It’s just rhythms and pitches really, in a sequence. But we don’t love patterns, a scale sounds boring. It’s the breaking of the patterns that sound good in music, but only in specific ways. Other ways sound discordant. What the duck is going on?
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PhD in neuroscience here. I didn’t specifically study musicology, but i did study the neuroscience of music.
The theory that holds the most water, in my opinion, is that music activates all the same parts of the brain as motor processing. It makes us want to move, and to make predictions about what’s coming next. People like makimg predictions. It’s also a pro-social activity that encourages bonding and communication. These are typically positive experiences.
Edit: you mentioned we like the breaking of patterns in music. Very true, we love syncopation. But we don’t tap our foot to the rhythm, we groove to the beat.
Humans are electrified meat computers. Music is math and chaos brought into order. It’s no wonder we love music like we do.
Yes I am a human, I love human things like… um… music…
finishes zipping up skinsuit
My man!
I don’t. And I don’t understand why I’m the only one who just in general would rather hear silence then music.
I’m the same. I don’t listen to music, ever. It does nothing for me (except hurting my ears if it’s medium or high volume, annoying me, stressing me out if it’s fast, and preventing me from understanding spoken words.). There’s something weird in my brain, I think.
There is a gremlin in your brain, textbook synonym here.
I too like silence, then music, when the album I’m listening to intended to have a break between songs.
However, if the songs’ tracks are meant to fade from one to the next without a break, it’s annoying and distracting if I can hear a silence between them, however small – even just a click – then music.
I’ve met 2 people like that, you’re not alone! I love music but y’all are valid
To drown out the sound of your brain counting the moments until your next shift at work.
13 hours 50 minutes…
But we don’t love patterns
I would disagree with that somewhat - I think we do love patterns, but the more complex and intricate the better.
Which is why music appeals so much - it’s chock full of patterns overlaying each other, echoing and counterpointing each other, contrasting each other in ways that are both conflicting and harmonious. Good music is like seeing the rhythms of the world all around you.
Yes! When a chorus repeats and becomes familiar, or when a sequence resolves and the pattern is “recognized”. Satisfying to the core.
Exactly - chills up the spine moments!
By the way your link didn’t work, but this one might: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_(music)?wprov=sfla1
And on the flip side, when you’re singing a little improvised song and your coworker prevents you from resolving the melody, it can be frustrating.
I don’t know anything about specifics, or actual explanations, but I once heard it said that Art decorates space and music decorates time.
Birds love music too now you mention it.
I think all experience of art, enjoyable for us or not, is something the brain adheres to because it is unlike nature. Nature tries to all blend together in a very loose way. We categorize many things like animals, land, the stars… but it all is really just one thing. Art is the ability to purposefully change that continuity with intent. To see something sitting there, doing nothing, and you feel the desire to arrange it in some way.
Music is no different. We realized sound was one of our senses and most of nature’s songs are chaotic, outside the rare particularly talented bird.
We’ve found ways to harness sound into whatever we found is most pleasing. And it seems what it pleasing is different from one person to the next, but also shares ground through the instruments we use.
I imagine when we first started rhythmically hitting sticks on rocks, it wasn’t long before we had an arrangement of our favorite sticks and rocks to hit together. And we just kept getting more creative from there.
Okay, but why do we love art of nature then? If you go further, some people love hyper-realistic art of nature, while others prefer surrealistic or abstractionist/minimalist stylized art of nature. If we talk about scale between absolute chaos and absolute order, art covers it all.
I think when we capture nature in a hyper-realistic way, the takeaway is control. We get to choose exactly what is included and what is not. It’s also about admiring the process that goes into it. We’re able to comprehend the work that went into making that possible. It also means that you get to stop time in the piece. You’re seeing that very specific part of reality that artist wanted you to see.
I agree those are some of possible motivations, but I also think there are countless other motivations for it in the wild. The “We get to choose exactly what is included and what is not” thing I personally think is more a “minimalism” mindset than realism, but that’s just my perspective. A lot of people who do realism, just go there and draw exactly what they see, or they have people pose for them. They ofc choose the scene and pose, but they don’t deliberately strip detail for artistic value like minimalists do, which means minimalists push way heavier into this “control what’s included and what not” territory.
It’s the breaking of the patterns that sound good in music, but only in specific ways. Other ways sound discordant.
I like a lot of different music and I also like harsh noise, when it’s adventurous like Merzbow. It sounds discordant, but it sounds great and I enjoy listening to it. Maybe you should go more fundamental, “why do we humans like information entropy” or something like that.
The answer is we don’t know unfortunately. I dont think scientists have found a definitive answer on this one. The theory tho is that it had some evolutionary benefit in the past, but we dont know why that would be either.
Because at it’s core, music is a beautiful lack of auditory dissonance. See this minutephysics episode for an in depth explanation why. It’s fundamental. (to music itself, not to any particular style of music) https://youtu.be/tCsl6ZcY9ag
i can only think of one style of music that doesn’t heavily rely on dissonance.
Don’t animals also “understand” music to some extent and seem to enjoy it?
“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hail souls from mens’ bodies?” – Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
(Guitar/lute strings used to be made from sheep gut, for anyone confused)
Are we sure he wasn’t talking about condoms?
Why do we like reading? It’s just arbitrary characters, really, in a sequence.
This discounts so many quantitative and absolute qualities of music.
I’m not a scientist, but I think it is because humans like patterns, which is what music is. What makes random banging and loud noises annoying and how is that different from music? I think the answer is that music has patterns. What makes people like or hate different types of music is that they like one pattern over another.
