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Out of thousands of people I've asked over the years, I've met like 3 people that don't listen to music. Super creepy people. They're dead inside. They have doll's eyes. There's nothing going on behind them.

Music is math. Math is existence. Music is existence. We're hard-coded for music. The top answer is probably to respond to it as an emotional release or way to observe an idea or concept from a new/unique perspective you wouldn't ascertain on your own.

Also, music is.....so many different things. Heart. Soul. Love. Joy. Sadness. Hatred. Empathy. Melancholy. It's a release, and a guiding light to how your mind is operating subconsciously. If you hear a depressing song and it makes you sad...you're probably sad, dude. If you hear a depressing song and you smile or aren't super into it, you're probably not depressed. Music is a compass for the soul.

I don't wanna really go further than that, but yeah, it really bothers me when someone says something to the effect of "I don't really listen to music." I'm already at 200 songs today, not counting repeats. Not to gloat about how many songs I've listened to lol, but they serve a very necessary purpose. But so do psychopaths in war. It is what it is.

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Because of evolution.

Why did our distant ancestors develop ears? Perhaps as a way to warn of approaching danger.

It's not that our distant ancestors wanted to grow ears. That's not how it works.

Some random mutation led to some organ that could detect pressure waves in air, and the brain learned to interpret that as "sound". That was a huge evolutionary advantage, so that trait survived.

Later, our ancestors developed the ability to discern between different animal sounds.

And even later than that, our ancestors developed the ability to communicate via speech.

Again, none of this was "planned". But random genetic mutations led to abilities that were advantageous to humans winning out, and that included the ability to hear.

One of the ways the genetics worked out is for certain sounds to be more pleasurable / enjoyable.

Why?

Maybe it was so we'd enjoy the sound of other humans. Maybe it was so that we'd march together with other humans because we like the sound of marching.

We don't know for sure why. But the end result is that our brains are wired to enjoy certain sounds and patterns of sounds, because it was an evolutionary advantage for us to do so.

Music is just exploiting those patterns. Coming up with new sounds and patterns that tickle the human brain.

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The most basic answer is: "We don't know".

On the level of genres, that's learned. Your genre preference are typically tied to experience; what you remember fondly.

As for music in general tho, it's a bit hazy.

But we know that a lot of animals like it, so it's not specifically human, and we know children still respond positively to it, so it's not an entirely learned behavior.

We just like orderly patterns of sound. It might be as simple as it being an enriching stimulus — like a puzzle — something interesting for your brain to chew on.

That assumption wasn’t made? The first comment was about the three people this person has met. Not a generalization.

The actual “psychopath” statement also wasn’t an assumption, it was a parallel: music serves a purpose in this person’s life, “but so do psychopaths in war”, ie, “just because something serves a purpose doesn’t mean it’s good, so take this with a grain of salt”

edit: a punctuation mark

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I can see why. I read it as “people who don’t listen to music” not being the same as “people who can’t listen to music”. The first being people who simply choose not to for whatever reason, as opposed to people who have a reason not to.

Not that I think people who choose not to listen to music are inherently odd or that you have to have a reason not to like it, but I would definitely double take at someone who told me they actively choose never to listen to music without a reason other than “I don’t want to.” But then again, I’ve never encountered the concept that people may simply choose not to without another reason, and the more that I think about it the more I’m genuinely wondering if that has more to do with the people I tend to spend time with rather than with the general population.

So, I think the real answer is we don't know. There going to be a lot of guesses based on SOME evidence, but there is never going to be anything conclusive because we can't really go back and time and observe the moment when humans first started to make and enjoy music.

Obviously, music can be enjoyed by more than just humans, so maybe the question shouldn't be "why humans" but more like "where did the love of music first start?" and maybe we have a common ancestor with other animals that explains that love.

So the brain is just constantly looping its operating system 30 - 50 times per second to scan for changes in the program, like a computer program operating in a loop. That’s cool.

Good food tastes good. Good scents smell good. A pretty sunset is just that. A soft touch feels good. Good music sounds...good!

It's all about the experience. Enjoy the good.

I don't listen to music. And I'm a mathematician. So your response was funny to me. I don't hate it. But I do not listen to it of my own accord and don't have music playing in my car. I am not dead inside. I just think music is so obviously synthetic sound and I prefer the natural sounds of birds and wind and such. It's so weird to me that people can't just pause and listen to the natural world around them. How can you possibly listen to music that much? Do you not have a job, or conversation with humans, or sleep, or a moment to just be?!? When I encounter people who listen to music to this extreme I always wonder why you're constantly trying to avoid having a conversation with yourself and why you are so afraid of the fact that people can be genuinely good and joyful people without listening to a single song all day long.

