Why are humans so attracted to music? What survival value does it invoke in us? Is there anything practical about music?
Why do coyotes and wolves howl? Why do whales and birds sing? Evidently, there's some deep-seated area of the brain in which music plays a serious role. But the same can be said for the portion of the brain which deals with visual stimuli, as well. Perhaps it's nothing more than the brain exercising itself, the same as we exercise our own muscles by going out and playing tag on the playground (kids) or a game of raquetball, tennis, or golf (adults)?
Our brains evolved to detect and associate patterns. It has such an affinity for patterns it searches for them everywhere. Music is comprised of many patterns (rhythm, melody, harmony, lyrics, etc). Hearing is also highly responsible for our ability to detect and thus respond to emotions of others which (along with memory associations) probably has a lot to do with our emotive response to it. ~Raithere
Similar to what raith said: music super-normally stimulates our auditory pathways. Our favorit music triggers just the right neural impluses in just the way to trigger evocative emotions. Music almost exploits our brain in a way. This can be for the good (mozart) or for the bad (kanye west), hehe.
REPLY: For me it can take me into totally different worlds. Some I hate and quickly turn off. Others can bring me into feelings which defy description. Music can add a wonderful new element to sexual pleasure. For me: not some loud crude element, but the exact opposite. A chord that resonates between the two of us and moves along in a delicate manner, making each treasured moment more blissful and memorable. Music can aid me in reaching and staying with times of great loneliness and pain, I might otherwise run from, when that is what I need to feel to heal myself. It is also a great aid for me in driving long, time consuming, distances. But it is always a pleasant companion in short drives also. It has been the magic touch in so many sexual experiences for me. It transforms what might have been some crude rutting event into something quite different. I do appreciate music that I enjoy. Some of what is called music I despise. ...traveler
Music is composed of rhythm, melody and lyrics (story). Almost all music has a rhythm and in my view has developed in us as a social animal to help coordinate group actions. Story (lyrics) is a method of teaching a story set to a rhythm. As for melody im not to sure about. In my opinion, melody has something to do with language in its more primitive subconscious levels. Music developed long ago, it is culturally based and has become more and more sophisticated as our cultures developed.
Music goes deeper than our humanity. Many other species of warm-blooded animals respond positively to sounds that have both melody and rhythm. Some birds will sway their bodies in time to music. Music appreciation goes far back beyond the speciation of Homo sapiens. It's apparently nested fairly deep in our brains. People who suffer strokes that disable their speech center can still enjoy music. I had a friend once who stuttered, but he had no trouble singing. There is a tiny percentage of humans (I can't find the statistic) who suffer from "amusia," the inability to understand music. To them all vocal and instrumental music sounds only like noise. There was a brief segment on this problem on a TV special about music a year or two ago, but they didn't answer the question I was waiting for: Do these people not even respond to rhythmic sounds, such as chanting, drumbeats or clapping in time? Would they be unable to walk in step on a march? Could they serve on a bomb squad, where you have to count one-two-three in perfect rhythm so you cut the blue wire at exactly the same instant when your partner cuts the white wire? There is a certain amount of mathematical elegance to music. We perceive notes as being in harmony if their frequencies are in the ratio of small integers. For example, the notes in a major chord are in the ratio 4:5:6. Pythagoras discovered this and the harmonic scale is also called the Pythagorean scale in his honor. However, this mathematical elegance is overridden by technological practicality, and somehow our psychology adapts to it readily. Music has become much more complicated than in the days of Ancient Greece, and in order to make it practical to perform, the chromatic scale was invented; the one that uses all twelve black and white keys within an octave on a keyboard. In the chromatic or scientific scale, the ratio between two adjacent notes is the twelfth root of two, 2^(1/12). This way the octave from one C to the next is exactly the ratio 1:2. However, all the intermediate ratios are distorted. The notes in the C-E-G major chord are no longer in the precise ratio of 4:5:6, but rather in the ungainly ratio 1:2^(4/12):2^(3/12). These frequencies are not only not in the ratio of small integers, they are not in the ratio of integers at all but totally irrational. Yet somehow they are close enough to the Pythagorean harmonic ratios (off by less than one percent) that our brains tolerate the error and lie to us that they are harmonically perfect.
i heard that as people get older the frequencies they can tolerate changes. This is basically in the higher pitches.
Age related hearing loss (Presbycusis) starts around 18-20 years old and includes a decrease in sensitivity to higher frequencies as well as amplitude. (1) While teens can generally hear frequencies as high as 20kHz by around the age of 25 most adults can only hear up to about 15 to 16kHz or so. This has resulted in some rather interesting age discriminating trickery, such as adults using high pitched noise to disperse loitering teens (2) and teens using high frequency ring tones undetectable by adults (3). 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbycusis 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito 3. http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/14031-pupils-perform-alarming-feat ~Raithere
