Music is just layered simple patterns and our brains LOVE IT.
Sound is pressure waves, musical notes are a specific pattern of pressure waves. Melodies are repeated musical notes. Songs are repeated melodies following standard structure.
Our brains love trying to decode and parse all these overlapping patterns.
Maybe not really a shower thought and more wild speculation.
Interestingly there is a body of research that suggests enjoyment of music comes from having exactly one of two things, never both:
Familiarity and predictability
If it’s neither familiar nor predictable, it is inscrutable and therefore discomforting to listen to
If it is both familiar and predictable it is boring
If it’s familiar but unpredictable, it feels like a journey through known emotions
If it’s predictable but unfamiliar it feels like ‘logical discovery’ and is fun and satisfying
A bit reductive but I love this idea
Musician here. This is definitely true, BUT interest can also come from subversion of those expectations. Can be seen in prog music and math rock (subversion of musical forms), funk (subversion of rhythmic expectation with lots of upbeats and short notes), etc
Exactly. Good music never ever goes where you expect and should always suspend the listener in a delightful unease.
I’m a non-musician that love jazz, fusion, prog, etc. What I need from music is human rhythm. I am revolted by Bach style mathematical fugues and so forth, they’re different… not music in the way my mind and heart thinks of music.
As a speculation it’s really pretty good. Many years ago there was a Scientific American article about why people like music. It was long and complicated but the tl;dr would go something like:
Well-liked music of any genre tends to contain fractal patterns. Doesn’t matter if it’s jazz, classical, rock or whatever. If you probe our peripheral nervous system you get a lot of white noise, but the closer you get to the central nervous system the more fractal the signal becomes, as if our nervous system is filtering out the noise and letting the fractal part of our perceptions get through to our brains. This makes it very likely that our thoughts and memories are fractal patterns, which means that on a purely mathematical level there could be similarities between patterns that encode ideas that aren’t related by context - for example, when a piece of music makes you think of the ocean, or flying birds, or the big city, it’s probably because the music’s pattern and the idea’s pattern in your head are mathematically similar.
And then you listen to Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (275 time signature changes)
For a long time lots of European music was mostly thorough-composed, where there was little to no repitition. Madrigals (the popular music of the renaissance) were mostly like this, the melody would follow it’s own journey with no chorus / verse or other repetitive structure. I might be remembering wrong, but I think it was early baroque and Monteverdi’s Orfeo that popularised repeating structures, and turns out people love them. If you back and listen to some madrigals, it’s a very different approach to music. (also, there was folks music and all sorts of other traditions, which used more repeating patterns, that seem more familiar to us.)
Music showers my brain!
More wild speculation:
- Patterns make brain release happiness hormones, because it rewards itself for correctly guessing how the pattern continues. The rewards stop when the pattern is overly repetitive, because the brain recognizes that this isn’t a challenge to guess correctly. And then it also quickly becomes not worth paying attention to, because if it’s not going to change, it’s irrelevant to our continued survival and all.
- This applies to anything where humans perceive beauty. A painting with a consistent color scheme or technique is nice, but just a blue canvas is pretty boring. A poem that rhymes is nice, but if it rhymes twice or thrice by using precisely the same device, then it doesn’t entice.
Ya let’s not pretend why humans enjoy music. No one can explain it.
I think this is getting it backwards. Here I’ll go (warning, evopsych style speculation follows):
Our brains are great pattern recognizers because it makes us better at learning music (and other structured forms such as poetry). Music is older than all the civilizations on earth. We learn music because it’s an incredibly powerful aid to memorization. Memorization and oral recitation is the oldest form of cultural transmission we have.
Culture is the secret of our success as a species. It’s the original problem solver that gave us so many tools and techniques to survive on every continent on the planet (except Antarctica of course). Culture is the reason we learned to prepare so many foods which would have been poisonous otherwise (such as cassava).
This is a cool take! I don’t think I agree though. I assume we developed pattern recognition before music/language. Many animals have the ability to note attributes about plants and animals even without the ability to communicate complex ideas (ie language or oral tradition). I assume that type of pattern recognition was a good blueprint for functions like music and language, but my guess is it started from a general pattern recognition, then was retuned for music and language.
Again, pure speculation, but there is some logic behind it!
We like music because it acts like a pleasurable drug. Probably something primitive and hormonal that is connected to mating (like birds do with bird song).
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Art is sublimated sex drive