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But they're not good and joyful, is the point I guess you missed. They're all terrifyingly weird.

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Haha, I assure you I am incredibly joyful and a good person. I don't force anyone to turn off their music. I just don't turn it on myself. It's not as uncommon as you think and your immediate judgement is definitely a part of you that makes you less than perfectly good. Not everyone loves music and that is absolutely okay. You might try reading a book for an hour instead of listening to music you'll find yourself becoming good and joyful before you know it!

Dude I write books for a living and I have to write in complete silence lol. We're both agreeing about the same thing, I'm just being kind of a dick.

Haha, it's often hard for me to listen to music these days for a reason: I'm a professional performing musician and music theory teacher. It's hard for me not to start analyzing what I'm hearing and thinking how I would explain it to students. Music just feels like work these days (it didn't always). But, I've made some major life changes and I am looking forward to just listening and enjoying very soon.

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I never thought to wonder what brain waves are.

This is not at all what I expected.

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Before you get downvoted because "cuz evolution," I researched a hypothesis as an undergrad that described a potential social advantage stemming from music perception.

Most primates' social group size is limited, among other things, because you can only keep so many relationships going smoothly. Mutual grooming is probably the most common conflict resolution activity. There are others, but the point one paper made was that they're one-on-one sort of activities. But what if an activity was sound-based? The hypothesis centers on the idea that music, singing, and dancing were critical in exploding the maximum number of humans in any one social group since it gave them all something pro-social that they could do together at the same time.

Think about it: we don't just like music, we share music. We gather in huge arenas to experience the same beats. We have formal dancing as the basis of traditional and romantic social functions. Music can be social glue.

I recently listened to a podcast that covered this exact topic. There is much more known about this than the other posters are aware of.

TLDR but the whole podcast is highly recommended:

All species that can learn vocalizations, such as birds and humans, will dance and respond positively to music. Songbirds learn songs by making vocalizations that it determines to be pleasing. In this case "pleasing" means when the processing of the musical sound triggers a release of dopamine in a way that other sounds don't. When a songbird learns a song it likes, it will sing it to attract a mate whose brain will also release dopamine in response to hearing it.

The answer to why humans like music has been researched and is understood. Just as it does with birds, music triggers a release of dopamine and dopamine makes you feel good. This phenomenon can be used for social benefit as a tool to cause the release of dopamine in other humans.

There is a compelling theory on the harder question of why human (and bird) brains can understand music in ways other animal brains cannot. The same networks in your brain that can learn speech, or generically, networks in any brain that has ability to learn vocalizations, are speculated to be necessarily receptive to music. This is because the brain must learn melody, rhythm and creative expression to control the muscles that move vocal cords in ways that intentionally shape sound to produce creative speech and song.

Acoustics are complex mathematical functions so your brain is actually doing what it loves best, Math.

It's why I always ask musicians if they know we know that they are sad, happy, angry etc when they are playing. We can literally feel when you're into the music.

I do think our brains are wired to like rhythm like someone tapping their foot at the perfect rate or rhythm in music. Cows like music too: "Classical music increases cows’ milk yield, study finds" - https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/classical-music-increases-cows-milk-yield/

See my recent post. There's some incredible new neuroscience on this topic. I don't think you can say "we don't know" anymore.

Brainwaves are not timed fetch/execute cycles like computers but that doesn't mean there's not anything to this comparison.

Computers are built from the ground up on timing. Perfect sequentialling is required for computers to function. One thing happening out of order will shut the entire system down (some exceptions). Neural networks (even when simulated in software) don't have that strict ordering requirement.

Timing of networks in the brain allows for more efficient messaging with other networks. This results in faster computation and lower energy consumption.

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Eeeeehhhhh releasing dopamine is how 'liking things' works in general; I don't know if that really counts as explaining why our body's would come to reinforce that behavior.

For example, your brain releases dopamine on an full stomach, because it wants to reinforce that behavior, but that's not a 'why' as much as it is a 'how'. The 'why' there would be more related to the fact that from a survival POV, it's important that you eat as much as you can when you can.

We don't really have a compelling reason as to 'why' music creates a dopamine response, unless I missed something in your post.

There was a quick snippet at the end about a speculation that the same networks in your brain that can learn speech are necessarily receptive to music; which if so would be an interesting quirk in evolution that makes sense as to why it's seemingly connected to complex vocalizations. But from what I understand, that was labeled expressly as a speculation.

Here's the real question here. Are you human?

Cool hypothesis: did any studies come of it?

Give that podcast a listen if you are interested. Speculation wasn't the right word to use. Behavioral and cognitive evolution is very real, but also very fuzzy.

