Every time I think I’ve finally taken the measure of the Typical Mind Fallacy…
Anyone want to announce that they dislike oxygen and rainbows? Let’s get it over with!
Actual answer: for many people, including me, it’s an incredibly useful mind-altering drug, that allows powerful immediate manipulation of my emotional state. In fact, I should really abuse it a lot more strategically than I do.
For me: I find some forms quite hedonic, and also very powerful emotional manipulation. In fact, it’s the only effective emotional self-manipulation I know of that doesn’t require obtrusive or expensive setups (such as live plays) or distract me completely from my tasks.
I like rainbows as a pattern to some extent, but the actual ones in the sky seem underwhelming to me. Too subdued, I’m used to my colours being more vivid. I am pro-oxygen, though.
What lavalamp is trying to say is that people listen to music because it makes them feel good, but it’s hard (or impossible) to explain why it makes one feel good. It is a subconscious thing; it happens in your neurons and you aren’t aware of the pathways and the sequence of neuronal firings that causes it to happen.
Maybe someday we’ll have a theory that makes it possible to take some information about you (anything from a ‘psychological test’ to a full-blown brain scan), a sample of music, and determine whether you will enjoy it or not.
Just a couple of thoughts about this. First, as far as anyone can tell music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon (and “music” itself is a term that describes a pretty giant range of human behaviors). There’s no single reason, or even manageably short list of reasons, why people like it. It seems to be wrapped up in many different physical, neurological, cognitive, emotional, social, and cultural systems, any of which (in any combinations) could be responsible for a certain person’s reaction to a certain kind of music. Some of the aspects of that seem to be relatively innate, like finding certain sonic timbres inherently pleasurable, while others are highly learned, like the kind of pleasurable “understanding” that comes from knowing how a classical sonata movement is ordinarily structured.
In your case, I’d guess that you have an atypically low physiological/neurological enjoyment of things like instrumental timbres, which makes the more cognitively demanding aspects of music-listening no more than a chore. For comparison, this is why we don’t generally listen to spoken words (e.g., audiobooks) as background listening: there’s nothing to be gained from it outside the semantic content, which is distracting unless you can tune it out, in which case why bother.
(Merely finding music distracting is not at all rare. In fact, the various professional musicians and music scholars I know listen to less music than most other people do, because our training makes it hard for us to listen as other than a “foreground” mental activity. I myself almost never listen to background music. Unlike you, though, I do like music a lot.)
We seem to have a tendency, when discussing music as when discussing other things, to assume that other people are more like us than we have any good reason to think they are. For example, I find the timbres and general sound world of noise music to be extremely unpleasant. So when I imagine someone who likes noise music a lot, my first impulse is to think they must in some sense “enjoy unpleasant things” (an obvious category error), or at least that they must find something in noise music that’s rewarding enough to get past how clearly unpleasant the sounds are. And yet when I actually talk to a fan of noise music, they often tell me they find the timbres and sounds of noise music (exactly the aspects of it I can’t even imagine liking) to be very pleasant or arousing in some way. The enjoyment of these basic aspects of a kind of music (what kinds of sounds it’s made up of) seems to be sufficiently physiologically/neurologically determined for a lot of people that it is almost impossible to imagine liking a kind of music you don’t “naturally” like.
In other words, and I do not mean this even slightly pejoratively, I would expect it to be very difficult for you to imagine why other people find, say, the sound of an orchestra playing a single major triad (NB, a purely sonic event with no syntactic or semantic content) pleasant. Much as it is for me to imagine finding noise music pleasant—it’s just not what my brain is built to enjoy.
Relatedly, the history of the questions “why do people like music?” and “what kind of music is best?” feature some truly aggravating episodes that seem to stem from the idea that music is (or should be) a single kind of thing to all people, and that we just have to figure out what. (To be clear, I’m in no way suggesting that you’re taking that point of view.) The idea that music is just a really, really complicated phenomenon with which everyone interacts a bit differently—and the corresponding aesthetic pluralism that follows from that fact—has been amazingly slow to spread, no less so in professional music circles than elsewhere.
o when I imagine someone who likes noise music a lot, my first impulse is to think they must in some sense “enjoy unpleasant things” (an obvious category error)
The same things happen to me in reverse: I find industrial music (pop or metal) quite pleasing, but the whole point of industrial is to add factory noise (for example those typical of a sawmill) to otherwise plain music, so I at least can understand why as a genre it doesn’t have a wide community of supporters.
Right. But, when exposed to it, some are drawn in and some run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. The point of the example was that there’s a surprisingly large amount of individual variation on what kinds of fundamental sounds and timbres people find most pleasing, and (I cautiously suggest) that appears to be the most innate and least malleable or learnable aspect of a person’s response to various kinds of music.
There is evidence that people with amusia tend to report lower levels of musical appreciation. Perhaps you have amusia?
There are a few online tests that claim to test for amusia, such as this or this. If its not too unpleasant for you, you might consider taking one of them.
Interesting! I took the first test and they always sounded alike so unless the test was a cruel trick I clearly have some kind of pitch perception problem.
I can explain why I like some things but not others.
I don’t believe you can. All you can do is point to surface features like ‘I like how red the explosions in Star Wars are and the feeling you get when they win at the last moment’, all of which is merely description of the parts you like and not what actually you like, and which do not serve to convey the qualia. If someone who just saw flickering lights on the screen asked you why you liked movies and that’s what you said, they would not be satisfied any more than you would be satisfied by a music fan going ‘the 4/8th time and the timpanni descending into a glissando in the third measure thrill my heart, and that is why I like music’.
If you really want to know what red looks like, you could try getting your hands on a psychedelic; they seems to be heavily linked to musical enjoyment.
Psychedelics are not interchangeable for this purpose, and if it weren’t for the war on drugs they could probably be used for some interesting science on auditory processing. Information from TIHKAL on two otherwise not unusual psychedelics with specific auditory effects:
N,N-diisopropyltryptamine specifically messes with pitch perception in such a way as to destroy the perception of harmony. From one of the experience reports: “No effects were noted with respect to clarity of speech, and both comprehension and interpretation were normal. Music was rendered completely disharmonious although single tones sounded normal.”
Meanwhile, 5-methoxy N,N-diisopropyltryptamine distorts “musical character and interpretation.” From one of the experience reports: “The program was a program of Irish music… What I heard were three distant, fraudulent selections with generically meaningless words, mumbled so as to sound authentic. Everything was faked.”
Maybe if I could get my hands on one of these I could understand what it’s like to be James Miller (in the musical respect only). Perhaps he’s totally lacking the hard-to-explain satisfying feeling that comes when you hear notes played together whose frequencies are at a small-integer ratio.
