The Appeal of Music

Great Debates
1

Music is an enigma. At least, it is to me.

We have the properties of melody , harmony, rhythm and timbre within music. Then we have the aspect of how music resonates with the human condition and the emotions that represent them.

But why do we like music ? Any piece of music ? What is it about a sequence of a single or multiple vibrations at different frequencies that appeals to any of us ?

How much does liking a certain type or work of music depend on your upbringing and your outlook and how much depends on your genetic makeup ? Does it even depend on any or all of these traits ?

What makes a melody appealing ? In more basic terms, what makes two notes consonant or dissonant ? You hear them in progression or simultaneously and can judge their relation. But what makes them such ?

We sometimes can’t resist dancing to certain music. Some beats are infectious. Willpower has to be applied to restrain oneself from spontaneously tapping or dancing to them.
What do SDers say about the why behind the music ?

(note to moderators : although this topic deals with music, it is about music itself fundamentally and not about a piece or element of music. So I post it in this forum.)

2

If you knew the answer to those questions, you would have a deeper understanding of humans than we currently observe. Why we respond to music is like asking, “Why do we laugh?”

I think it starts with the rhythm of our heartbeat, but from there, I have no idea.

3

I have no idea where the appeal of music comes from. As a musician I have given some thought to this question and come up with nothing. I’m interested to watch this thread develop.

4

Sometimes music makes me feel so good that I suspect time itself was created so that we could have music. No proof, so it’s only a suspicion. It’s funny, the question ends up delving into the spiritual if you let it lead you far enough. It seems people resist answers to this question just as they do questions about what exactly a person “is” or about what a “soul” is.

From this page about attempts to understand such things mechanically. It would seem that this question may not be unaswerable, much to the chagrin of the romantics out there. Like many of our times toughest questions, the reverse engineering and study of the human brain may eventually bring us the answers, whether we like 'em or not.

DaLovin’ Dj

5

I found this to be interesting. It all seems to point to the stimulus music provides to the brain:

From: Why Do We Like Music

There are things like neuromusicology and music therapy that are being used to understand the brain’s correlation to music and music’s correlation to the brain.
And according to this site:

6

I think a lot of these studies are fascinating and that they are on to something. Here’s a link of my own:

http://www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-850932-4.pdf

I don’t know pretty much anything about the way the brain works chemically or electrically so I won’t go into that.

As far as culturally, I think our music is based entirely off of the same chord structures that have been discovered throughout time. That trends in music are somewhat recursive and that they follow a logical progression. Which is why folk music from completely seperate parts of the world has lots of theoretical similiarities. It all inevitably comes back down to a heartbeat, and the ease with which one can recreate a heartbeat using anything percussive.

I believe that modern music is very much in line with the way the particular piece of culture thinks. I think Rock and Roll’s sounds and rhythms lent themselves to the air of rebellion that were indicative of the culture it belonged to. Just as electronic music very much resembles an obsession with progress and technology that pervades society.

Erek

7

Well, this thread has stagnated.

Let’s start by providing what we value in a piece of music and what we innately listen for in music.

I tend to judge music primarily by melody. I suppose, with the popularity of “candy pop”, so do most people.

Timbre is also important. Some melodies don’t sound equally good with all instruments. And I’m not referring to just raw timbre.

I also mean the flow itself. For example, take any music stored and played as MIDI or on the piano. The progression of the melody is in discrete steps rather than the smooth progression akin to a violin or a wind instrument. So, it’s not just the raw melody . The manifestation of the melody also has some effect.

Rhythm seems to be a natural endearing property. Given that we have a periodic event regulating our own survival (the heartbeat). A kinda silly premise, but would your heartrate have any bearing on your preference towards certain tempos or rhythms ? Any studies on this ?

Then there’s harmony. The battle or complimenting of two or more notes at once. And in more general terms, the interrelationship of two opposing melodies. Does this have any bearing to our own fundamental human emotional conflicts ?

The above is hopefully some food for thought.

Please, everyone chime in with your thoughts and experiences

8

I think that one of the reasons why music is so popular is its (relative) ease of reproduction. If you see a movie or a painting that’s really cool, you can try and describe it with words, but that would only scratch the surface, and you’d be putting your own viewpoints into the description. Same thing with other senses, too, like describing a particular taste or smell. But with music, you can actually reproduce it yourself, although not perfectly. You can sing out “We will, we will ROCK YOU” to someone who’s never heard it before and then they will know the song and be able to pass it on to someone else, if they wanted to. They may like it or not, but now they know it. And that is pretty cool.

