Why do people love music so much?

We’re attracted to music for the same reason we’re attracted to fire: it’s been a critical survival tool for us for hundreds of thousands of years.

Partying in the stone age

Music cognition is one of the first high-level brain functions to emerge in infants, coming long before walking and talking. It’s also one of the last to go in people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Music (and its twin sibling dance) are fundamental tools for soothing infants, for attracting mates, and for motivating and bonding groups ranging from kindergarten classes to infantry units. It enables us to both express our emotions and to actively modulate them, both within ourselves and among one another. Music is one of the very few known cultural universals. It’s incredibly ancient — there’s good reason to believe that it precedes language in human evolutionary history. There’s plausible speculation that it precedes bipedal walking as well. It’s no great mystery why people like it.

The real mystery is why we in modern western civilization developed the perverse idea that music is a frivolity. Steven Pinker, an otherwise very smart person who should know better, describes music as “auditory cheesecake.” Here in America, we relegate music-making to highly skilled experts, while most of us participate in it passively or not at all. We shouldn’t be surprised that depression, violence, drug abuse and suicide are epidemic in our country, even among our unprecedented levels of wealth, stability and safety. Lack of musical participation is both a cause and symptom of our unhappiness, and it demonstrates the failure of modern civilization to meet our emotional needs. In other human societies, probably in most of them throughout our deep history, music has always been a part of daily life, on a level with cooking or gossip. We would be wise to restore routine music-making to its proper place in the center of our lives.

Provoked by this Quora thread, which includes an answer by Hans Zimmer.

3 thoughts on “Why do people love music so much?

  1. I agree. I live in the US. I have put 50 years of my life into being a musician. Being on the road. Literally broke my back for it. Now all the money goes to Google RightsFlow. Spotify and Pandora. iTunes. Songs that I wrote (350 of them) are stolen and used as jingles, commercials, in movies. Even a Disney movie. I get not one penny. I have belonged to ASCAP and have my own publishing company and my own record company. Good, right? Wrong. Internet traffic can be redirected away from my own site to iTunes. Sometimes to Amazon. Do I get paid? No. It is a wonderful thing, music. But for me, it has brought me nightmares.

  2. It is inaccurate to state that we in western civilisation consider music frivolous. The enormity of the European concert seasons negate such a view. The Max Planck Institute recently opened their Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, continuing 20 years of arts research throughout the Continent. It is in the US that we denigrate the arts as elitist and undemocratic, and thus we remain well behind in findings that are being applied to Alzheimer’s, dementias, learning & attention disorders, among others.

    • M.C.Gurnemanz, I take Ethan’s point to mean that music is a sideline in most people’s lives – an entertainment to be enjoyed for brief times and then put aside, rather than being a constant in our daily lives, especially when it comes to actively playing. I live neither in the US nor Europe, but from this distance I don’t see fundamental difference between the two – the difference would be more a matter of degree; different points along the spectrum, but both towards the non-particpatory end. The size of concert seasons in each continent is probably not sufficiently different to invalidate Ethan’s view.

      I can also cite two worthy endeavours currently being pursued by the US-based company for whom I work: supporting Music & Memory, a project providing iPods loaded with specifically tailored music to sufferers of dementia and other conditions; and Simply Music Gateway, a program designed for people with learning difficulties such as autism, to be offered free worldwide.

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