I mean, it’s just a specific collection of noises that somehow tingles our brains.
I assume it’s because we are great at recognizing patterns, and music is just that - patterns.
No doubt because it increases our dopamine levels
I asked why it does that, not what it does.
Music seems to tap into something very primal and has a significant effect on my mood.
Music is one of my greatest joys in life.
It’s a form of communication that reaches us more fundamentally than words. I imagine it’s like animal sounds - what does a dog’s bark mean to another dog? Probably the same thing as when you tell someone “Stop!” or “Hey!” really loud. It don’t carry a concrete meaning, but feeling. Music is taking that and turning it into language. It can have many different meanings and tell many different stories, even without lyrics. Although it’ll never be as exact as written words, we can still enjoy the story.
Our ancestors benefitted from recognizing the nuances in each other’s vocalisations. How exactly that translates to enjoyment I’m not sure, but I guess enjoying listening to vocalisations means you focus more on it so you can recognize more nuance. Similar to why we enjoy looking at actors’ faces and recognizing emotions that way.
I’ll be honest with you. I love Michael Bolton’s music! I do. I’m a Michael Bolton fan. For my money, it doesn’t get any better than when he sings “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
I see you not only have great taste in music, but movies as well.
The real answer is that no one knows. There’s probably no single answer for something so complex and so intricately related to us as a species. It probably has multiple factors ranging from increased survival to just pure curiosity. It’s personal, cultural, and yet still somehow universal. It’s like any other form of artistic communication. We just do it bc we do
Yes patterns, but also basic physical resonance.
Sounds in harmony creates more powerful standing waves which will affect your cochlea more than noise.
Whether that is also more pleasant will depend on context, but music will definitely get your attention more easily than random sounds due to this basic physical property.
Pretty much everything in the universe are frequencies. Things that resonate are simply more powerful better than things that don’t.
I assume it’s because we are great at recognizing patterns, and music is just that - patterns.
I think you pretty much got it there. It’s more like, music is specifically tailord to sound like something we do enjoy.
I think it’s a “glitch”. Our brains are wired towards pattern recognitions, and this often manifests itself in recognizing seemingly random shapes as faces because of a vague resemblance.
It is my belief that music is a similar trait where we recognize patterns in rhythm, sound, and motifs as something pleasant because we are built to recognize and categorize so many things to the point where a series of sounds can give a pleasant feeling once we’re able to “parse” it.
Source: None, really. Just me having given this a lot of thought in the past, as I’m very musically interested myself.
must be one of the most reliably reproducible glitches ever
Four four common time replicates the heartbeat and natural bodily rhythms but that does not really explain why music can so successfully alter emotional state in the listener. I think it is not really known why other than music connects with and is readily understood by organic brains, not just human in a very intimate way. For example a five minute piece of classical music is informationally very complex but a person is often able to hum it back after a single hearing and do so again years later. Repeating verbatim a five minute speech listened to is beyond most people and so it might be suspected that music is more native to the brain than is language.
One thing I meant to add but forgot is the best way I can think to explain the effects of music in our minds and our ability to recall long sequences of notes is that human composed music is telling us a story that our brains already know.
I vaguely remember someone saying that music is essentially brain massage. Pretty sure I got that from a sample used in a song.
