The Revealing Truth of why Music is IMPORTANT TO US !!!!!!!!
.
As far as I am aware the answer to this question is still not well-understood. Neuroscience is just beginning to explain some of the potential reasons humans have such an affinity for music (this is one of the things that largely separates humans from other animals -- few, if any, species innately recognize and respond to rhythm and melody the way humans do).
One of the theories out there is that our appreciation for music is a side effect of the evolutionary development of our other systems for verbal communication. Some scientists theorize that ancient human verbal communication may have been more like singing and less like speech.
Other theories correlate music with our brain's advanced abilities to do pattern recognition, typically used to detect deviations which may represent threats. Since most music follows a set of patterns, we find it appealing. This also explains why many find cacophonous or abstract music displeasing.
Music has substantial evolutionary survival value. There's a theory, which I find totally convincing, that music is the evolutionary precursor to language, the bridge between the cries and gestures of other primates and our own more abstract communication.
Humanity's success as a species is due entirely to our social organization. Music is a crucial tool for group building and bonding, more than we give it credit for in the western world. We here in modern high-tech culture think of music as a form of entertainment, mostly divorced from its most basic purposes. But taking the macro-scale historical view, music isn't recordings of specialists making pleasant background noise. It's all the emotional-laden patterned vocalization, percussion and gestures we perform, consciously and not. For example, all parents use music to comfort babies. Sometimes it's in the form of overt singing and dancing with them, but even routine speaking to very young children is mostly musical in content. There's the singsong cadence, the repetition, and the warmly modulated tone. This "motherese" is universal among human cultures and is probably very ancient. It's an essential tool for fostering kids' brain development and their relationships with their parents.
Music is also a crucial tool for social bonding among adults, for making a tribe feel like a tribe. We use music to modulate our own emotions and those of others. There are ecstatic chants and dances for spiritual purposes, or for just relaxing and relieving stress. There are work songs to make tedious tasks more bearable. There are marches and fight songs to prepare for battle, and there are lullabyes to soothe each other to sleep. There are love songs for courtship and battle raps to playfully establish social dominance. In preliterate societies, music was a crucial mnemonic device, and it's still extremely useful for that purpose. And modern language continues to have substantial amounts of musical content. Some languages, like Chinese, literally use pitch to convey grammatical meaning. Even "non-tonal" languages like English use pitch, rhythm and timbre to add emotional and social coloring to the bare facts conveyed by the words.
We enjoy music for the same reason we enjoy eating, sex, and running and jumping. Treating music as a frivolity is like treating exercise that way; it leads to unhealthy and unhappy humans.
One of the theories out there is that our appreciation for music is a side effect of the evolutionary development of our other systems for verbal communication. Some scientists theorize that ancient human verbal communication may have been more like singing and less like speech.
Other theories correlate music with our brain's advanced abilities to do pattern recognition, typically used to detect deviations which may represent threats. Since most music follows a set of patterns, we find it appealing. This also explains why many find cacophonous or abstract music displeasing.
Music has substantial evolutionary survival value. There's a theory, which I find totally convincing, that music is the evolutionary precursor to language, the bridge between the cries and gestures of other primates and our own more abstract communication.
Humanity's success as a species is due entirely to our social organization. Music is a crucial tool for group building and bonding, more than we give it credit for in the western world. We here in modern high-tech culture think of music as a form of entertainment, mostly divorced from its most basic purposes. But taking the macro-scale historical view, music isn't recordings of specialists making pleasant background noise. It's all the emotional-laden patterned vocalization, percussion and gestures we perform, consciously and not. For example, all parents use music to comfort babies. Sometimes it's in the form of overt singing and dancing with them, but even routine speaking to very young children is mostly musical in content. There's the singsong cadence, the repetition, and the warmly modulated tone. This "motherese" is universal among human cultures and is probably very ancient. It's an essential tool for fostering kids' brain development and their relationships with their parents.
Music is also a crucial tool for social bonding among adults, for making a tribe feel like a tribe. We use music to modulate our own emotions and those of others. There are ecstatic chants and dances for spiritual purposes, or for just relaxing and relieving stress. There are work songs to make tedious tasks more bearable. There are marches and fight songs to prepare for battle, and there are lullabyes to soothe each other to sleep. There are love songs for courtship and battle raps to playfully establish social dominance. In preliterate societies, music was a crucial mnemonic device, and it's still extremely useful for that purpose. And modern language continues to have substantial amounts of musical content. Some languages, like Chinese, literally use pitch to convey grammatical meaning. Even "non-tonal" languages like English use pitch, rhythm and timbre to add emotional and social coloring to the bare facts conveyed by the words.
We enjoy music for the same reason we enjoy eating, sex, and running and jumping. Treating music as a frivolity is like treating exercise that way; it leads to unhealthy and unhappy humans.
LiaF7 › Here in Portugal and very near my birth town there is a little village that when they talk it sounds like they are singing. Intonation gives the phrases such a different meaning :)
soncee › Beautiful
