The Scientific Mystery Why People Love Listening to Music
Since our childhood, we have listened to different sounds and melodies which we think are appealing. Throughout our lifespan, we become attracted to a specific genre of music and cannot stop listening to different songs. If you’ve ever been wondering why we love listening to music, read the scientific theories!
Theory 1: Our brains love patterns. Music is a pattern. Coincidence?
Studies have shown that when we listen to music, our brains release dopamine, which in turn makes us happy. In one study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers found that dopamine release is strongest when a piece of music reaches an emotional peak and the listener feels "chills"— the spine-tingling sensation of excitement and awe.
Dopamine is an adaptation that encourages us to do more of these behaviors. But music is not essential in the same way. One possibility is that it's a function of our love of patterns. Presumably, we evolved to recognize patterns because it's an essential skill for survival. Music is a pattern. As we listen, we're constantly anticipating what melodies, harmonies, and rhythms may come next. That's why we typically don't like styles of music we're not familiar with. When we're unfamiliar with a style of music, we don't have a basis to predict its patterns. When we can't predict musical patterns, we get bored. We learn through our cultures what sounds constitute music. The rest is random noise.
Theory 2: Music fools the brain into thinking it's speech
These explanations may describe why we feel joy from music, but don't explain the whole other range of emotions music can produce. When we hear a piece of music, its rhythm latches onto us in a process called entrainment. If the music is fast-paced, our heartbeats and breathing patterns will accelerate to match the beat. That arousal may then be interpreted by our brains as excitement. Research has found that the more pleasant sounding the music, the greater the level of entrainment.
Another hypothesis is that music latches onto the regions of the brain attuned to speech — which convey all of our emotions. Music may then be an exaggerated version of the speech. Just as higher-pitched and speedier voices connote excitement, so do higher-pitched and speedier selections of music. And because we tend to mirror the emotions we hear in others, if the music is mimicking happy speech, then the listener will become happy too.
That’s why musicians — who’ve usually been exposed to more complicated musical patterns over time — tend to have more varied musical tastes and enjoy more avant-garde musical traditions than non-musicians. Social contexts are also important and can affect emotional responses.
Things to think about:
Underneath all these ideas is the fact that we’re not even sure what kind of emotion we’re talking about. We can recognize sad music without feeling sad. And even if we do feel sad, it’s not like the sadness of bereavement – it can be enjoyable even if it provokes tears. Some music can create intense emotion even though we can’t quite put into words what the emotion is. So we’ll surely never understand why music stimulates emotions at least until we have a better picture of what our emotional world is really like.