Why Do We Like Music?

Ryan Cheung

So here is the big question. Why do we like music? If you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense. Music is just noise, but why and how does it get us going and bring our moods up? Well, so far it has baffled scientists just as much as you and me. They haven’t targeted a specific cause for our love for music, they do have some theories on what might be the cause.

In 2001, neuroscientists, Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while people listened to music and found that it had activated parts of the limbic and paralimbic regions in the brain. These areas control emotion processing, goal setting, motivation, self-control, learning, and memory which have very similar reactions as those we experience through eating good food, sex and drugs. These parts of the brain uses dopamine to function which is a type of neurotransmitter that helps facilitate function between the nerves and the brain . This all makes sense, but why? It makes sense for having this sensation food or sex because those reactions are survival instincts; but why music, which seems to have no survival value. However maybe there might have once been a survival instinct.

Another theory suggests that this uncanny ability must have been something greater which actually contributed to a survival instinct such as prediction and recognition of predatory noises. Musicologist David Huron of Ohio State University referred to our ancestors who would have used this trait to survive by recognizing sounds, and acting as if they were coming from a predator. This instinct has direct control of our emotions where in this instance it will induce an emotion making us alert that a threat might be nearby. So basically what Huron is saying is that this trait could have eventually adapted to how we like music.

Music is also theorized as a stimulation for our brains. Our brain likes patterns, and music utilizes them. Referring back to Zatorre, he is in full support of this idea of recognizing patterns being a survival instinct, and he adds that the brain interprets the music as speech because the part of our brain involving speech conveys all our emotions. Music itself can invoke more emotions than speech. This might be caused by the wider range of notes, or it triggers certain patterns you vibe with. In summary, we don’t entirely know why we like music, but we do know how lucky we are to have it!

1 : David Huron - Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation
2 : BBC - Why Does Music Make Us Feel Good
3 : Vox - The Scientific History of Why Humans Love Music