Psychedelics are not interchangeable for this purpose, and if it weren’t for the war on drugs they could probably be used for some interesting science on auditory processing.
Sure. If I had to be more specific than just ‘psychedelics’, I’d probably say either LSD (due to Deadheads) or mescaline (due to Huxley).
And those two excerpts are fascinating. What does it mean for something to sound ‘distant, fraudulent’? I can’t even imagine. Maybe it’s like a musical version of Capgras delusion.
Generally, sentences that start out “I (don’t) like X because” and don’t finish with a description of neuronal states are, with highish probability, confabulation. :)
For someone with my “brain type” music is obvious bad.
OK, sure.
It drains attention while giving nothing back.
IMO, this is confabulation. Maybe it’s your true rejection, but I think it’s much more probable (80%ish?) that your brain randomly came up with this story while trying to figure out why you dislike music. The part of your brain that generates reasons doesn’t necessarily have access to the part of your brain that generates likes/dislikes.
The story my brain came up with along time ago when I was a teenager was that I was too intelligent to enjoy music or other people were just pretending to enjoy it. (I could have used LW back then.)
I was wondering whether you have hearing issues* but that doesn’t sound like it. Do you enjoy visual art?
*I like music, but not nearly as much as most people. A recent online test suggests that I don’t hear low pitches as well as most people. Of course, the problem there might be with my computer speakers rather than my ears, but it might be a clue.
My hearing has always tested as fine. I like some visual art, although I’m well below average in this. I do get pleasure in seeing beautiful things. I’ve never experienced music as beautiful and to my mind music being beautiful seems like a category error.
My guess is that you just don’t make an emotional connection to music. It’s possible that moving to music would eventually make a connection, but this is a very tentative guess.
Can you tell people’s emotional state from their voices?
I dislike the music as it comes out from my father’s car stereo because he sets the equalizer to amplify the high pitches too much for my tastes. I used to wonder why he would do that, then I remembered that the ability to hear high pitches declines with age.
What is it that you expect to get back that you do not? Whatever it is probably reduces down to the relative positions of certain neurotransmitters, the isovariable interpersonal variance of which few others are likely to be able to explain.
...and we’ve now arrived at the hard problem of consciousness (why does anything feel good or bad, and what does that mean, and why is it hard to describe?). That didn’t take long! :)
This seems like a fake explanation, or curiosity-stopper. I mean, natch, the difference has to be cognitive in some sense, in that it’s a mental phenomenon and therefore relates to James_Miller’s brain. But giving “cognitive dissimilarity” as an answer and treating it as an open-and-shut case seems pretty unenlightening.
Not necessarily, says Josep Marco-Pallerés, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona and lead author of a new study [“Dissociation between Musical and Monetary Reward Responses in Specific Musical Anhedonia”] that explores why some people feel indifferent to music. “Music isn’t rewarding for them, even though other kinds of rewards, like money, are,” he says. “It just doesn’t affect them.” To find out why, researchers recruited 30 university students, each of whom had been identified as very sensitive to music, moderately sensitive, or not sensitive at all thanks to a questionnaire. Researchers also made sure that the study’s participants weren’t depressed, tone-deaf, hearing-impaired, or otherwise unable to understand music — all factors that would have dampened their pleasure response. Then, researchers monitored the student’s heart rates and sweat levels during listening sessions involving familiar pieces of music (previous studies have shown that people react more strongly to music they know). “We asked them to bring music from home that they like,” Marco-Pallerés recalls, “and most of them had problems doing that.” Those who were indifferent to music either ended up bringing a smaller number of recordings — some didn’t own music at all — or had to borrow music from a family member. The study’s results, published today in Current Biology, are surprising. Although these participants were perfectly capable of perceiving when a tune was sad or happy, they didn’t show physical or emotional reaction. They didn’t shiver if a singer hit a high note, and their heart rate didn’t increase with each crescendo. But when asked to play a game involving a monetary reward, those who were indifferent to music reacted just like everyone else: the thought of winning even a small amount of money was enough to make their hearts race. The results were unchanged a year later, when 26 of the students took the test again.
...Researchers even have a name for the condition: “specific musical anhedonia.” The term anhedonia is used by psychologists to describe a person’s inability to derive pleasure from activities that most find enjoyable. But as the monetary-reward experiment indicates, this specific anhedonia only affects music perception. “Now that we know that there are people with specific musical anhedonia,” Marco-Pallerés says, “we want to know the neural bases that might explain [it].” The research team plans to conduct a new experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study how the brain’s reward system differs in these people.
A lot of people talk about having emotional reactions to music as their primary reason for liking it. I don’t generally have this reaction to music, so I might as well talk about what I do get out of it for a different perspective.
It can drown out other noises. It is more regular than the sound of ventilation or traffic or chirping birds or upstairs footsteps, and I prefer it; I turn my (almost constantly on) music up when there are non-conversation noises about. (Conversation, though, competes too directly with music; I can’t understand people talking over significant other sound.)
It can control sensory overload. When I am spun up to unmanageable levels of sensory sensitivity, putting on familiar music with a solid, thumpy beat forces my thoughts to match it somewhat. When I am not spun up like that, it’s still nice to have a modestly engaging track for my attention to fall into when I’m not doing enough to occupy myself—I don’t function well when I’m not multitasking, my brain decides it’s not wanted and turns off if I try. This probably doesn’t apply to anyone else, at least anyone else who isn’t autistic in a way similar to me.
But that’s all about the use of music, not the enjoyability of music. There is also enjoyability. Some music is a good source of word-pleasure, either in the poetic sense or just in the sense of some words sounding cool and feeling cool to say. People seem to vary widely in how much they appreciate this as a thing.
Notes and timbres and rhythms vary a lot, and some of them sound pretty together. I think this for me is less like visual art being pretty—sequence is too important; if it’s like visual art it’s more like animation than like a painting—and more like an especially complex version of enjoying running my hands over soft things. Music is texture for my ears.
It is possible that you perceive it differently. Do you have abnormal sound perception, e.g. inability to distinguish pitches or timbres, or to hear rhythms?
For example, if you hear a note, can you find it on a piano keyboard? Likewise a chord? Do you know what people mean when they talk about high pitches and low? If you hear a violin or a trumpet, can you tell which it is? Can you tap out a rhythm after hearing it? Can you appreciate poetry written with regular scansion and rhyme?
Not only do I like music but I wouldn’t even know where to start explaining why I do; I didn’t like music until in my teens and I don’t even know what changed in me!
This is an excellent question. grouchymusicologist above has it right that “music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon”, and I would like to expand on this.