9

dalovindj

Could you provide a link ?

10

Strictly speaking, I like music because it makes me feel good. When I need to relax, Enya can lull me like no one else. When rambunctious, only punk can fill the void. On a long drive, something with a great beat will while me on my way. If that drive must be quick, then Techno will get both my heart and my engine racing.

But why do I like these things? I suspect that our species values order. Regardless that my pot cupboard (which is where I keep my things to cook with, not what else you may think) looks like an ideal locale to film Junkyard Wars, we have an innate sensibility to those things organized in an understandable way. Music is just that order that we find so pleasing. If you open your window, you will hear a cavalcade of sounds, none of which belong with another. It is just noise. But if you take that noise, and order it in such a way that each note builds on the one previous, you now have beauty in sound.

Even common everyday noises, when arranged in some melodic way, can form music. The cast of “Stomp” have proven that! Even the old bands with the washboard were able to make music of something otherwise mundane. What was once noise was made into music; as such, we can then appreciate it as something other than noise.

If I had to hang my bet on something at this early stage of conversation, I hang it on the beauty of order (the condition of my home’s cleanliness notwithstanding).

But - why do we dance?

Also, please check out my “Bwahaha” post in General Discussion. Anything that you can contribute to that conversation (what conversation? I’m the only poster so far) is much appreciated.

11

Although what does “building upon” mean ?

Are you referring to what Dr Mark Tramo says

context sets up expectancies for subsequent events … set up derived meaning and emotion.

We may crave order, but what is the beauty of order ?

12

Every word has a definition - often several. When we string those words together, we achieve communication. Yet simply stringing words together does not a classic novel make. (I’ve always hated that kind of backwards talk, but it seemed to fit.) The beauty is in the telling.

If something can be arranged in a way that encourages the beholder to feel emotion, connection and a common experience, then you have achieved art. This happens with words, music and color most frequently. I grant that a well-kept kitchen cupboard is not my cup of tea when it comes to art. However, to my old college roomate (she was such an obsessive neat freak), it may well have been. She would gaze upon a newly organized bookshelf like one might appreciate a Monet.

Regardless of what you may deem to be art, the art arises because of the order. In that order lies beauty.

As far as what Tramo said - sure, I guess that’s what I meant. He’s just better at saying it.

13

Of course we can’t fully explain why music affects us the way it does, but there are some things that give us clues. Traditional tonal music has a strong connection to the mathematics of sound waves. When we hear a musical note, part of that sound is the overtones, which are mathematical divisions of the sound wave. As each sound frequency is successively halved, we get the overtones in the sequence: octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, major third, minor third, second, etc. It’s no accident that we hear these intervals as being successively more dissonant. But there’s also a learned aspect to it. If you listen to medieval music, it generally ends on the interval of a perfect fifth, because that was considered to be the most consonant interval. Composers of the time heard that as being a place of “rest” for the music. But in modern tonality, the major triad (perfect fifth AND major third together) is the place of “rest”. To our modern ears, the perfect fifth sounds too “stark”, but the major triad sounds fuller and more satisfying. There’s really no way to explain it other than we are just “used to it” that way.

So in traditional tonal music, as we add notes with more and more complex mathematical relationships to the “fundamental” tone, it sounds more and more dissonant, as if the sound wants to “go somewhere”. So when we finally resolve it to that major triad, we get that “ahhhh” feeling of having arrived. It’s kind of like sex, in that the ecstasy can be increased by delaying that final arrival.

Now for the rhythm aspect: I think rhythm in music relates to our perception of time, and the regularity of certain things we observe in the universe (like heartbeat, as has already been pointed out). I remember a music class I took where the instructor pointed out something very interesting that I hadn’t thought of before: Music develops according to the culture in which it originates. European classical music is very rigidly ordered, with pre-conceived forms that are more or less rigorously followed. Thematic material is introduced and then recapped at the end. This relates to the changing of the seasons, and the corresponding cyclical way of life. But traditional African music tends to have a repetitive drum beat with no clearly marked sections or ending point, since the changing of the seasons is not dramatic in that country.

Of course it’s impossible to construct a model complex enough to explain everything about music, but I think all music relates to these fundamental concepts in some way.

14

So, the beauty of the order is a measure of the resonance that the art exhibits with regards to the beholder ?

complex enough or simple enough ?

