The Importance Of Music: When and Why we listen to music

There is no doubt that most humans spend a lot of time listening to music. Music is clearly important to us. Neilson (a global measurement company) says that Americans are listening to 4.5 hours^[1] of music a day; another one^[2] says it’s 2 hours. Many others like me spend between 2 and 4 hours listening to something musical. So why is music so important to us, and what is the brain giving us by listening to music?

Fun Fact: One of the oldest instruments known to humans is a Flute made out of a vulture’s wing bone. It is at least 40,000 years old. Researchers consider the existence of instruments as a clear marker of advanced societies. (source^[3])

Music and the Brain

Music is essentially something that stimulates the auditory nerves (hearing sense). But music is perhaps one of the only stimuli received by a single sense organ, which stimulates almost all of the brain in unique ways with a sense of reward attached to all of that stimulation. A lot of “music” happens within the brain. Our interpretation is necessary for differentiating between music and noise.

Research shows that pretty much everything in the brain is affected by music. The auditory cortex is processing the sound. The frontal cortex analyzes the sounds. The limbic system activates emotions. The occipital lobe is activated with music videos. Lyrics engage language skills with the Broca’s & Wernicke’s area. The somatosensory cortex is activated while playing an instrument and dancing to music. And, specialized brain regions^[4] get activated for your favorite music, disliked music, and new music you like.

The benefits of music engaging the whole brain are seen in music therapy – for example, Alzheimer’s patients^[5] have many compromised brain regions, and music can stimulate them to improve their overall neural processing. Music therapy is used to rehabilitate people and improve well-being in innumerable ways – manage pain of various kinds^[6] (chornic and during hospitalization), rehabilitate prisoners^[7], manage mental health^[8] and stress^[9], etc. The 2 core mechanisms involved in most of these approaches are – to recalibrate reward pathways in the brain and stimulate brain regions & regulate emotions (de-stress, manage anxiety) at the personal & social level.

There’s also a fun nuance to the music we listen to – the pleasure of artistically pleasing music Vs. popular music. Researchers scanned the brains of people^[10] listening to artistically pleasing music (to them) and compared them to those listening to popular music. They found differences in the activation of specific brain areas that support the idea that – artistically pleasing music creates pleasure based on intellectual engagement and social bonding, and popular music creates pleasure from physiological arousal with common emotions & movements like dance or grooving.

There is a lot going on in the brain when it comes to music. Look at the model of the processes involved given by researchers below^[11].

Without going into the whole details, I want to highlight 3 things from this model.

1. There is a direct connection between meaning & emotion related to music – this is our subjective interpretation.
2. Gestalt formation (making sense of all the patterns in the music), analysis of intervals, and structure building all depend on the musician who gave that type of music – it’s their offering to your brain.
3. Vitalization & Premotor action is the final stages that we typically enjoy – the overall feeling you get in the body and mind – the memories, feelings, social feelings, etc. + the intention to move your body and dance (premotor action).

No person perceives music in exactly the same way. Bearing this in mind, one can say that every person is uniquely motivated to listen to music. People will also have specific reasons to listen to music. Some common reasons are:

1. Enjoyment
2. Special emotion
3. Structural parts of the song which are preferred (chorus, beat, etc.)
4. Unique sensations like ASMR (head orgasm), piloerections (goosebumps), euphoria, deep trance, etc.
5. To not get bored (after all, music stimulates the whole brain)
6. Social/Interpersonal bonding

The human condition as a whole is encapsulated by music and musical phenomena – from feelings of joy and sadness to cultural bonding. Music has been a constant throughout the ages. However, there are exceptions. Some people do not comprehend music – a condition called amusia^[12]. And, some derive zero pleasure from music – musical anhedonia^[13]. For them, there is less interaction between 2 brain regions: the auditory cortex (sound perception) and the nucleus accumbens (reward center). The lowered interaction reduces the inherent pleasure of music. One estimate^[14] suggests 5.5% of all people have low music-reward sensitivity or musical anhedonia.

Functions of music: the common role it plays in our lives

Theoretically speaking, you can listen to any music at any time for any or for no reason. Research^[15] by Jenny M. Groarke and Michael J. Hogan points to 11 important adaptive functions of music that describe the role music plays in our lives. Those factors are:

1. Stress Regulation: We use music as a way to distract ourselves from stressful situations. It helps us escape a situation and comfort us.
2. Anxiety Regulation: We believe music helps us regulate our anxiety and comfort us. Sometimes by increasing positive emotions, matching anxiety to music, distracting and comforting us, or even re-evaluating our thoughts.
3. Anger Regulation: Music can calm us down or even validate our emotions. We listen to music because we believe it helps us regulate our anger.
4. Loneliness Regulation: Music helps us reduce our feelings of loneliness.
5. Rumination: We sometimes dwell and focus on anxious and sad thoughts because music lets us do so in a unique way.
6. Reminiscence: We remember our past experiences – good or bad – and dive into those with a small sense of reliving those memories.
7. Strong Emotional Experiences: We seek out profound emotional experiences through music.
8. Awe and Appreciation: Sometimes, listening to music is all about appreciating its beauty.
9. Cognitive Regulation: Some of us use music to improve our concentration and focus while studying or working. This includes streamlining attention, buffering against sensory inputs, changing the sensory landscape, etc.
10. Identity Formation & Relatability: Music helps us express ourselves and develop an identity. This extends to a social identity shared by a larger group of people too (subcultures, genre-fans, musicians, etc.). It works as a social glue and a tether between people.
11. Sleep Aid: Many of us use music (songs, noise, and auditory podcasts) to help us sleep.

