Why do we like Music?

I know I should probably be thinking more about WiFi everywhere, but believe it or not, the reasons why we are attracted to any given art form (and the variations thereof) and simply being attracted to anything in general is something that I often think about. Waya and the 13 year old’s two visions could be described as the psychological versus physiological debate (or even nature vs. nurture). Both are good answers and actually quite compatible. I have written a more in depth post on this topic called “One Good Thing About Music” covering both sides of the debate.

But, I also find another side of the story quite interesting. I have a theory about why we listen to a given type of music at a given moment. This I wrote about in a post called “On Music and Somnolence” where I argue that music serves as a psychological defence mechanism to either foment our thought process or muffle it. For example, sometimes we do not like what is going on in our minds, so we put on very loud music with lots of lyrics to drown out the thoughts in our heads. We use music to avoid the stress that we are living with just like babies use sleep to avoid the stress of having received so much new stimuli during their waking hours. Other times when we are not afraid of our thoughts, we listen to music that is compatible with our thought pattern and does not cover it up. And when we want someone to do the thinking for us, say when we are depressed or broken hearted, we listen to music whose lyrics describe what we are feeling. It is like the saying that we read to know that we are not alone. In sum, music can serve the function of empathy, compassion, escapism, and also act as a catalyst or medium for thinking.

In general, I believe that the relationship between art and beauty is found in the struggle to recreate the world around us, and the more accurate the representation, the better the art. Therefore, we like music when a particular sound captures our understanding of the world around us at a given moment, either through subconscious association or hormonal stimulation. What I particularly find interesting is how we seek out music precisely to produce the desired affect – to hide from ourselves, to hide in others, or to be comfortable with ourselves.

All in all, what I find so interesting about music is not what is essential in the music itself or what our biochemistry tells us about music, but what the music we are listening to tells us about who we are are at any given moment.

I asked this to myself when I begun to listen Mozart seriously.
I found the best answer:

Neuroscientists don’t yet have the ultimate answers. But in recent years we have begun to gain a firmer understanding of where and how music is processed in the brain, which should lay a foundation for answering evolutionary questions.

Whatever answer you come up with, the next question should be: why do different people (dis-)like different music ?
And what are the consequences of that notion (the answer to the first question not being universally valid unless it was so broad to be meaningless).

Want to answer the question anyhow:
People like music because they learned to like music.

Any relation to physiologic phenomenons are either caused by preliminary conditions (for instance the existing (dis-)ability to hear certain frequencies) or by learned relations (feeling good hearing a specific type of music under specific circumstances).

Remember that music is a human invention, not a natural component for evolution. (It may have had some influence though, there are musicians most people would want to shut up, and others that get groupies by the dozens).