why music is so cool

04/06/2025

• music has an emotive meaning to people that is common across cultures
  • we innately know when a song is happy, sad, celebratory, or hopeless.
  • there is some circuitry in the brain that must be primeval which understands this.
  • so you're telling me that understanding the emotional meaning of sounds was advantageous to our ancestors? cool, but why?
    • is it the case that our ability to discriminate emotion in music is just a second order effect of neural circuits that were meant to do something else, say determine if a sound came from a predator, and we are in some sense highjacking that system to evoke emotions on command using specific frequencies!
    • or could it be that humans who were able to understand and participate in musical activities were more likely to be communal and thus survive and propagate their DNA, and so that trait was selected for over some evolutionarily relevant length of time. seems less likely but maybe, who knows.
  • this same type of thought feels less applicable to visual art, and much less so to culinary art, tactile art, or olfactory art.
  • there is something more built in to us about music, and I think that's pretty dang cool.
  • here's a study on it!