Michael J. Parsons, in How we understand art: a cognitive developmental account of aesthetic experience, identifies a sequence of developmental stages in the appreciation of visual art. This is of necessity a very rough and un-nuanced summary since I don’t have the book to hand, but I think this sequence is: first, colour (“this painting is red”); second, subject matter (“this painting is of a dog”); third, emotional content (“this painting makes me feel wistful”); fourth, technique (“this painting is pointillist”); and fifth, historical relationships (“this painting is a witty riposte to a work of Velasquez”).
I can’t point you at a corresponding developmental study of music, but I’m sure that similar stages of appreciation are there. To give a flavour of the different kinds of thing going on in the appreciation of music, let’s take an example: here’s Ian Bostridge singing Schubert’s setting of “Der Erlkönig” by Goethe.
When listening to this, I appreciate: (i) the timbre of the piano and voice; (ii) the driving and urgent rhythm; (iii) the words and the story; (iv) the way the harmony creates and releases the dramatic tension at appropriate points in the text; (v) the skill of the performers: stamina is needed by the pianist to keep the triplets going, and vocal control by the singer to maintain timbre of the high notes; (vi) the “tone-painting”: that is, the ways in which the musical notes illustrate aspects of the story, for example the repeated notes representing the horse’s hooves; the way that the “child’s” entries are a semitone above the piano, this discord illustrating his distress; the way that each entry is higher and more distressed than the previous one; (vii) the vocal acting of Ian Bostridge: his use of different vocal timbres to differentiate the four parts, and details of expression like the snarl on “so brauch ich Gewalt”; (viii) the different choices Schubert made in this composition compared with Carl Loewe’s setting of the same text.
(I recognize that this doesn’t explain why I appreciate these aspects of the performance. But I think it’s still useful to give an indication of how complex the phenomenon of music appreciation is.)
You don’t enjoy any kind of music? Gregorian chant, polyphonic medieval, celtic, African percussions, Caribbean, classical, baroque, house, electronic, alt-rock, progressive, industrial, rap, metal in all its infinite variations, pop music, tuvan chant, trance, etc. None of them evokes pleasurable feelings? Boy, you are an outlier :) That’s perfectly fine, of course. I can only answer that for me, I enjoy different kind of music for different reasons. Listening to classical music evokes sensations akin to reading a novel: it evokes powerful emotions and tells an elaborate story. Listening to pop music is much more like eating junk food: a fast, powerful kick of positive emotions, that anyway lasts very little and leaves nothing behind. I also listen to salsa music, over which I try to dance: the rythm combined with the movements makes me feel sexy and passionate. House music is pleasurable in a kind of guilty way: it’s a complete immersion in group-think, a primordial forgetting of individuality. In all those cases anyway the underlying theme is the evocation of powerful positive or negative emotion (which can be meta-positive).
I imagine you’ve read about synesthesia. Someone with synesthesia might find a particular color has texture or taste—some atypical crisscrossing between the senses. I find music (especially considering those who can’t understand music) can be well modeled as a near-universal form of synesthesia, a linking between the emotional parts of the brain and those that process auditory information. Now this analogy is not perfect, as synesthetes almost never achieve consensus; the taste and/or texture of any particular color varies wildly between synesthets. This isn’t true about music, as it doesn’t vary that much in structure; and there seems to be some consensuses on the “sadness” or “energy” of particular songs.
But still, this might be a good, non-confusing way for you to think about music. When someone describes the beauty of a song, treat their statement as you would a synesthete saying, “Wow, that sunset tastes like a cheese burger.”
I’m in the same boat. I don’t have anything against music, but never derived pleasure from it like other people seemed to. I’ve enjoyed particular songs, e.g. stuff from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, because I can enjoy cleverness and humor and a lot of songs have content that is clever or funny. But the music itself is background at best.
What I feel when listening to Bach isn’t what someone else feels about a song they dislike; more like what you feel about an overheard conversation with nothing to do with you. Or a speech on an issue you don’t care about. I have tried to change this, because of utilitarianism, but it turns out it’s hard.
In my very limited understanding of classical music, I get that Bach’s music is quite difficult to follow and very rational, not very emotional. Have you tried Haydn or Mozart? You might get a better mileage...
Do you feel the same way about music in movies, games, etc? Like, do you think you’d enjoy them just as much (perhaps more?) without the background music? This seems somewhat testable, given that many video games allow you to play without music.
In regards to sound: If you take a tuning fork and smack it, it will vibrate. Vibration can be pleasurable. If the tuning fork is a brain, and the smack is music, then the result is a contented or slightly altered-from-the-norm feeling, that might be akin to the vibration of a tuning fork if tuning forks like vibrating.
In regards to lyrics: Singing along to things or singing by oneself can bring joy to one. This could have to do with the feeling of one’s voice reverberating through their body, psychological factors I won’t pretend to know, a combination of factors, or of course something I haven’t considered.
Let me know if that helps, doesn’t help, or causes confusion.
In regards to sound: If you take a tuning fork and smack it, it will vibrate. Vibration can be pleasurable. If the tuning fork is a brain, and the smack is music, then the result is a contented or slightly altered-from-the-norm feeling, that might be akin to the vibration of a tuning fork if tuning forks like vibrating.
Now that I think on it, maybe it is for some people. If you consider the lyric “lose yourself to the music, the moment...” the instruction to ‘lose oneself’ implies the experience must be voluntary; much like hypnosis, if you don’t wish to succumb to the hypnotic flow of the hypnotist’s drone, you won’t.
Then again, music also passively affects brain waves. I can’t find a review article after searching for five minutes. The neuronal firing patterns—the frequency of firing, or brain waves—induced by heavy metal differ from jazz, which yet differs from classical, which further depends upon the composer and the piece.
Music increases my motivation by making me feel like I am the main character in a story (since I have a “soundtrack”) and prevents me from being distracted by people talking nearby (which makes it extremely difficult for me to study) because I can no longer hear them them with sound coming through the headphones.
Also, some music can make me feel more relaxed than I otherwise would (possibly due to sounds that mimic peaceful ancestral environments, such as gently moving water, etc...).
1) Music seems to have the closest link to my emotional state of anything short of romantic relationships. It’s rather trivial to hack my emotional state into mellowness with a song like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paeNnR33i5Q, or into an aggressive upbeat state with something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO6giM9UAv0, or appreciation of civilization with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U. No other form of art can do anything near as much for me—most of them I appreciate on an intellectual level, but music is heavily emotional as well.
2) I’ve always listened to a lot of it, which means that there’s a whole mess of assorted nostalgia attached to it.
3) Similarly, silence sounds unusual to me. I don’t mind a bit of it, but too much(at least, in a context where music is possible) creates a distinct sense that something is missing unless I’m engrossed in something else.