Some psychologists call this self-regulation using music a “self-soothing” mechanism. Like when people start humming a tune when they are stressed or briefly put on earphones in a social gathering to listen to just a part of a song they love to repair their mood.

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When do we habitually listen to music?

A lot of people listen to music to pass the time and use it as a background stimulant while working or doing chores. In fact, some of us do this unconsciously and we end up estimating the total driving time as the length of songs heard.

Some music is traditionally meant to be heard during specific times of the day. These traditions usually emerge by finding a musical vibe that fits the context of mornings. This could be matching the sounds to a person’s morning energy, hearing sounds that help a person build up energy for physical labor, hearing sounds that increase arousal, etc. Some music is better suited to the feelings associated with the night sky or the morning sun. If you’d like to explore this further and how these traditions develop, you might want to check out “cross-modal correspondences” described in the famous “Kiki-Bouba” experiment – it’s about how we match patterns in one sense to patterns in another sense (like music with the atmosphere). This is popularly seen in Indian Ragas (the traditional classical music structures from India).

Strictly speaking, in the context of tradition, Raag Poorvi is ideal during the prevening. Raag Bhairav is ideal during the mornings. This is strikingly specific. These Raagas have a unique musical structure, and they come with built-in rules to follow. So music based on these Raagas has a uniquely distinguishable ‘feel’ or texture. When you are listening to Raagas, you might appreciate the tradition for what it is.

Heavy metal music is generally loud & raw. Consider how you feel during different times of the day. Can you enjoy something loud and raw right after waking up or right before sleep? The brain’s chemistry comes into play here. People have different levels of ‘excitation’ during different times of the day or across climates. That is, chemically speaking, your nervous system could be excited in general (with or without symptoms like restless legs) and you might feel that you want strong stimulation. So heavy metal music could work for you if you want more excitation.

A polar opposite scenario: If you are biologically excited, you may also not want more excitation. So soothing ambient music could work for you during those times. Fundamentally, music is a form of stimulation. Your choice of music could deviate from your genre preference (that is, if you have any) based on your current psychological, social, and biological arousal. 2 personality traits – sensation-seeking & sensory processing sensitivity uniquely affect musical preferences, too. Sensation seekers tend to prefer highly stimulating music, and those with sensory processing sensitivity might prefer mild music.

Time, for us, can also be with respect to ‘before work’ or ‘after work’ or ‘weekend party time’. Your biological and psychological state would be different during these times. The level of stimulation you have would influence your preference for music.

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10 ways to use music daily

Let’s look at how we use music in daily life.

1. Music & Emotions: We humans have a large set of emotional experiences. And they dictate our behavior in odd ways. You may listen to some specific type of music when you are in a certain mood, or a random song could change your mood. It’s a 2-way mechanism. Just like your mood/emotional environment affects your choice of music, the music you listen to changes your emotional state or preferences. The general research consensus is that music makes us feel better. Even sad music makes us feel better. Listening to sad music usually evokes 3 types of responses – genuine sadness (negative valence), comforting and uplifting sorrow (positive valence), and sweet sorrow (positive valence). Self-chosen music (as opposed to prescribed music) can also help regulate negative emotions induced by other taxing activities. Research also shows that listening to heavy metal music can be a healthy way of processing anger. People often use it as a way to regulate their emotions. People may seek out mood/personality-congruent music or may even do the exact opposite based on psychological needs. This approach is similar to the emotional regulation function of music.

2. Music & Attention part I: Many people say that they can concentrate with the help of specific music, and many can’t. Vocals, Guitars, Violins, and Trumpets are instruments that have a frequency range that gets amplified in the ear – around 1000hz. These instruments also resemble speech in some ways; therefore, the brain is distracted when you hear music with these instruments – speech has priority for the brain. It is not the best idea to listen to this music when you are reading, writing, and trying to memorize. When it comes to working, some music can help us by occupying surplus attention and limiting it to be “just enough” and not “too little or too much” to feel bored or distracted. If a person is generally calm, music with a lot of detail might distract you. But if you are a hyperactive person, electronic music can engage some of your attention, and the remainder can be focused on productivity. That’s the sweet spot some of us find and that music becomes a part of our productivity culture.

3. Music helping Creativity: Do you ever feel you need to think creatively? While some music can help you relax, ANY music can help you with creativity. Say you had a difficult math problem or an architectural floor plan to make and you just can’t figure things out. It is great to let your brain work on these problems at an unconscious level (a process called Incubation). And to enhance this, music activates many regions of the brain and that might just help you get your creative breakthrough by triggering spread-out brain regions that link to spread-out memories. You can read more about how music affects creativity and productivity here.

