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What is it that makes humans natural lovers of music? Hard wired genetics, or a quality that we develop through constantly being exposed to sounds? This question has been bugging me for a while now and over the last few weeks I have been lucky enough to meet several psychologists who have managed to give me a few very interesting answers..
One theory suggests that the reason why humans can naturally enjoy music is because it resembles so closely to the language we speak, of course many songs feature human vocals but I’m talking about the elements that make up the sounds. Music is often rhythmic, varied and uses repetitive elements – just like our language. Because of its similarities, we are able to literally use music as a language, as many African communities still do to this day.
A study by Dr Dale Purves, Professor of Neurology at Duke University showed that the most popular genres of music are those that use the most similar sounding scales to the ones that we use in our language.
However, this doesn’t explain the addiction and euphoria that we get from music, so surely there is something else going on?
We all experience a variety of different emotions naturally, but music allows us to experience emotions artificially by associating certain sounds or specific songs to events or representations that trigger emotions within us. As an example, I often listen to acoustic music to cheer me up on a rainy day because the sound reminds me of warm summer days. Our brains enjoy experiencing a variation of emotions – listening to music allows us to satisfy this need with quick fixes.
As humans, we instinctively react to certain sounds in certain ways, but as we experience new emotion provoking scenarios, we begin to associate certain sounds with emotions so that when we hear that sound again we are reminded of how we felt the first time we heard it, and that’s the bit that we love.
In an attempt to prove whether our reactions to sound is instinctive or learnt, Radio 1 carried out a test to see if a group of primitive tribes people would have the same reaction to a collection of dissonant and non-dissonant sounds as a group of modernised people from the developed world, all of the groups tested showed the same reaction to the sounds highlighting that our reactions to dissonance are universal.
The music industry is constantly using psychological manipulation to increase the success of new music releases. Naturally, we all associate music with events (which are often what was going on when you first heard that particular song) so many music marketers will use subtle representations and marketing placement to ensure that your first impression of that song triggers some kind of desired emotion. Think of the following examples
This is all subliminal marketing, if you can relate a song to a desired event then it helps to either promote the event or add a representation to the song that triggers a set of emotions to make you react to the song (perhaps even buy it!)
This may sound all dark and unethical, but like any form of marketing, it is just a way of making your job of finding something that you will like easier and making sure that when you do find it, you love it.
What are your thoughts?
Photo Credit: elisabeth
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