The strong relationship between language and music in the human brain has been long established in neuroscience through a number of experiments.

What I found to be uniquely interesting about this theory is that where we already knew that our ability to understand music is deeply related to our ability to understand language there is now a theory that explains how this relationship evolved and why that relationship has to be so.

The dopamine response to song provides a clear evolutionary benefit. For birds that benefit seems to be limited to mating. Humans are a eusocial or prosocial species. Both the ability to positively regulate the mood of other members of a society and the ability to have your mood positively regulated by others is an extremely beneficial adaptation. Extreme isn't a strong enough word. These abilities are likely hard requirements for intelligent prosocial species. Selection pressure for cooperative and affinitive behavior would have been immense. Humans have developed prosocial abilities in many ways. Ability to enjoy music is an example of one of those abilities

Understanding music would then be something that just comes with the ability to learn vocalizations, speech and language. As we evolved speech and language abilities, the ability to understand music just came with it. Enjoying music as opposed to just comprehending it is an exceptionally beneficial adaptation for a member of a prosocial species.

The brain finds pleasure in structures, patterns, rhythm, predictability and the sound frequencies that operate around the speech spectrum. As for more complex forms of music, there is also a great degree of intellectual stimulation (not dissimilar to completing a puzzle, for example). We also enjoy music as a form of communication, as musical forms and ideas have developed intertextual meanings over time, which enhance and help support the message in a deeper way than say, just reading the words to a song (rhyming is a form of pattern making in language). The triad - a most basic, common form of chord - includes elements of the harmonic series which appear in spontaneously in nature.

The feeling of liking something is almost synonymous with releasing dopamine. Both things always happen together, and it's not any kind of new discovery.

So you're not really explaining why humans like music. You're just explaining what "liking" something means on a hormonal level.

Deaf folks like music too. The feel of the beat or a loud bass. Not answer to your question but wanted to add on :)

Humans are a prosocial species. Cognitive and behavioral adaptations with social benefits, such as empathy, are strongly selected for. The ability to positively regulate the mood of others and the ability to have your mood positively regulated by others is a powerful one for a social species. Dopamine buttons like smiling and touching are powerful tools for a prosocial species. A brain that releases a massive amount of dopamine in response to music is exactly that ability.

The ability to understand music evolved due to the pressures that selected for speech and language. Blissful enjoyment of music is itself a social ability that was selected for by the same pressures that favored enjoyment of touch and laughter.

There are people who don't enjoy any kind of music. I've known high functioning autistic people who simply had no interest in music. It didn't affect them.

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The need for survival and strength in numbers. Music brings people together, which, in turn helps our chances of survival.

"She bop, he bop, we bop I bop, you bop, they bop Be bop, be bop, a lu bop (I hope he will understand)

She bop, he bop, we bop I bop, you bop, they bop Be bop, be bop, a lu she bop Oh, she do, she bop"

-Cyndee Lauper

Humans like music because it is a form of expression that can be enjoyed by everyone. Music can evoke emotions and create a sense of community. It can also be used as a form of therapy to help people relax or cope with stress.

Your post just made me consider the idea that our understanding of the musical scale and it's progressions that constitute being "in tune", could theoretically be out of tune for other species, terrestrial or otherwise.

Like, imagine that to a different set of ears, what we consider harmonic was the opposite, and a group of notes that we consider incompatible are actually the pleasant sounding chord?

Imagine aliens played us their music, and to them it sounded like a sweeping, major key orchestral piece that sounded uplifting and happy to them, and to us it sounded like a completely out of key minor piece? Imagine if their version of music theory was also the "wavelength" that like, reptiles and insects heard it properly?

I've always loved music partly because it's "universal", if you can speak the language of music you can communicate with people from around the world without saying a word. But I never considered that it was because we all hear music/chords/harmonies the same way.

What a trip.

Just my thoughts...

Consider the way we speak to new born children when encouraging speech, whether we mean to or not we incorporate musicality and melody into it. I think this makes a good case for music being a fastener for accurate recall and repetition and subsequent language use. The first words children use are often thusly musical, like dada or mama etc.. Since that is an evolutionarily valid reason for doing it it may be that it is encouraged, and as a side effect we are receptive to, and rewarded by that same melody/music even removed from speech and communication.

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The wirkd exists and functions on a wavelength. Music/sound literally resonates with our organism and environment.

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It’s called pattern recognition, for example rhyming is a thing people are attracted to which is commonly In rap. People usually find music attracting because of all the similar patterns or rhyming words.

To quote a famous blind person, “Music is a world within itself With a language we all understand With an equal opportunity For all to sing, dance and clap their hands”

It's also on Spotify