Why Do We Love Music? - PMC
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Cerebrum<br>. 2018 Nov 1;2018:cer-16-18.
Why Do We Love Music?
Robert J Zatorre
Robert J Zatorre, Ph.D.
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Collection date 2018 Nov-Dec.
Copyright 2018 The Dana Foundation All Rights Reserved
PMC Copyright notice
PMCID: PMC6353111 PMID: 30746026
Editor’s Note
While the human brain is hardwired to feel pleasure for basic survival necessities, such as eating and sex, music—although obviously pleasurable—doesn’t offer the same evolutionary advantages. So why do we respond to patterns of sounds that disappear in an instant? Why do we belt music from the top of our lungs, learn to play instruments, and empty our bank accounts to see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway? Our author offers some valuable insights.
Human beings seem to have innate musicality. That is, the capacity to understand and derive pleasure from complex musical patterns appears to be culturally universal.1 Musicality is expressed very early in development.2 In this sense, music may be compared to speech—the other cognitively interesting way that we use sound. But whereas speech is most obviously important for communicating propositions or concepts, obtaining such knowledge, this is not the primary function of music. Rather, it is music’s power to communicate emotions, moods, or affective mental states that seems beneficial to our quality of life.
Which brings us to the question that forms the title of this article: why do we love music? On its face, there is no apparent reason why a sequence or pattern of sounds that has no specific propositional meaning should elicit any kind of pleasurable response. Yet music is widely considered amongst our greatest joys.3 Where does this phenomenon come from?
There are several approaches to this question. A musicologist might have a very different answer than a social scientist. Since I’m a neuroscientist, I would like to address it from that perspective—recognizing that other perspectives may also offer valuable insights. An advantage of neuroscience is that we can relate our answer to established empirical findings and draw from two especially relevant domains: the neuroscience of auditory perception and of the reward system. To give away the punch line of my article, I believe that music derives its power from an interaction between these two systems, the first of which allows us to analyze sound patterns and make predictions about them, and the second of which evaluates the outcomes of these predictions and generates positive (or negative) emotions depending on whether the expectation was met, not met, or exceeded.
The Auditory Perception System
It’s remarkable to think that all sound—a baby crying, thunder, the strains of a waltz—is carried by nothing more than vibrations of molecules in the air. Our rich phenomenological experience of these sounds is the product of a sophisticated perceptual system that takes these vibrations and transforms them into what psychologists call internal representations (perception, thoughts, memories, emotions, etc.), which can be related to our memories of other sounds and knowledge of the world in general. Part of the process has to do with extracting relevant acoustical features from the sounds and encoding them in the pattern of nerve firings.
This process is accomplished by operations happening in three separate brain areas: the brainstem, thalamus, and auditory cortex. A cello string when plucked, for example, will vibrate at a characteristic frequency based on the physics of its materials and its tension; if it is the first string of a conventionally tuned cello, for example, the entire length of the string would vibrate about 65 times in one second, corresponding to the musical note C. Neurons in the aforementioned nuclei and the cortex will respond in a synchronized manner with a corresponding neuronal oscillation4 of 65Hz, thus transforming physical energy to a pattern of neural activity representing sound frequency.
A great deal of research suggests that neurons in the auditory cortex, especially in the right cerebral hemisphere, are important for distinguishing fine gradations of frequency, creating the psychological sensation of pitch.5 Pitch is fundamental to most music, but it is not...