Why do we like music anyway?

[Bootlebat]

When you think about it the whole concept is kinda weird. I mean, if we were visited by a race of aliens that didn't have music and they asked us why we made it could you explain why? I couldn't.

[Jena]

Because I'm a singer, I really like music.

[Datelessman]

I would explain music as an auditory way of expressing and communicating feelings, and that both can feel pleasant depending on the pitch, volume, tone, etc. This isn't even entirely a human feeling. Birds communicate with each other via chirps and many other animal displays involve sounds in ways beyond simple communication of information.

What a delightfully random topic to unearth! Welcome to the forum, Jena!

[Werel]

Rhythm (and by extension most music) isn't a purely human capacity; cockatoos and (possibly) a handful of other animals both understamd & intentionally produce rhythmic noises. Here is an adorable video about research on a cockatoo named Snowball who loves the Backstreet Boys and Queen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8MFhizIs_8

As for why? Let me spill my spooky opinions all over this thread and guess that music was one of our first and best technologies for communicating with non-human entities, corporeal or otherwise, which is why most states of ecstatic trance have cross-culturally involved music, and it's possibly the fastest & easiest way to induce altered consciousness and/or brainwash people.

Less spooky: our pattern recognition centers are hyper amped up compared to most animals, we're extremely reliant on sound, and music is a massive dump of sound-pattern recognition that tickles the bits of our neurology that like identifying patterns in dense sensory information.

Also, it's cool and fun.

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