4) I find that a minor distraction actually improves my focus sometimes—giving my brain a B-plot, so to speak, short-circuits a lot of wandering thoughts. Music, especially music I’m familiar with, gives my brain something to latch onto when it’s idling that can easily be pushed back into the background.
I sometimes listen to music whilst doing chores for precisely this reason. Without it I get distracted and begin to procrastinate. I think the music uses up spare brainpower or something.
EDIT: When I’m doing serious work I prefer to listen to music I know very well. It’s less distracting because I know what’s coming.
I used to not listen to music for similar reasons, yet I played piano regularly. I also was confused by it, especially the lyrics—I couldn’t understand what people were saying.
Eventually, peer pressure got me and I started listening to music, usually one cd over and over. Eventually I came to like it and became more comfortable with it as background, in a very similar way to wearing a watch or clothes different from my usual is extraordinarily uncomfortable, but after a week it becomes the new normal.
For me, it’s not something I have to look for at all. It just, happens…
Being introspective (which is notoriously unreliable), it feels like my enjoyment of it is basically a combination of enjoying repetition/structure plus valuing novelty (so the repetitions change enough to avoid being boring), in the auditory modality. I enjoy the same sort of thing in other modalities as well:
Kinesthetic: things like dancing, tapping patterns on my leg, sex.
Taste: I like alternating bites of my food to make the flavors form a pattern. For example, when I eat rice, I will often split it into two portions, and put soy sauce on one, and lemon juice on the other, and alternate the bites so I get a pattern of flavors. And sometimes I switch it up to a few bites of each alternating, etc…
Abstract thought: enjoyment from thinking about math seems to be a similar thing as well. In particular, abstract algebra. Going through the proof of the Sylow theorems, for example, gives me enjoyment analogous to listening to a grand symphony.
I can’t think of anything like this for smell, but I have a very weak sense of it.
Anyway, I hope this at least helps you understand what most people get out of music, even if you don’t enjoy it yourself.
Do you enjoy other types of art? If you do, and can describe what you like about that, perhaps we can suggest particular music that might appeal to you.
If music doesn’t resonate emotionally with you, there is also intricately patterned music that appeals to me in a more mathematical way. Bach’s fugues, particularly his “little fugue” in G minor, are a good place to start. Following along with the sheet music may help with appreciating the clever ways in which the different voices relate to each other.
As for appreciating music emotionally, I find that it is necessary to relax into a certain mildly altered state of consciousness similar to meditation; I’ve become better at this over time, though I can’t always do it when under stress. I’ve also heard numerous reports that marijuana aids in the appreciation of music (in a lasting, not a temporary, way—you notice new things in music that you can then continue to appreciate while sober), and will have to try it sometime.
I like to draw a (rather pretentious) delineation between music and songs, the archetypal examples being, say Beethoven’s fifth symphony and “Call Me Maybe”. (As a side note, I very much consider it possible for something to both be a “song” and “music”) I enjoy music because I played a few instruments and sang when I was younger, so I know enough musical theory to appreciate the artistry it took to come up with the structure in the music, and (when appropriate) lyrics.
Contrarily, I enjoy songs (although happen to hate “Call Me Maybe”) because they’re fun and upbeat and keep me in a positive mood. You can find a song to fit most moods, and fitting them very closely is a very satisfying feeling. Once last week, I was in a very relaxed mood on my way home and set Sultans of Swing on repeat, because it fit how I was feeling very exactly. It was probably the happiest I have been in the last week. Additionally, sometimes songs have the ability to change my mood and/or motivate me to work harder, and I often exploit them for this purpose.
As well as what others have said about the aesthetic experience, I find it useful for taking up ‘processing power’ in my brain, making it easier to focus on something. For example if I’m doing fairly dull work having free ‘processor cycles’ in my brain will cause me to get distracted and divert myself away from what I need to be doing, but music in the background can take up some of that so I dont get s distracted.
I think that you must differ from the average person in some way that makes it not enjoyable for you. Perhaps you are more sensitive to certain sounds and find them unpleasant. Perhaps you weren’t exposed to music at a very young age. Your brain might be “wired” differently than average.
My current unsubstantiated evpsych theory is that music is a collective mood-control language. A communication channel for getting everyones’ attitudes in synch, songs to be used by the confident members with clear vision, to be shouted down if misplaced, or amplified and repeated if resonant. Does that sound plausible, considering your situation? Is it possible you’ve developed under conditions that would naturally cause you to be especially unreactive to a thing like that?
I could understand the pursuit of sanity would correlate with a disconnection from the mass’s attitude control systems. Sometimes I find even as I laugh I wish the funny-man would shut up, as I dance I wish the music had not spoken to me, as I help I wish I had not been able to empathise in the first place. I wish I could just think my own thoughts.
My situation doesn’t make your theory more or less plausible in part since I’m such an outlier on this . There is nothing in my development that would cause me to not like music.
People are weird. I don’t like music either. I mean, what’s the point? For that matter, why do people like sex? Why do they LIKE to eat food, or get hungry for that matter, all things I have never experienced myself? More things that make absolutely no sense to me. I mean, obviously those serve a biological purpose, but I mean something deeper than a utilitarian reason. ALTHOUGH I do associate certain songs with things I like in a pavlovian sort of way, and so there actually is some music I like in a sense, but not for its own accord. For instance, certain video game music, just because I liked the video games that I was playing while I was hearing the music. But I would never, ever, ever derive any enjoyment from just listening to the music, I’d have to be playing the game. Though I may hum those songs while I’m running if it’s a game with lots of running, like canabalt or doom. I don’t know how many hundreds of miles I have run endlessly humming the canabalt song. Unfortunately humming it doesn’t seem to give me the power to run 100+ mph :(.
I have never liked music. Why do people like it?
Upvoted for blowing my mind.
Every time I think I’ve finally taken the measure of the Typical Mind Fallacy… Anyone want to announce that they dislike oxygen and rainbows? Let’s get it over with!
Actual answer: for many people, including me, it’s an incredibly useful mind-altering drug, that allows powerful immediate manipulation of my emotional state. In fact, I should really abuse it a lot more strategically than I do.
There’s little I enjoy more than getting rid of that damn oxygen in my lungs!
(Rainbows are cool, though.)
Meh. I’ve never seen why they have this position of being axiomatically good. I mean they’re nice, but are basically just some colours in the sky.
One confounding factors may be that I’m slightly colourblind (r/g) so maybe I’m not getting the full effect.
So you’re saying you can subjectively distinguish oxygen days from placebo days?
I’ve been looking into how to blind this, but I’m afraid the hood just makes the whole thing that much more sexy and erotic.
