German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
He was probably on to something.
How many of you can remember the first song you appreciated?
When as a small child you started tapping your feet and realized a bunch of notes, a
catchy melody, could make you feel happy or even ecstatic.
This happens to us at a very early age, perhaps before we are old enough to really understand
what music is; before we cling to a genre as an identity or can fully respect the depth
of the music itself or the lyrics that sometimes support it.
It’s as if we like music a priori, meaning our love of music was kind of built-in.
And today we are going to try and understand why we love our tunes, in this episode of
the Infographics Show, Why Do We Like Pop Music?
There are lots of reasons why we like music and it’s not all about neurochemistry and
dopamine hits.
For instance, music can be tribal, it can symbolize how we feel at certain times in
life, represent our ethos, our club, so to speak.
The punk music of the 70s defined a clique, while you could say that classical music has
often been the favored music of the upper classes.
But first let’s talk about the science of why we like music.
We warn you, our relationship with music is complicated.
Later we will also discuss why so many people like popular, or pop music.
In 2001, a study at Montreal’s McGill university set out to find what happens in our brains
when we listen to music.
Those neuroscientists told us that they used something called magnetic resonance imaging
to see what happened in our brains when we listened to what they called “pleasurable”
music.
They did not define pleasurable, so we can’t say if the music was the Wu Tang Clan, Ed
Sheeran or Arcade Fire.
Perhaps different styles of music have different effects on the brain, but we’ll get to that
later, too.
Ok, so the scientists told us that when we listen to pleasurable music parts of the brain
called the limbic and paralimbic areas are activated and these are connected with the
feeling of euphoria.
Yep, we get a dopamine rush from music, just as do when we make love, complete a jigsaw
puzzle or bite into a double-dipped chocolate lava cake.
But the problem is, we know we get that rush from making love so we make love more and
procreate and humanity goes on; we know we get pleasure from food so we eat and don’t
become emaciated and finally dead.
But why does someone blowing into a saxophone give us this rush?
Well, the sad answer is that no one totally understands.
According to the BBC some scientists say it’s all about expectation and pay off.
We hear sonic patterns and regular beats, and unconsciously we are predicating what
happens next.
We get emotionally involved, and when we hear what happens next and we expected it, we get
a thrill, possibly like that feeling when your hairs stand on end or you get that rush
up your back and neck.
That’s the pay off, produced by dopamine.
This all goes back to how we evolved.
We listened to patterns as early humans, and those sonic patterns could signify danger
or joy, and music is a pattern that can induce fear or panic or joy.
Of course if you listen to very alternative tunes, or what you might call experimental
music, it’s not predictable at all.
Maybe that’s the stuff your parents call unlistenable.
But for the most part, most genres have melodies or predictable parts, they have crescendos
and blissful harmonies.
This gives us a buzz, while we might say extremely experimental stuff at least intrigues us.
Science goes further, saying in the past when we were hunter-gatherers we might hear sounds
of animals.
A lion’s roar might produce adrenaline while bird-singing might induce calm.
“Nature’s tendency to overreact provides a golden opportunity for musicians” said
one scientist.
What he means is that music manipulates us.
You have classical music that starts calm and then produces adrenaline when it climbs
to a crescendo.
You could say the same about post-metal bands such as Deafheaven, whose music often starts
peaceful and builds to something that sounds cataclysmic.
It manipulates our emotions, and this gives us a rush of adrenalin especially when the
crescendo comes.
Then you have genre music that represents how you feel in life, or at a certain stage
of life, and when the lyrics combined with the music tell you should hate the oppressive
police, or distrust the establishment, or just party, party, party, this enforces the
manipulation and encourages dopamine to spill into your brain.
It goes further, though.
We are told that music is culturally specific, so one culture might find a kind of music
jarring as what they expect to happen doesn’t happen.
Remember we get off on what we can predict.
The BBC writes, “All of us develop a strong, subconscious sense of which notes sound ‘right’,
whether in sequence in a melody, or sounding together in harmonies.”
An article in Vox stated this is why we can get bored of music when we can’t predict
the patterns.
That might not last, as we’ve all had some point in life where it took us some time to
get into an album or piece of music.
We might have also said that we liked something initially and then got bored of it, possibly
because it was just too predictable and bland.
We are also told by the French Institute of Science that music is like language, and all
humans hears tones in others’ voices that sound angry, sad, etc.