15

Yes.:smiley:

16

Are we all forgetting about lyrics? I’ve been wondering about this topic myself for… well… forever. And I started to notice a sort of pattern. But I still can’t explain it. Me? I like music for the explanations described so far in this thread: harmony, rhythm, melody, tone, beat, etc. I like the SOUND of Enya, Pink Floyd, U2. But most popular music, well, I don’t dislike it. I tolerate it. The sound of most popular music is so boring to me though. It sounds like every other bit of popular music. But it IS popular. WHY? When I watch people enjoying the music they seem to be LISTENING to it. They react to the song as if it is a piece of poetry, which is a discussion for a different thread. I don’t listen to the lyrics usually. Well, unless I like the sound of the music. Then my interest gets peaked. I want to learn more about the song. Oh, Peter Gabriel. I like him too. Wierd lyrics. But I would never know he had wierd lyrics if his music didn’t sound so awesome! So my conclusion is that music can suck, as long as it has good lyrics… for it to be popular anyway. And I admit, if I listen to the lyrics I enjoy the song more. But for me to really like it, the sound must reach into my soul. And that question, “what is it about music that reaches your soul” I don’t see us answering for a very long time. I think we’ll solve our energy problems and colonize Mars before we figure that one out.

17

No. But like you, I treat lyrics as just manifestations of a thread of melody by a human timbre complimenting the rest of the polyphonic harmony. That those sounds also convey a tangible communication might be a subconscious factor separate from the fundamental reasons why we like music.

18

There was a recent US News article (can’t find link, sorry…) which suggests that music acts on the brain in a similar way as sex does. I’ll start to listen to music a lot more now :wink:

19

It’s clear to me that the Universe doesn’t work the way I would imagine it to, but that’s part of the charm. I was very surprised to learn that people with one hemisphere of the brain damaged could no longer speak, but they could sing. This is noticed in many books on the brain. It also happened to the father of a woman I know.

Now, were I building a human being, speech would be pretty fundamental, with singing and music as a special function on top of that. If you lost the higher processing, you could still talk, but you couldn’t sing. There wouldn’t be a way to sing but not talk.

But that’s clearly not how the brain functions. Clearly music is somehow basic to the functioning of that part of the brain. Our love of music may, ultimately, be related to the fact that it is inherent in the operation of that hemisphere of the brain.

There’s another aspect to our appreciation of music. The column “Deadalus” in the British journal Nature always consists of very brief columns on science or engineering speculation, usually with a very dry tongue in cheek. One suggestion it made some time ago was that we appreciated the harmony of octaves (play a chord of middle C and C one octave up and it sounds pretty) because such harmonics are the natural harmonics of bending beams, especially simply-supported beams (beams that simply rest on a support at each end without being tied down – think of xylophones or marimbas). Such beams have a sonic spectrum harmonics – middle C plus the C above that plus the C above that plus…etc. Our arboreal ancestors, Daedalus suggested, listened to the sound of groaning branches, and if they heard the natural harmony of such octaves, knew that it was sound. Broken or rotten branches gave dissonance, and were to be avoided.
Pretty far-fetched, but I think it’s onto something. I’ve always wondered where octaves came from, and why they should occur so naturally in the case of simply-supported beams.

A few other random notes on music and our appreciation:

– not everyone’s music is the same. Chinese pentatonic scales aren’t the same as our western scales. I once heard Chinese music played on a western-style violin tuned to a pentatonic scale, and both scale and music were vastly different from what I would call music, yet there was an observable pattern. (This was at the Met. Museum of Art in NYC, in their Musical Instruments room). There are plenty of other examples, but this is the one that struck me most forcibly. There may be an underlying natural love of music, but the specific form of it is heavily influenced and guided by culture.
– Music is the ultimate Abstract Art. Although some music may be consciously pettered after some natural sounds or forms, or try to “tell a story”, most music, of any kind, is as nonrepresentational and abstract as you can get. The next time you get in a discussion with someone saying that they don’t like abstract art – you know, modern painting, post-impressionist – bring up the subject of music. What does Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony sound like?

20

I would be just the opposite. As long as I could sing I would never need to speak.
I can’t really explain why music calms me like nothing else. If I am upset over a fight with my husband, worry over a loved one’s ill health, or any stress inducing malaise…I only need to listen to my favorite albums*.
Whether it’s Broadway show tunes, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones or Aretha Franklin , I will feel immediately sedate and tranquil.

  • Replace with CD’s where applicable