Why You Love Music

Music, particularly singing, is an important feature of all human societies,

and we have evidence that it has been so for many thousands of years. In 2008, a
team of archaeologist working in southwest Germany discovered a selection of
flutes that are approximately 40,000 years old. Wulf Hein, a member of the
archaeological team made a copy of one of these flutes and found that it produces
a pentatonic scale, the five-note scale that has been the basis of most musical
systems throughout history including the western major scale.

One of the basic ideas behind Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is that
if a particular activity is very widespread and extremely old, it’s probably because
that activity is useful to the survival of the species involved. So in the past, music
must have had a positive effect on human survival, and this must be one of the
main reasons why it exists.

Whether you’re a football team, a group of Queen fans, or members of a

religious sect, a communal singing will bind you together and encourage you to
help one another if things start going badly. In fact, the bonding that comes from
communal singing may will still be saving lives today among platoons of soldiers
who sing while marching or training. The singing helps the rhythm of the
marching, reduces the boredom of the long tracks, and helps to make the group
into a self-supporting team.

Group bonding give us part of the answer to the question “why does music
exist?” but the theory that John Powell, the classically trained musician likes best
is concentrates on the importance of mothers singing to their babies.

Lullabies

All human cultures sing to their children and have done so for thousands
of years. Plato wrote about the beneficial effects of lullabies on children over
2000 years ago, and the fact that lullabies are similar all over the world is a strong
indicator that singing and the humming as a means of soothing babies goes right
back to the beginnings of human history.

Babies like it when their mother talks to them in sing-songy motherese,

but they love it even more when she sings to them. Psychologists Takayuki
Nakata and Sandra Trehub have carried out an experiment that confirms it. You
can tell when a baby is enjoying what her mom is doing because she pays
attention. She looks at her mother’s face and stops wriggling around so much.
Knowing this, our two psychologists play several babies video tapes of their
mums either singing or talking and monitored how interested in the infants were.
The singing clearly won the day.

After babyhood we move on to kindergarten, and here, once again,

musical activities such as classroom sing-alongs are some of the best parts of our
day. The link between happiness and music at this age is very clear: if a child is
singing, either to herself or with others, you know she is in a good mood and
content with life.

Teenage years

As you reach your teen years, just about every interaction you’ve had with
music has been enjoyable and now it’s time to claim your own musical space—
one that only you and your friends truly understand. Your musical choices help
divine you; they are part of your identity.

Music as a tool of self-definition is particularly important during our

adolescent years, and we listen to more music during this period than we do at any
other time in our lives. In early adolescence, our musical tastes tend to be for pop,
rock, and dance music. In general, we like our music to be defiant (of boring older
people and they’re boring old music), but we tend to align our preferences with
those of the main pack of young teens. In later adolescence we become, in our
musical taste as well as other things, less randomly defiant but more individual
and adventurous. We even gain enough confidence to admit that we sometimes
like to listen to Sinatra or the Beatles despite the fact that most of our peers
disagree. But even if one of the original reasons why you listen to a certain sort of
music is to be socially accepted, that doesn't mean that you don't genuinely love it.
Music is lovable, and you love the music you are most familiar with.

Adulthood

As we move from late adolescence into early adulthood, we accept a

broader range of music into our lives, but unfortunately, most of us don't continue
to do so as we get older. American researchers Morris Holbrook and Robert
Schindler have looked into this in some detail and have shown that the
development of our taste for popular music reaches a peak when we are in our
early twenties and declines after that.

Although we don't seek out new musical experiences with as much

enthusiasm as we grow older, we don't actually remain musically frozen in time.
We retain a particular love of the popular music we fell for between the ages of
fifteen and twenty-five, but we often develop a taste for more complex music, like
jazz and classical. This is probably because, by the time we are thirty, we have
listened to so much popular music that the genres involved (pop, rock, blues, rap,
etc.) have become too predictable and therefore boring. Finding a new genre that
provides enough musical complexity to stimulate this expert brain can be a bit of a
struggle at first because it's settle difficult to know where to start, but whatever
new genre you will add to your musical pleasure without dimming the love you
have for the music of your youth.

Pattern recognition

One primary aspect of our enjoyment of music is pattern recognition. The

human brain is, among other things, an amazingly impressive pattern recognition
machine. A pattern involves a certain amount of repetition and predictability, and
when most of us think about patterns, the first things that spring to mind are the
sort of repeating designs you might get on fabric or wallpaper like this:
[insert drawing]

Of course, in music we don’t experience a visual patterns spread out in

space like this. Instead we here patterns that repeat in time.

The most obvious time-based musical pattern is the rythm. If we hear a

pattern such as bomb-diddy-bom-bom, bomb-diddy-bom-bom, we expect more of
the same or perhaps a change to something similar: bomb-diddy-diddy-bom, for
example. The idea that a rhythm is a pattern is fairly straightforward, but the fact
that both the pitch and timbre of any notes are also patterns it’s not so obvious. So
when we listen to music, our pattern recognition systems are extremely busy
identifying the pitch, melody, timbre, harmony, and rhythm of what’s being
played.