If someone with a high-pitched tone talks fast and with energy it can sound happy, like
lots of electronic dance music.
A low-pitched slow warble might sound sad, as you might feel when trying to get through
a full Bill Callahan album.
And music has far wider range than voice, so it can manipulate us more.
Search on YouTube for 90’s Rave clubs and you’ll see what we’re talking about, the
people looked possessed – of course there were sometimes added stimulants.
So, why do we like pop music?
In a book called “The Rest is Noise”, the writer said, “Music may not be inviolable,
but it is infinitely variable, acquiring a new identity in the mind of every new listener.
It is always in the world, neither guilty nor innocent, subject to the ever-changing
human landscape in which it moves.”
As we know, music sometimes defines who we are or at least we relate to it.
There are styles of music that help us to be part of a tribe, and we feel comfortable
with that music.
We can predict it, and it in turn gives our lives some meaning.
Whether you have ever defined yourself as a punk, a Hip-Hop devotee, a psychedelic psycho-naught,
a death metal fan or a lover of jazz, that music becomes part of what you are and you
receive pleasure in the form of dopamine when you listen to it.
For this reason, though, while you get intensely invigorated listening to Rage Against the
Machine your mother might not receive your kind of dopamine hit.
She might be more attuned to the Frozen tune, “Let It Go.”
We are not all alike.
Another study asked 126 participants in Montreal to bring in all the songs they really liked.
They then tried to see how much pleasure a person derived from listening to songs of
different genres.
By looking at the brain they could predict how much time a person would spend, or was
willing to spend, on a certain song.
“Those areas included the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotion, the hippocampus,
which is important for learning and memory, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which
is involved in decision-making,” wrote the scientists.
They concluded that people just listen to music that they have experienced already and
can predict, it’s what they feel at home with.
They said we have a musical template, and even when we listen to something new, we are
using those templates to see if the music fits with what we are accustomed to.
The problem is that this study doesn’t solve why we have such different musical templates.
We might grow up in the same household as someone and at similar ages and have very
different tastes in music.
This might just be because we have been around a musical style that the other hasn’t, it
might be about tribe, but it might also just be about something we were born with.
Perhaps we are made with a musical template, that indeed there is something innate when
it comes to musical preference.
Now, with pop music it is usually very easy to listen to and it is very predictable.
It’s usually not full of nuance and we don’t have to be refined musical aficionados to
like it.
It’s made that way so it sells and is liked by the largest audience.
In one article, a researcher wrote, “Pop music is actually getting more and more homogeneous.”
The study as the Medical University of Vienna in Austria looked at 15 genres of music and
374 sub-genres.
They studied each genre’s musical complexity and they found that the more complex the music
was, the less it sold.
The best-selling music was simple, it was what they called generic.
They wrote that, “music is becoming increasingly formulaic in terms of instrumentation under
increasing sales numbers due to a tendency to popularize music styles with low variety
and musicians with similar skills.”
Could we cynically call this the dumbing-down of music?
The Great Big Sell-Out?
Well, business is business, and if producers can create something formulaic that we can
all easily predict and enjoy, that doesn’t offend, doesn’t cause fear, doesn’t upset
even the most sensitive parent, perhaps they are just doing their job.
Pop music is also marketed well and it’s what we are exposed to a lot.
It doesn’t carry serious messages; it doesn’t attempt to have a profound social impact,
and the majority of people just want something easy to listen to that they are familiar with.
That’s not to say bands with serious messages haven’t broken the charts, just look at
Kendrick Lamar, Nirvana, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and even our dear old The Beatles.
They all did extremely well and were not what you’d call simple pop (the later Beatles
at least) or trying to be something they weren’t.
Researchers, however, told us that sales of Alt-Rock, Hip-Hop, Experimental, Folk, Alt-Folk,
are all down, although there are pretenders who come across as a certain genre but aren’t
really that genre, that do well in the charts.
An example would be pop-punk, which isn’t exactly what The Dead Kennedys, NOFX, or the
Clash had in mind when they talked about punk.
It’s really just pop in disguise.
This kind of dressed-up pop is doing well, but it’s also formulaic we are told, a pop-façade
imitating a former sub-genre.
Will more sub-cultures develop with less generic music that will become popular?
Are we destined to have homogenous tunes in the charts from top-to-bottom forever more?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other show Why Do So Many Scams Come From Nigeria?.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.