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Is Our Love of Music Just a Cosmic Accident?
According to science, it could be.
Yesterday, I saw a post about someone’s young daughter who said, “When I hear music, it speaks to my heart.”
Besides being about the cutest thing I’ve ever heard, isn’t that the truth? Doesn’t music move us in ways that almost nothing else can? It can bring us joy, it can energize us, it can make us wistful or thoughtful. It can even have a strange bittersweet effect, where we feel both happy and sad at the same time.
Music seems to be a universal language for humans — in the sense that people tend to be able to identify basic emotions from any kind of music. What may come as no surprise to you is that, across cultures and time, people have used similar melodies to express basic emotions like happiness and sadness.
This consistency in how we express emotions in music speaks to something innate within us all — perhaps to some quality or trait that we’re born with. But, from an evolutionary perspective, what is the survival advantage of being drawn to music? Why did our ancient ancestors who could “hear” music have a better chance of passing on their genes than their non-musical counterparts?
This is a question I’ve pondered for quite some time. Now, science has produced an answer, but it’s not what I expected.
