Our ability to appreciate and enjoy music gets pretty complex pretty fast. Indeed the boundaries of music get pushed quite a bit. Right now I’m listening to Lustmord’s The Place Where the Black Stars Hang. I love this work. But many people would find it hard to call it music in a conventional sense. It sits out on the edge of noise/industrial/ambient (or “wierd shit” as its creator terms it.) Similarly our ability to move from simple melodies and harmonies to quite angular forms, both in Jazz and a lot of the last century’s music. Often it seems we need to take a journey to get there, learning to keep our ears open to new ideas and sounds, and often it takes a while to get into the new ideas. This makes the OP’s question even more interesting. Then you can look at alternate tonalities on other musical cultures. The idea that music is inherent in the physics of the Pythagorean scale isn’t enough. Music cuts across a heck of a lot more than that. You can spend a lifetime just learning about what happened in music, without even scratching the surface of why.
I would second reading Musicophilia. I found it perhaps a little less satisfying than some of Sack’s other works, but it is still about as good as it gets in looking into this area, and, as always, readable and accessible.
Music appears to be hard-wired into the way our brain works – or how part of it works. One of the fascinating things to come out of split-brain research (and studies of patients with strokes) is that the capabilities for speech and for singing are concentrated in different parts of the brain, with the result that some stroke patients can apparently sing, but not speak. It’s very much unlike the way I would naively arrange the brain, were I building one.
I don’t mean to put it as simplistically as “our bodies have rhythms, therefore we like music, because it’s rhythmic”, but clearly something in our brain is organized around expressing things in this way, and we naturally respond to it. It’s not the sort of thing that has obvious survival value*, but we see examples of what certainly appears to be music in other creatures – birdsong, whalesong, etc. In the case of birds song certainly seems to have a useful purpose – warning, mating, etc. We still don’t know why whales sing.
*There was an interesting tongue-mostly-in-cheek suggestion in the “Daedalus” column in Nature several years ago suggesting that our simian ancestors grew to like harmonics and overtones because these are the characteristic frequencies of a simply-supported beam and of a singly supported beam, and they could tell whether a branch was sound from the sound it made when hit or swung on, since a broken or breaking branch would produce some “discordant:” notes. I’ve always suspected there might be something to it. Certainly nothing else has been proposed, that I’m aware of, that tries to explain why, given that we like music, certain chord combinations seem to be universally displeasing.
I believe many people like music because other people do.
Heh 
- not to hijack, but that was my favorite movie of the previous decade and partly formed my hypothesis. You finished watching this horribly brutal ultra-realistic portrayal of India - and what is the last scene? I loved it.
[QUOTE=Francis Vaughan]
Then you can look at alternate tonalities on other musical cultures. The idea that music is inherent in the physics of the Pythagorean scale isn’t enough. Music cuts across a heck of a lot more than that. You can spend a lifetime just learning about what happened in music, without even scratching the surface of why.
[/QUOTE]
I always wished I had more musical talent (one of my sisters got all the good genes for that) since I am fascinated by the tonal structures of other cultures, especially India which I think is the most convoluted one out there, and so I wish I had the talent to learn to play those different tones.
As to the OP, I always liked this quote by Nietzsche: “Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet, if a melody has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal. A parable.” Ignoring the parable part, I think it does speak to partly why music fascinates us - we are never certain where it will lead us, and our enjoyment comes from both the journey and the completion. Most mundane tasks force us to concentrate on one or the other. And then most music creates within us an urge to dance and/or sing along - it is not enough to merely listen, but partake it in. I do think music (and dance) is part and parcel of being human. We would be completely different creatures without it. I don’t think any scientific explanation would do justice to its effect on humans. It sparks something within us that goes beyond rationality. What some call the divine, others call the Tao - every culture has a name for it - that which you cannot describe, but only experience.