And thus the new fetish of double-blind bdsm was born…
For me: I find some forms quite hedonic, and also very powerful emotional manipulation. In fact, it’s the only effective emotional self-manipulation I know of that doesn’t require obtrusive or expensive setups (such as live plays) or distract me completely from my tasks.
Can also be a kind of useful semi-distraction.
I like rainbows as a pattern to some extent, but the actual ones in the sky seem underwhelming to me. Too subdued, I’m used to my colours being more vivid. I am pro-oxygen, though.
What lavalamp is trying to say is that people listen to music because it makes them feel good, but it’s hard (or impossible) to explain why it makes one feel good. It is a subconscious thing; it happens in your neurons and you aren’t aware of the pathways and the sequence of neuronal firings that causes it to happen.
Maybe someday we’ll have a theory that makes it possible to take some information about you (anything from a ‘psychological test’ to a full-blown brain scan), a sample of music, and determine whether you will enjoy it or not.
I was more surprised by someone who said they found Stockhausen more accessible than Mozart than by James Miller saying he didn’t like music.
Just a couple of thoughts about this. First, as far as anyone can tell music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon (and “music” itself is a term that describes a pretty giant range of human behaviors). There’s no single reason, or even manageably short list of reasons, why people like it. It seems to be wrapped up in many different physical, neurological, cognitive, emotional, social, and cultural systems, any of which (in any combinations) could be responsible for a certain person’s reaction to a certain kind of music. Some of the aspects of that seem to be relatively innate, like finding certain sonic timbres inherently pleasurable, while others are highly learned, like the kind of pleasurable “understanding” that comes from knowing how a classical sonata movement is ordinarily structured.
In your case, I’d guess that you have an atypically low physiological/neurological enjoyment of things like instrumental timbres, which makes the more cognitively demanding aspects of music-listening no more than a chore. For comparison, this is why we don’t generally listen to spoken words (e.g., audiobooks) as background listening: there’s nothing to be gained from it outside the semantic content, which is distracting unless you can tune it out, in which case why bother.
(Merely finding music distracting is not at all rare. In fact, the various professional musicians and music scholars I know listen to less music than most other people do, because our training makes it hard for us to listen as other than a “foreground” mental activity. I myself almost never listen to background music. Unlike you, though, I do like music a lot.)
We seem to have a tendency, when discussing music as when discussing other things, to assume that other people are more like us than we have any good reason to think they are. For example, I find the timbres and general sound world of noise music to be extremely unpleasant. So when I imagine someone who likes noise music a lot, my first impulse is to think they must in some sense “enjoy unpleasant things” (an obvious category error), or at least that they must find something in noise music that’s rewarding enough to get past how clearly unpleasant the sounds are. And yet when I actually talk to a fan of noise music, they often tell me they find the timbres and sounds of noise music (exactly the aspects of it I can’t even imagine liking) to be very pleasant or arousing in some way. The enjoyment of these basic aspects of a kind of music (what kinds of sounds it’s made up of) seems to be sufficiently physiologically/neurologically determined for a lot of people that it is almost impossible to imagine liking a kind of music you don’t “naturally” like.
In other words, and I do not mean this even slightly pejoratively, I would expect it to be very difficult for you to imagine why other people find, say, the sound of an orchestra playing a single major triad (NB, a purely sonic event with no syntactic or semantic content) pleasant. Much as it is for me to imagine finding noise music pleasant—it’s just not what my brain is built to enjoy.
Relatedly, the history of the questions “why do people like music?” and “what kind of music is best?” feature some truly aggravating episodes that seem to stem from the idea that music is (or should be) a single kind of thing to all people, and that we just have to figure out what. (To be clear, I’m in no way suggesting that you’re taking that point of view.) The idea that music is just a really, really complicated phenomenon with which everyone interacts a bit differently—and the corresponding aesthetic pluralism that follows from that fact—has been amazingly slow to spread, no less so in professional music circles than elsewhere.
The same things happen to me in reverse: I find industrial music (pop or metal) quite pleasing, but the whole point of industrial is to add factory noise (for example those typical of a sawmill) to otherwise plain music, so I at least can understand why as a genre it doesn’t have a wide community of supporters.
I don’t think many people are born enjoying noise music—I imagine they mostly ease into via other genres.
Right. But, when exposed to it, some are drawn in and some run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. The point of the example was that there’s a surprisingly large amount of individual variation on what kinds of fundamental sounds and timbres people find most pleasing, and (I cautiously suggest) that appears to be the most innate and least malleable or learnable aspect of a person’s response to various kinds of music.
There is evidence that people with amusia tend to report lower levels of musical appreciation. Perhaps you have amusia?
There are a few online tests that claim to test for amusia, such as this or this. If its not too unpleasant for you, you might consider taking one of them.
Interesting! I took the first test and they always sounded alike so unless the test was a cruel trick I clearly have some kind of pitch perception problem.
I doubt anyone has sufficient introspective powers over their own brains to answer this satisfactorily.
Or: I expect answers more complicated than “because it sounds good (to me)” to be mostly confabulation...
OK, but then what is it about music that makes it difficult for people to say why they like it?
What things do you find pleasant? Could you tell me why food tastes good or paintings look pretty?
You can talk about certain repeated and near completed patterns but I think it’s largely subconcious
I can explain why I like some things but not others. Why is music in the not others category for most people?
I don’t believe you can. All you can do is point to surface features like ‘I like how red the explosions in Star Wars are and the feeling you get when they win at the last moment’, all of which is merely description of the parts you like and not what actually you like, and which do not serve to convey the qualia. If someone who just saw flickering lights on the screen asked you why you liked movies and that’s what you said, they would not be satisfied any more than you would be satisfied by a music fan going ‘the 4/8th time and the timpanni descending into a glissando in the third measure thrill my heart, and that is why I like music’.
If you really want to know what red looks like, you could try getting your hands on a psychedelic; they seems to be heavily linked to musical enjoyment.
Psychedelics are not interchangeable for this purpose, and if it weren’t for the war on drugs they could probably be used for some interesting science on auditory processing. Information from TIHKAL on two otherwise not unusual psychedelics with specific auditory effects:
N,N-diisopropyltryptamine specifically messes with pitch perception in such a way as to destroy the perception of harmony. From one of the experience reports: “No effects were noted with respect to clarity of speech, and both comprehension and interpretation were normal. Music was rendered completely disharmonious although single tones sounded normal.”
Meanwhile, 5-methoxy N,N-diisopropyltryptamine distorts “musical character and interpretation.” From one of the experience reports: “The program was a program of Irish music… What I heard were three distant, fraudulent selections with generically meaningless words, mumbled so as to sound authentic. Everything was faked.”