4. Music & Exercise (non-professional): Music while exercising helps break the monotony and lets you sync with a beat to keep you motivated. One example^[16] is how music at around 170BPM can lower one’s perceived effort for endurance-based exercise. Nonetheless, many professional athletes will say that music is not good for physical training. Mainly because of the 2nd point I mentioned. It takes away attention from things like breathing.

5. Music & distraction from pain and negative emotions: Sometimes you need your attention to be taken away. Perhaps when you are sad or you are highly disturbed because of a scary incident like watching an accident. Music will take your attention away. Music you enjoy can also blunt the experience of physical pain and increase tolerance, even though the actual pain doesn’t go away. This likely happens through the emotional shielding effect of positive emotions^[17] and taking attention away from pain^[18] (which directly reduces pain perception). You can listen to 80s pop music to get distracted from paranoid thoughts or listen to music you like while getting dressed up for an injury. This approach is like a mixture of emotional and cognitive regulation functions of music.

6. Social facilitation, aka Musicking: Listening to music with people fosters a certain type of ‘coupling’ between them. People readily sync with each other and find each other more favorable under a shared musical experience. Author William Benzon, who wrote Beethoven’s Anvil^[19], defined musicking as an experience with music that goes beyond listening to it and making it. For example, dancing and coming close during a romantic song. Music and dance share an intimate relationship from the dawn of civilization. Humans connect via movement, and the metaphor “music moves us” might be quite a literal explanation.

7. Deep thought: Music can act as a projective and reflective surface. Many times, due to the stimulating nature of music, one can think in unique ways because the music is modestly guiding your thoughts. While listening to instrumental music, you could interpret the music in certain ways. That interpretation is likely to reflect some of your core thoughts on life, people and yourself. Appreciating beauty in music can also facilitate deep conversations that make that moment special.

8. Enjoyment & Environment: You could get your entertainment with music, you could spend time at a location with specific music which grows on you, and you could spend time listening to it for no apparent reason. Simply pairing music with a location and a nature of conversation can make you like or dislike either of the 3: music, location, or the conversation. It could also just be a part of your environment as background noise. Music plays almost everywhere where people are present.

9. Instrument learning & Musicianship: Learning music is similar to honing a wide range of cognitive processes- attention, sensitivity, abstraction, memory, spatial and motor concepts, etc. A musician listens to music for the aesthetic as well as technical aspects of the structure, tone, timbre, lyrics, etc. That helps to separate the craft from aesthetic appreciation. This can be considered as a different form of active and passive engagement with music. Some of these cognitive processes could help to learn in other areas such as computer science. Converging lines of evidence show that music buffers against old-age and Alzheimer’s disease-related cognitive decline via the development of a cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve is the totality of cognitive enhancements as well as structural and functional changes in the brain that are utilizable resources. These resources create an in-built resistance to damage and aging.

10. Music and wellbeing: You could listen to specific music through habit or incidental reasons. For example, some music could help you sleep, or you could use it to induce a trance. Or some music just goes well with what you are doing because you had pleasant experiences in the past. For example, one could listen to death metal and share happy memories of bonding with friends and then use death metal while eating because you miss them. Many many other purposes for music listening can be mentioned under this heading. They are almost always subjective.

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Music psychology References

• Ahmad, Nawaz & Rana, Afsheen. (2015). Impact of Music on Mood: Empirical Investigation. Research on Humanities and Social Sciences. 5. 98-101.
• Schäfer, T., Sedlmeier, P., Städtler, C., & Huron, D. (2013). The psychological functions of music listening. Frontiers in psychology, 4, 511. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00511
• Schäfer T. (2016). The Goals and Effects of Music Listening and Their Relationship to the Strength of Music Preference. PloS one, 11(3), e0151634. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0151634
• Egermann, H., Fernando, N., Chuen, L., & McAdams, S. (2015). Music induces universal emotion-related psychophysiological responses: comparing Canadian listeners to Congolese Pygmies. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 1341. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01341
• Sanivarapu S. L. (2015). India’s rich musical heritage has a lot to offer to modern psychiatry. Indian journal of psychiatry, 57(2), 210-3.
• Eerola, T. and Peltola, H. (2016). Memorable Experiences with Sad Music—Reasons, Reactions and Mechanisms of Three Types of Experiences. PLOS ONE, 11(6), p.e0157444.
• Diaz Abrahan, V., Shifres, F. and Justel, N. (2019). Cognitive Benefits From a Musical Activity in Older Adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 10.
• Hanna-Pladdy, B. and Gajewski, B. (2012). Recent and Past Musical Activity Predicts Cognitive Aging Variability: Direct Comparison with General Lifestyle Activities. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6.
• Groarke, J. and Hogan, M. (2019). Listening to self-chosen music regulates induced negative affect for both younger and older adults. PLOS ONE, 14(6), p.e0218017.

P.S. Here is some research on listening to music while working and listening to music while studying. It shows the importance of music in cognitive regulation.

Sources