am surrounded by it every day, currently not singing due to a severe throat injury, so it's a good thing I don't hate it. My two daughters love music, Katherine is three and Belinda is five. Belinda loves singing like and usually rocks to the beat of the music as it plays. They take after me I think as my boyfriend can take music or leave it. Music isn't for everybody but it definitely is for me; and my daughters it seems

https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/human ... ame-origin
The article talks about commonalities in human and bird musical cognition. I feel like we could have learned it from the birds and mutated to be born with it eventually if there was evolutionary pressure to understand their music, like if certain songs meant there were eggs to eat and others meant other things, like danger.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10 ... 0601000109
"One may say that spectral information, as an important aspect of timbre, is mapped along a first neural axis, periodicity (pitch) is mapped along the second neural axis of the auditory system. Finally, as a result of temporal analysis, neurons in the auditory midbrain show preferences for harmonically related sounds."

There's also a bunch of tonal languages out there and apparently the use of alliterative and rhythmic mnemonics hinted at in prehistoric oral traditions, which under contemporary investigation have been deemed informal logical fallacies rather than lore-preserving error detection systems.

I could swear there's some interesting cross-modal cognition going on too, but I haven't read enough about it. What does a karate match between masters look like if you take the Human voluntary muscle system to be a musical instrument with over 600 keys?

For me, music is an escape from all the madness in the world. It's relaxing and it's a creative outlet as well.