Maybe if I could get my hands on one of these I could understand what it’s like to be James Miller (in the musical respect only). Perhaps he’s totally lacking the hard-to-explain satisfying feeling that comes when you hear notes played together whose frequencies are at a small-integer ratio.
Sure. If I had to be more specific than just ‘psychedelics’, I’d probably say either LSD (due to Deadheads) or mescaline (due to Huxley).
And those two excerpts are fascinating. What does it mean for something to sound ‘distant, fraudulent’? I can’t even imagine. Maybe it’s like a musical version of Capgras delusion.
Marijuana also has a reputation for making music more enjoyable.
Generally, sentences that start out “I (don’t) like X because” and don’t finish with a description of neuronal states are, with highish probability, confabulation. :)
What makes you think it isn’t in that category for you?
For someone with my “brain type” music is obvious bad. It drains attention while giving nothing back.
OK, sure.
IMO, this is confabulation. Maybe it’s your true rejection, but I think it’s much more probable (80%ish?) that your brain randomly came up with this story while trying to figure out why you dislike music. The part of your brain that generates reasons doesn’t necessarily have access to the part of your brain that generates likes/dislikes.
The story my brain came up with along time ago when I was a teenager was that I was too intelligent to enjoy music or other people were just pretending to enjoy it. (I could have used LW back then.)
I think your new story is less harmful but probably equally true. :)
So, uh, how about when you are just listening to music?
(‘I hate novels, they totally drain my attention and all I get back is the experience of reading novels.’)
I’ve tried just listening and I don’t enjoy it.
Then ‘drains attention’ was not a relevant fact.
It was relevant but not necessary as to why I don’t like music.
Are you sure you’re not really “Marvin” the depressed Robot?
I’m not depressed. Some things in life give me tremendous pleasure. I enjoy TV, movies, book, and video games.
Life. Don’t talk to me about life. -Marvin
I was wondering whether you have hearing issues* but that doesn’t sound like it. Do you enjoy visual art?
*I like music, but not nearly as much as most people. A recent online test suggests that I don’t hear low pitches as well as most people. Of course, the problem there might be with my computer speakers rather than my ears, but it might be a clue.
My hearing has always tested as fine. I like some visual art, although I’m well below average in this. I do get pleasure in seeing beautiful things. I’ve never experienced music as beautiful and to my mind music being beautiful seems like a category error.
Do you enjoy movies? Does the background score seem distracting?
Yes and I do dislike background scores.
My guess is that you just don’t make an emotional connection to music. It’s possible that moving to music would eventually make a connection, but this is a very tentative guess.
Can you tell people’s emotional state from their voices?
I dislike the music as it comes out from my father’s car stereo because he sets the equalizer to amplify the high pitches too much for my tastes. I used to wonder why he would do that, then I remembered that the ability to hear high pitches declines with age.
What is it that you expect to get back that you do not? Whatever it is probably reduces down to the relative positions of certain neurotransmitters, the isovariable interpersonal variance of which few others are likely to be able to explain.
...and we’ve now arrived at the hard problem of consciousness (why does anything feel good or bad, and what does that mean, and why is it hard to describe?). That didn’t take long! :)
Here’s a tautological answer: It’s because music is designed to be exactly the kind of sound that people want to listen to!
Then why do I dislike the kind of sound that most people want to listen to?
Cognitive dissimilarity.
This seems like a fake explanation, or curiosity-stopper. I mean, natch, the difference has to be cognitive in some sense, in that it’s a mental phenomenon and therefore relates to James_Miller’s brain. But giving “cognitive dissimilarity” as an answer and treating it as an open-and-shut case seems pretty unenlightening.
This may be relevant; “Bad brains: some people are physically incapable of enjoying music; Research shows that people who say “I don’t like music” aren’t just trying to sound cool”:
A lot of people talk about having emotional reactions to music as their primary reason for liking it. I don’t generally have this reaction to music, so I might as well talk about what I do get out of it for a different perspective.
It can drown out other noises. It is more regular than the sound of ventilation or traffic or chirping birds or upstairs footsteps, and I prefer it; I turn my (almost constantly on) music up when there are non-conversation noises about. (Conversation, though, competes too directly with music; I can’t understand people talking over significant other sound.)
It can control sensory overload. When I am spun up to unmanageable levels of sensory sensitivity, putting on familiar music with a solid, thumpy beat forces my thoughts to match it somewhat. When I am not spun up like that, it’s still nice to have a modestly engaging track for my attention to fall into when I’m not doing enough to occupy myself—I don’t function well when I’m not multitasking, my brain decides it’s not wanted and turns off if I try. This probably doesn’t apply to anyone else, at least anyone else who isn’t autistic in a way similar to me.
But that’s all about the use of music, not the enjoyability of music. There is also enjoyability. Some music is a good source of word-pleasure, either in the poetic sense or just in the sense of some words sounding cool and feeling cool to say. People seem to vary widely in how much they appreciate this as a thing.
Notes and timbres and rhythms vary a lot, and some of them sound pretty together. I think this for me is less like visual art being pretty—sequence is too important; if it’s like visual art it’s more like animation than like a painting—and more like an especially complex version of enjoying running my hands over soft things. Music is texture for my ears.
It is possible that you perceive it differently. Do you have abnormal sound perception, e.g. inability to distinguish pitches or timbres, or to hear rhythms?
For example, if you hear a note, can you find it on a piano keyboard? Likewise a chord? Do you know what people mean when they talk about high pitches and low? If you hear a violin or a trumpet, can you tell which it is? Can you tap out a rhythm after hearing it? Can you appreciate poetry written with regular scansion and rhyme?
I can’t read music, but I’ve never really tried to learn. I can distinguish between a violin or a trumpet,or high or low pitches. No on the poetry.
This sounds significant. What about the rhythm part?
I can tell if something rhymes.
I meant the, “Can you tap out a rhythm after hearing it?” part.
Can you recognize tunes?
Yes but I’m well below average at this.
The tests aren’t about reading music. You hear a note or a chord; can you find it on a keyboard?
No.
(He doesn’t mean first time, simply if you can recognise when you’ve found it)
Wow, I thought I was the only one.
Not only do I like music but I wouldn’t even know where to start explaining why I do; I didn’t like music until in my teens and I don’t even know what changed in me!
This is an excellent question. grouchymusicologist above has it right that “music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon”, and I would like to expand on this.
Michael J. Parsons, in How we understand art: a cognitive developmental account of aesthetic experience, identifies a sequence of developmental stages in the appreciation of visual art. This is of necessity a very rough and un-nuanced summary since I don’t have the book to hand, but I think this sequence is: first, colour (“this painting is red”); second, subject matter (“this painting is of a dog”); third, emotional content (“this painting makes me feel wistful”); fourth, technique (“this painting is pointillist”); and fifth, historical relationships (“this painting is a witty riposte to a work of Velasquez”).
