WHY DO WE LIKE MUSIC?

Everybody gets to sing a song in their head. Music is still largely mysterious matter, with
enormous power, able to unite people and encourage communication and the expression of emotions.

In the animal world, however, what may seem like music to us humans is often a form of communication in all perspectives (eg. birds). Listening to and producing music for its own sake and for pleasure is an all-human characteristic, and its survival functions are not so evident. Researchers have tracked down mechanisms and functions that help us to understand why we like music and how it helps our species.

Neurochemistry of music

The pleasure of listening to a song we love is similar to that of taking drugs or sex. In an experiment (Blood and Zatorre, 2001) a brain scan with PET was carried out on the participants, to find the mechanism through which the music evokes such strong emotions.

It was seen that the same areas involved in the reward/motivation system, emotions, and physiological activation were activated, the same areas react to pleasant stimuli such as food, sex, and drugs. These areas include the ventral striatum, the midbrain, the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

The universal language

The orbitofrontal cortex

Although we recognize the cultural belonging of every kind of music (for example, Indian music is different and recognizable from American country music), there are basic mechanisms that, like the universal expression of Ekman’s emotions (1971), would seem to be innate and common to all cultures.

In one study (Mehr et al. , 2018), 14-second pieces of music were played by participants from 60 different cultures. The songs also came from cultures all over the world, it could be love songs, lullabies, etc., randomly chosen by small communities of hunter-gatherers, farmers and shepherds.

The participants were asked if each song could be more suitable for calming a child, dancing, healing a wound, communicating love, crying a dead person, telling a story. The results showed that the participants guessed the function for which the original culture uses that melody.

The universal expression of Ekman’s emotions

This experiment indicates that music represents a universal means useful for different purposes: social and psychological. This would have saved; it in natural selection, being handed down and practiced intensely.

The social function of music

In each city, the subdivision of urban subcultures is evident according to the way of dressing, speaking, shared values and norms, and in most cases, all this is related to a musical genre. Even nations have a hymn that is played in the most important celebrations.

Anthropologist Edward Hagen and evolutionary psychologist Gregory Bryant (2003) hypothesize that the social organization of human beings, especially the tendency to create cooperative alliances in the absence of kinship, is based on music and dance.

In their study, the synchrony of music was manipulated in order to alter the perceptions of subjects related to the quality of a piece. The results show that the quality of the music actually correlates with the perceptions about intergroup affinity.

In everyday life, it is clear that music plays a fundamental role in social interactions. Just think of meeting places, such as in discos, or in pubs, where music also becomes a pretext to establish new relationships, romantic or friendly.

Sources

• Blood, A. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(20), 11818-11823.
• Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of personality and social psychology, 17(2), 124.
• Hagen, E. H., & Bryant, G. A. (2003). Music and dance as a coalition signaling system. Human nature, 14(1), 21-51.
• Mehr, S. A., Singh, M., York, H., Glowacki, L., & Krasnow, M. M. (2018). Form and function in human song. Current Biology, 28(3), 356-368.
• Schulkin, J., & Raglan, G. B. (2014). The evolution of music and human social capability. Frontiers in neuroscience, 8, 292.