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We expect rhythms to be regular, but are surprised if the jumpy syncopation of rock’n’roll suddenly switches to four-square oompah time. We expect pleasing harmonies rather than jarring dissonance – but what sounds pleasing today may have seemed dissonant two hundred years ago. We expect rising melodies to continue to rise – but perhaps not indefinitely, as they never do. One reason for this is that music simply offers so much opportunity for creating and violating expectations that it’s not clear what we should measure and compare. The idea that musical emotion arises from little violations and manipulations of our expectations seems the most promising candidate theory, but it is very hard to test. “Composers can fashion passages that manage to provoke remarkably strong emotions using the most innocuous stimuli imaginable.” “Nature’s tendency to overreact provides a golden opportunity for musicians”, says Huron. We all know that music has this direct line to the emotions: who hasn’t been embarrassed by the tears that well up as the strings swell in a sentimental film, even while the logical brain protests that this is just cynical manipulation? We can’t turn off this anticipatory instinct, nor its link to the emotions – even when we know that there’s nothing life-threatening in a Mozart sonata. By bypassing the “logical brain” and taking a shortcut to the primitive limbic circuits that control our emotions, the mental processing of sound could prompt a rush of adrenalin – a gut reaction – that prepares us to get out of there anyway. On the African savannah, our ancestors did not have the luxury of mulling over whether that screech was made by a harmless monkey or a predatory lion. And involving the emotions in these anticipations could have been a smart idea. Making predictions about our environment – interpreting what we see and hear, say, on the basis of only partial information – could once have been essential to our survival, and indeed still often is, for example when crossing the road. Ah, says musicologist David Huron of Ohio State University, but perhaps once it did. Why should we care, though, whether our musical expectations are right or not? It’s not as if our life depended on them. The constant dance between expectation and outcome thus enlivens the brain with a pleasurable play of emotions.
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If we’re right, the brain gives itself a little reward – as we’d now see it, a surge of dopamine. It sets up sonic patterns and regularities that tempt us to make unconscious predictions about what’s coming next.
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This, Meyer argued, is what music does too. That, as you might imagine, creates frustration or anger – but if we then find what we’re looking for, be it love or a cigarette, the payoff is all the sweeter. Meyer drew on earlier psychological theories of emotion, which proposed that it arises when we’re unable to satisfy some desire. The current favourite theory among scientists who study the cognition of music – how we process it mentally – dates back to 1956, when the philosopher and composer Leonard Meyer suggested that emotion in music is all about what we expect, and whether or not we get it. However, we now have many clues to why music provokes intense emotions. (Some drugs subvert that survival instinct by stimulating dopamine release on false pretences.) But why would a sequence of sounds with no obvious survival value do the same thing? As DJ Lee Haslam told us, music is the drug.īut why? It’s easy enough to understand why sex and food are rewarded with a dopamine rush: this makes us want more, and so contributes to our survival and propagation. Those rewards come from a gush of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Using magnetic resonance imaging they showed that people listening to pleasurable music had activated brain regions called the limbic and paralimbic areas, which are connected to euphoric reward responses, like those we experience from sex, good food and addictive drugs. Why does it make us feel good? In 2001, neuroscientists Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre at McGill University in Montreal provided an answer. We like music because it makes us feel good. We have answers on some levels, but not all.
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Why do we like music? Like most good questions, this one works on many levels.