I can’t point you at a corresponding developmental study of music, but I’m sure that similar stages of appreciation are there. To give a flavour of the different kinds of thing going on in the appreciation of music, let’s take an example: here’s Ian Bostridge singing Schubert’s setting of “Der Erlkönig” by Goethe.
When listening to this, I appreciate: (i) the timbre of the piano and voice; (ii) the driving and urgent rhythm; (iii) the words and the story; (iv) the way the harmony creates and releases the dramatic tension at appropriate points in the text; (v) the skill of the performers: stamina is needed by the pianist to keep the triplets going, and vocal control by the singer to maintain timbre of the high notes; (vi) the “tone-painting”: that is, the ways in which the musical notes illustrate aspects of the story, for example the repeated notes representing the horse’s hooves; the way that the “child’s” entries are a semitone above the piano, this discord illustrating his distress; the way that each entry is higher and more distressed than the previous one; (vii) the vocal acting of Ian Bostridge: his use of different vocal timbres to differentiate the four parts, and details of expression like the snarl on “so brauch ich Gewalt”; (viii) the different choices Schubert made in this composition compared with Carl Loewe’s setting of the same text.
(I recognize that this doesn’t explain why I appreciate these aspects of the performance. But I think it’s still useful to give an indication of how complex the phenomenon of music appreciation is.)
You don’t enjoy any kind of music? Gregorian chant, polyphonic medieval, celtic, African percussions, Caribbean, classical, baroque, house, electronic, alt-rock, progressive, industrial, rap, metal in all its infinite variations, pop music, tuvan chant, trance, etc. None of them evokes pleasurable feelings?
Boy, you are an outlier :) That’s perfectly fine, of course.
I can only answer that for me, I enjoy different kind of music for different reasons.
Listening to classical music evokes sensations akin to reading a novel: it evokes powerful emotions and tells an elaborate story.
Listening to pop music is much more like eating junk food: a fast, powerful kick of positive emotions, that anyway lasts very little and leaves nothing behind.
I also listen to salsa music, over which I try to dance: the rythm combined with the movements makes me feel sexy and passionate.
House music is pleasurable in a kind of guilty way: it’s a complete immersion in group-think, a primordial forgetting of individuality.
In all those cases anyway the underlying theme is the evocation of powerful positive or negative emotion (which can be meta-positive).
I imagine you’ve read about synesthesia. Someone with synesthesia might find a particular color has texture or taste—some atypical crisscrossing between the senses. I find music (especially considering those who can’t understand music) can be well modeled as a near-universal form of synesthesia, a linking between the emotional parts of the brain and those that process auditory information. Now this analogy is not perfect, as synesthetes almost never achieve consensus; the taste and/or texture of any particular color varies wildly between synesthets. This isn’t true about music, as it doesn’t vary that much in structure; and there seems to be some consensuses on the “sadness” or “energy” of particular songs.
But still, this might be a good, non-confusing way for you to think about music. When someone describes the beauty of a song, treat their statement as you would a synesthete saying, “Wow, that sunset tastes like a cheese burger.”
I’m in the same boat. I don’t have anything against music, but never derived pleasure from it like other people seemed to. I’ve enjoyed particular songs, e.g. stuff from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, because I can enjoy cleverness and humor and a lot of songs have content that is clever or funny. But the music itself is background at best.
What I feel when listening to Bach isn’t what someone else feels about a song they dislike; more like what you feel about an overheard conversation with nothing to do with you. Or a speech on an issue you don’t care about. I have tried to change this, because of utilitarianism, but it turns out it’s hard.
In my very limited understanding of classical music, I get that Bach’s music is quite difficult to follow and very rational, not very emotional. Have you tried Haydn or Mozart? You might get a better mileage...
How often are you even exposed to music? Eg, do you consume TV/movies/games, etc?
I have been exposed to a huge amount of music over my life. I greatly enjoy TV/movies/games. Some video games are superstimula for me.
Do you feel the same way about music in movies, games, etc? Like, do you think you’d enjoy them just as much (perhaps more?) without the background music? This seems somewhat testable, given that many video games allow you to play without music.
I always turn the music, but not sound, off in video games.
Well, if you didn’t enjoy any music from the soundtracks of those things, then I don’t have any further suggestions.
I’ve thought about this before. Here’s my go:
In regards to sound: If you take a tuning fork and smack it, it will vibrate. Vibration can be pleasurable. If the tuning fork is a brain, and the smack is music, then the result is a contented or slightly altered-from-the-norm feeling, that might be akin to the vibration of a tuning fork if tuning forks like vibrating.
In regards to lyrics: Singing along to things or singing by oneself can bring joy to one. This could have to do with the feeling of one’s voice reverberating through their body, psychological factors I won’t pretend to know, a combination of factors, or of course something I haven’t considered.
Let me know if that helps, doesn’t help, or causes confusion.
This makes it seem like wireheading.
By the same logic eating you favorite food because it tastes good is also wireheading.
Well no because you have to eat SOMETHING. You could just not listen to music.
Now that I think on it, maybe it is for some people. If you consider the lyric “lose yourself to the music, the moment...” the instruction to ‘lose oneself’ implies the experience must be voluntary; much like hypnosis, if you don’t wish to succumb to the hypnotic flow of the hypnotist’s drone, you won’t.
Then again, music also passively affects brain waves. I can’t find a review article after searching for five minutes. The neuronal firing patterns—the frequency of firing, or brain waves—induced by heavy metal differ from jazz, which yet differs from classical, which further depends upon the composer and the piece.
Compare: this solo to this solo, and these ー pieces ー here。
Music increases my motivation by making me feel like I am the main character in a story (since I have a “soundtrack”) and prevents me from being distracted by people talking nearby (which makes it extremely difficult for me to study) because I can no longer hear them them with sound coming through the headphones.
Also, some music can make me feel more relaxed than I otherwise would (possibly due to sounds that mimic peaceful ancestral environments, such as gently moving water, etc...).
1) Music seems to have the closest link to my emotional state of anything short of romantic relationships. It’s rather trivial to hack my emotional state into mellowness with a song like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paeNnR33i5Q, or into an aggressive upbeat state with something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO6giM9UAv0, or appreciation of civilization with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U. No other form of art can do anything near as much for me—most of them I appreciate on an intellectual level, but music is heavily emotional as well.
2) I’ve always listened to a lot of it, which means that there’s a whole mess of assorted nostalgia attached to it.
3) Similarly, silence sounds unusual to me. I don’t mind a bit of it, but too much(at least, in a context where music is possible) creates a distinct sense that something is missing unless I’m engrossed in something else.