This is true, but only up to a point. It certainly explains why some chords are pleasing to the ear and some are not, but dissonance plays a very important role in music. Something that gives an instrument much of it’s character is the almost chaotic sound it makes at the beginning of a note before a stable waveform is established. Hit a string and you get a rapid transition from a godawful mess to a stable note + harmonic overtones. Studies have been carried out where the start of notes were electronically removed, and people had a lot of trouble distinguishing various instruments. This is partly why a simple synthesiser can sound very flat and uninteresting, there is little dissonance (the other reason being, the ratio of harmonics is often fixed across the it’s range, unlike natural instruments). I’m not dissing synthesisers by the way, sometimes a simple sound suits a piece perfectly. However, I really appreciate the nuances a skilled player can wring from their chosen instrument, for me it’s what brings a piece alive and gives it much of it’s emotion. It’s something that is barely covered by standard musical notation.
Music is much more than a succession of pretty notes and chords. Every musical phrase is heard in the context of what preceded it.
Yes, there are also cases where people can comprehend but not speak, and others who can speak but not comprehend. Every time I learn a bit more about how the brain functions I’m left in a state of amazement. I started a related thread a little while ago: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=593866
My guess is that it started as a simple function (mating and warning calls) and has become culturised. A brain is a big lump of potential, it’s when it starts learning that it becomes interesting.
If you’re looking for more than a handful of paragraphs, I recommend you look at Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy, by Robert Jourdain, This Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin, and Sweet Anticipation, by David Huron. The first two deal more with the evolutionary aspects and neuroscience of listening to music and will give you rich insights into the matter. The Huron book is more about the aesthetics of listening to music, and if you’re at all musical, this is a fascinating study of the psychology of expectation and how that works in music. All three can provide you with a much deeper understanding of what’s at work when we hear music.
The OP is quite ambiguous and could be asking why we like to make music or why we like to hear music, or why we like certain music. All of those questions are addressed in those books. However, one answer to why we like to make music - with others - is the sense of community and safety that it provides, and some people speculate that has powerful evolutionary power, in that people who sing together tend to form self-protective groups, and vice-versa. The sense of enjoyment we feel when we make music with others may be an atavism that betrays our earlier lives of huddling together for strength, camaraderie, and safety.
While you might not sing or dance when you hear music or dance performed, you probably do respond to it on some level. Tapping your foot, say, or bobbing your head would be indications that something is getting to you. You might not burst into song, but it may be that subconsciously, your vocal cords are subtly responding while you listen to a familiar song. Recent research into what are called mirror neurons indicate that we are much more responsive to outside stimuli than we realize, and music is definitely a potent stimulus. One simple example: when you hear the rhythm, shave-and-a-hair-cut, you can feel - even if you don’t act on it - bump, bump. Oh, music has you in its grip, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, you old human, you.
I read Sigmund Freud hated music. Conversely, why would someone hate music?
People hate music all the time. I bet there’s thousands of songs right now that you hate.
Imho, people get their musical taste set during puberty. As they get older, different types of music don’t sound like music to them. For example, I can’t endure heavy metal, polkas, or screamers. Even if you like the music today, in 20 years or so, the new music is going to sound very weird to you.
But few humans have any direct experience with a supernova. Heck, wasn’t the last one visible by eye SN 1987A?
Supernovae are beautiful, no doubt. But the whole thing still hinges on: Why is there beauty at all? Is beauty merely “something humans find preferable”, or is beauty an abstract? And if it is an abstract, where does the abstract come from?
Chicks dig it.
Everything we find appealing is a direct result of a specific group of neuro-chemical levels in the brain. As far as music, it seems that people associate audio experiences like songs, compositions, styles, etc, to emotional states they were experiencing at the same time they were exposed to the music they eventually like.
I recently heard of a study isolating a specific neurotransmitter being active for people who enjoy music, and a complete absence of it for people that don’t.
Music enjoyment is a highly abstract experience and we’ll eventually figure out why we like it.
Hating music is not the same as hating songs.
This isn’t universally true, I’ve learned to enjoy different genres of music throughout my twenties and into my thirties.
You’re now discussing musical preferences and musical tastes. That’s a different question from the OP.
OTOH, the fact that there exist musical preferences, and tastes, and that we can learn to enjoy music we previously disliked, or the converse, suggests some significant aspects of the human mind that need to be addressed by any theory that seeks to answer the OP.
true, dat