Why Do We Like Music?
Back in 2014 / 15 I made a radio program called ‘Why The Caged Bird Sings’ for an experimental station in Glasgow called Radiophrenia. It was built around several conversations and jams with other music makers from around the edges of anything we might recognise as the music ‘industry’ who I asked to try and tell me why it was that they make music (given that in most cases it couldn’t be considered their day job or even, in some cases, particularly sustainable on an ‘employment’ basis.) That led to some interesting answers and I was surprised to find that few of the people I talked to had actually stopped to consider in any great detail at any point why they made music. Some had perhaps even resisted thinking about it too deeply, maybe due to a concern that ‘overthinking’ it might somehow ruin a mystery and magic or get in the way of tapping into something primal beyond the intellectual structures of music.
The same year that program was broadcast Brian Eno gave the John Peel lecture where he talked about ‘the ecology of culture’ and reckoned another important question for us as humans will be ‘why do we like music?’ As I understood this, he was making a point about how trying to understand why we respond to music can potentially help us discover a lot about ourselves more broadly in terms of being social, emotional beings and also things like our memory, consciousness and other elements of neuroscience and psychology. I thought at the time this would make a great question for a follow-up program to Why The Caged Bird Sings and, in thinking about it, realised it was another one that I hadn’t examined in much detail myself and I would probably find quite difficult to answer in any coherent way. Time passes though and I got diverted so to date, I haven’t made the follow-up.
Then - somehow appropriately, given Brian Eno’s abiding interest in generative techniques and technologies for inspiring and creating art and music through process and chance - like many other people right now I was playing with the artificial intelligence chatbot Chat GPT (and admittedly sort of wondering if I might be able to get it to write something like a blog post for me!) and it occurred to me to ask it how it would describe music to someone who hadn’t heard it. The bot made a decent attempt at a pretty dry, factual answer to this so I gave it a go at explaining why we like music and got a fairly useful summary of some reasons. Again, they’re quite rational, empirical, fact-based justifications so what’s quite interesting is what it leaves out about some of the mystery, magic and inexplicability of music, sound and art. Rather than feeling that ‘if a chatbot can tell us why we like music, why would I need to make another program discussing it?’ I feel more like actual human music-botherers would have a lot more to say about this and it would very probably be unexpected and intriguing. Have I talked myself – or have I allowed a chatbot to chat me – into making another radio program? We’ll see. Here’s the bot’s ideas, if you’re trying to justify to yourself why you should come and hear me and Safetynett programming music machines live at Fine Times in Aberdeen on the 6th May you could do worse than referring to some of these reasons, for example, it may confer upon you some ‘evolutionary advantages’ so that makes it pretty unmissable (Ha! Crowbarred in some hard sell just in time):
“Can you try to explain why we like music?
The reason why we like music is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, and it's still an area of active research among psychologists and neuroscientists. However, here are some of the main reasons why we enjoy music:
Emotional resonance: Music can evoke powerful emotions and create strong emotional connections. We often use music to help us express or process our emotions, and we may find certain songs or genres particularly resonant with our personal experiences and feelings.
Sensory pleasure: Music engages our senses in a pleasurable way, activating the reward centers in our brain and releasing dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. This can create a sense of euphoria or "chills" in response to certain musical elements like a catchy melody, a powerful beat, or a soaring vocal line.
Social bonding: Music is often associated with social contexts, such as concerts, dance parties, or shared listening experiences. This can create a sense of social bonding and shared identity with others who share our musical tastes, and we may use music to signal our affiliation with certain social groups.
Cognitive engagement: Music engages our attention and cognitive resources, requiring us to focus on different musical elements like melody, rhythm, harmony, and lyrics. This can create a sense of intellectual or aesthetic pleasure, as we appreciate the complexity and beauty of the musical composition.
Evolutionary advantage: Some researchers suggest that our enjoyment of music may have evolutionary roots, serving as a way to communicate and coordinate with others, to enhance social bonding and cooperation, or to regulate our emotions and physiological arousal levels.
In short, we like music because it can evoke strong emotions, provide sensory pleasure, create social bonds, engage our cognitive resources, and potentially provide evolutionary advantages.”
Now I’m thinking I should probably add the information that as a music-maker I ‘evoke strong emotions, provide sensory pleasure, create social bonds, engage your cognitive resources, and potentially provide evolutionary advantages’ to my bio …..