4) I find that a minor distraction actually improves my focus sometimes—giving my brain a B-plot, so to speak, short-circuits a lot of wandering thoughts. Music, especially music I’m familiar with, gives my brain something to latch onto when it’s idling that can easily be pushed back into the background.
It can cause or intensify a large range of emotions or moods.
Do you not have an emotional reaction to any music?
It usually annoys me. It steals attention, like a beggar demanding money.
I sometimes listen to music whilst doing chores for precisely this reason. Without it I get distracted and begin to procrastinate. I think the music uses up spare brainpower or something.
EDIT: When I’m doing serious work I prefer to listen to music I know very well. It’s less distracting because I know what’s coming.
Interestingly enough (I think), in the XVIIIth century a sub-genre of classical music was born for this purpose: chamber music.
Likewise wrt work. I also prefer music without comprehensible lyrics for this purpose.
I used to not listen to music for similar reasons, yet I played piano regularly. I also was confused by it, especially the lyrics—I couldn’t understand what people were saying.
Eventually, peer pressure got me and I started listening to music, usually one cd over and over. Eventually I came to like it and became more comfortable with it as background, in a very similar way to wearing a watch or clothes different from my usual is extraordinarily uncomfortable, but after a week it becomes the new normal.
Do you think you could deliberately focus your attention on it? That could potentially increase your enjoyment.
I have tried, in the required school music classes, for example. I don’t understand what benefit people see in it, so I don’t know what to look for.
For me, it’s not something I have to look for at all. It just, happens…
Being introspective (which is notoriously unreliable), it feels like my enjoyment of it is basically a combination of enjoying repetition/structure plus valuing novelty (so the repetitions change enough to avoid being boring), in the auditory modality. I enjoy the same sort of thing in other modalities as well:
Sight: looking at highly patterned art, for example, this visualization of the Mandelbrot set.
Kinesthetic: things like dancing, tapping patterns on my leg, sex.
Taste: I like alternating bites of my food to make the flavors form a pattern. For example, when I eat rice, I will often split it into two portions, and put soy sauce on one, and lemon juice on the other, and alternate the bites so I get a pattern of flavors. And sometimes I switch it up to a few bites of each alternating, etc…
Abstract thought: enjoyment from thinking about math seems to be a similar thing as well. In particular, abstract algebra. Going through the proof of the Sylow theorems, for example, gives me enjoyment analogous to listening to a grand symphony.
I can’t think of anything like this for smell, but I have a very weak sense of it.
Anyway, I hope this at least helps you understand what most people get out of music, even if you don’t enjoy it yourself.
Do you enjoy other types of art? If you do, and can describe what you like about that, perhaps we can suggest particular music that might appeal to you.
If music doesn’t resonate emotionally with you, there is also intricately patterned music that appeals to me in a more mathematical way. Bach’s fugues, particularly his “little fugue” in G minor, are a good place to start. Following along with the sheet music may help with appreciating the clever ways in which the different voices relate to each other.
As for appreciating music emotionally, I find that it is necessary to relax into a certain mildly altered state of consciousness similar to meditation; I’ve become better at this over time, though I can’t always do it when under stress. I’ve also heard numerous reports that marijuana aids in the appreciation of music (in a lasting, not a temporary, way—you notice new things in music that you can then continue to appreciate while sober), and will have to try it sometime.
I like to draw a (rather pretentious) delineation between music and songs, the archetypal examples being, say Beethoven’s fifth symphony and “Call Me Maybe”. (As a side note, I very much consider it possible for something to both be a “song” and “music”) I enjoy music because I played a few instruments and sang when I was younger, so I know enough musical theory to appreciate the artistry it took to come up with the structure in the music, and (when appropriate) lyrics.
Contrarily, I enjoy songs (although happen to hate “Call Me Maybe”) because they’re fun and upbeat and keep me in a positive mood. You can find a song to fit most moods, and fitting them very closely is a very satisfying feeling. Once last week, I was in a very relaxed mood on my way home and set Sultans of Swing on repeat, because it fit how I was feeling very exactly. It was probably the happiest I have been in the last week. Additionally, sometimes songs have the ability to change my mood and/or motivate me to work harder, and I often exploit them for this purpose.
As well as what others have said about the aesthetic experience, I find it useful for taking up ‘processing power’ in my brain, making it easier to focus on something. For example if I’m doing fairly dull work having free ‘processor cycles’ in my brain will cause me to get distracted and divert myself away from what I need to be doing, but music in the background can take up some of that so I dont get s distracted.
I think that you must differ from the average person in some way that makes it not enjoyable for you. Perhaps you are more sensitive to certain sounds and find them unpleasant. Perhaps you weren’t exposed to music at a very young age. Your brain might be “wired” differently than average.
My current unsubstantiated evpsych theory is that music is a collective mood-control language. A communication channel for getting everyones’ attitudes in synch, songs to be used by the confident members with clear vision, to be shouted down if misplaced, or amplified and repeated if resonant. Does that sound plausible, considering your situation? Is it possible you’ve developed under conditions that would naturally cause you to be especially unreactive to a thing like that?
I could understand the pursuit of sanity would correlate with a disconnection from the mass’s attitude control systems. Sometimes I find even as I laugh I wish the funny-man would shut up, as I dance I wish the music had not spoken to me, as I help I wish I had not been able to empathise in the first place. I wish I could just think my own thoughts.
My situation doesn’t make your theory more or less plausible in part since I’m such an outlier on this . There is nothing in my development that would cause me to not like music.
Try Keeping Together in Time by McNeill. It doesn’t directly address why someone would like music in isolation, but I think it is the right answer.
Related.
People are weird. I don’t like music either. I mean, what’s the point? For that matter, why do people like sex? Why do they LIKE to eat food, or get hungry for that matter, all things I have never experienced myself? More things that make absolutely no sense to me. I mean, obviously those serve a biological purpose, but I mean something deeper than a utilitarian reason. ALTHOUGH I do associate certain songs with things I like in a pavlovian sort of way, and so there actually is some music I like in a sense, but not for its own accord. For instance, certain video game music, just because I liked the video games that I was playing while I was hearing the music. But I would never, ever, ever derive any enjoyment from just listening to the music, I’d have to be playing the game. Though I may hum those songs while I’m running if it’s a game with lots of running, like canabalt or doom. I don’t know how many hundreds of miles I have run endlessly humming the canabalt song. Unfortunately humming it doesn’t seem to give me the power to run 100+ mph :(.
No, you’re weird.
:)
This sounds less like normal variation and more like a medical problem. Are there things you do enjoy?
zortharg says right there in the post that ve likes video games.