 "Photo: The Current")
Music is an ever-present force of emotional influence, a universal mover of humanity throughout history, and the unleasher of dance floor moves that are often quite unflattering indeed.
It is made by the chanting of monks in Tibet. It is echoing through the corridors of the International Space Station. In the past it was plucked from the strings of an ancient roman Lyre.
And, unless you are some sort of hermit, it's probably being enjoyed within 100 feet of where you're reading this article.
Nobody ever asks why people listen to music – all can attest to music's seemingly innate ability to stir the soul, for good or bad, for happy or sad.
Simply listening to music has been proven to increase heart rate, dilate the pupils, and even increase blood flow to the legs. Where the questions arise, then, is when one attempts to understand exactly how these repetitive waves of air can have such a profound cognitive and physiological impact.
The answer: through music's intricate interaction with both conscious and unconscious processes in the brain.
First you have the brain's unconscious search for patterns. Being able to recognize a repeating chain of events is an evolutionary advantage, allowing us to predict events.
Repeatedly listening to a certain genre of music unconsciously creates expectations in the brain – you recognize a pattern and predict the future based upon it. House music, for instance, usually has a kick drum hit at every beat, and blues songs often follow the standard 8-bar blues structure.
Similarly, each individual song builds its own set of rules, patterns, and expectations that come with it.
After you begin to recognize a distinct pattern, the song breaks it. Music - the good kind, at least - always contains the unexpected; this sudden and surprising change excites the brain in that familiar euphoric feeling we all know from our favorite songs.
A study done by the University of London shows the surprising elements in music actually trigger a release of dopamine, a chemical in the brain released when one feels desire or when one is experiencing pleasure. It is because of such chemicals we can even feel happiness.
In fact, some say, it's surprise alone that can make music interesting at all – it takes teasing, toying, and taunting to keep our brains from getting bored. "Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation," says Jonah Lehrer, a journalist who specializes in psychology and neuroscience.
That explains the basic ability of music to unconsciously capture a listener's attention and lead the brain to actively follow the beat. This also explains why some can't do their homework while listening to music. Still, it does not explain the whole picture of humanity's musical tendencies.
Next to unconscious activities, you also have a conscious interpretation and understanding of a particular piece of music; listeners intentionally evaluate the emotional content such as lyrics and vocal emotions.
This kind of interaction with music often has more of an emotional impact, and goes hand in hand with personal and cultural connections to a particular song.
Take, for instance, Bob Dylan's war protest songs; had they been written in another time, they wouldn't have meant much to anyone.
Individuals can also find enjoyment in music for its ability to trigger memories. All the effects of music cause a song to become cemented into the long-term memory. Your brain is designed to make connections between things and discover relations. A song that was playing in the background when you went through an emotionally charged occurrence can, figuratively speaking, stick to the event and form a mutual relationship – through neurological connections, a trigger of one will trigger the other.
Musical enjoyment has been and continues to be a universal human phenomenon; despite the rare few who would pass it up, just about every human being who has been subject to the enterprise of music has found some aspect enjoyable.
The content may be different, but it's music all the same.
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