Why does music exist? What gives it its power? Science offers gripping answers

Different parts of my brain lit up as they dumped adrenaline and dopamine into my bloodstream.

So much of the 23 years since has been spent in pursuit of that experience. I would learn the term for it only years later: frisson.

As a music journalist, I have wandered off the narrow path of the familiar, into strange new avenues. Endangered my eardrums standing in front of poorly tuned public-address systems, whose thumping, too-loud sounds caused nothing like the tingle. Even my politics (the direct action of DIY, the punk’s suspicion of authority and power) have been defined by the pursuit of this psychogenic dragon and the people and places able to provide it.

Today, we know a bit more about the processes behind that frisson, the many systems that work together to allow music its influence. In recent years, science has answered some vital questions: How can the same song be experienced as a pleasant melody by one person and a life-changing experience by another? What gives music its affective power? Why, in fact, does it even exist?

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Anthropology tells us that music is a “cultural universal”; something shared by all known human cultures. Archaeologists have found bone flutes dating to the Upper Palaeolithic era, about 40,000 years ago. But since the voice is also an instrument, music may have emerged much earlier.

This universality — alongside other clues such as the large area devoted to auditory processing in human brains — suggests that it started out as an evolutionary adaptation, perhaps even a precursor to language.

Despite advances in technology, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, we do not have the whole picture, but theories abound. One intriguing idea is that music emerged from “musi-language”, a shared precursor to both those things. Musi-language is still around, the theory goes, in the infant-directed speech or babytalk that parents use with their infants, communicating emotion through intonation and rhythm long before the offspring has a capacity for language or logic.

This idea is traceable to 19th-century English biologist Herbert Spencer and German composer Richard Wagner, and it is expanded upon beautifully in English archaeologist Steven Mithen’s 2005 book, The Singing Neanderthals.

Another interesting theory is the “bipedalism hypothesis”, which argues that as the human brain rapidly evolved — becoming the primary survival tool of a species that had none of the invincibility, invisibility or other superpowers that various creatures evolved — we developed an unusually keen ability to perceive differences in pitch and harmony. In nature, this meant that the subconscious brain could sift through sounds more effectively, identifying stasis vs opportunity vs threat.

As human culture evolved, music emerged from this, the theory goes, and served the additional purposes of boosting social cohesion and inter-group communication.

Not all scholars agree. In 1997, Canadian cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker famously called music “auditory cheesecake”, a pleasant but inessential cultural byproduct of evolution. But as Mithen so pithily puts it: “We don’t have emotions for free or for fun.”

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Music serves a host of functions: personal, social, liturgical, political.

Parents sing to their children, lovers to their paramours, soldiers have marched to the drums of war, rural labourers sing work songs in the field. There is the spike of energy caused by the birthday song; the mood-influencing music of the dentist’s office and the movies; the rush of emotion so different for different people, when the Wedding March or shehnai are played.

A big turning point, of course, came in the 19th century, with the invention of recording technology. Suddenly, listening to music went from a communal activity to a personal, on-demand one. The music of the world was now available to the individual.

New types of communities were born, defined almost entirely by the music they loved (or said they did): Beethoven fans and Beatlemaniacs; Deadheads, Swifties and the BTS Army.

Meanwhile, thanks to the invention of medical technologies such as positron emission tomography (or PET) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (or MRIs) in the 20th century, we were finally able to measure the human brain’s emotional and physiological responses to music.

We now know that music is processed by almost every area of the brain, from the subcortical structures that manage emotions and movement to the auditory cortices that process pitch, timbre and harmony; the hippocampus, which forms memory; and — somewhat more surprisingly — the prefrontal cortex, which gets to work anticipating where the tune is going.

The experience of frisson is closely linked to that last one. It turns out that the literal thrill depends heavily on a tune’s ability to subvert expectation. “Expectancy violation” — when the brain’s prediction for how a piece of music will progress turns out to be wrong — is a strong indicator of musical frisson, according to a study by neuroscience researcher and musician Psyche Loui and psychologist Luke Harrison of Wesleyan University (published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology in 2014).

Other indicators, they found, include the addition of new instruments or voices, unexpected harmonies, sudden loudness and the human scream. A list on which …Teen Spirit checks all the boxes.

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What, then, determines how our playlists evolve? Academics use the term “open-earedness” to describe our willingness to explore new music. Typically, open-earedness wanes across the span of a human life, which goes some way towards explaining why every generation believes that music has been declining in quality since the tunes of their youth.

But why would this be? A study involving more than 250,000 participants found that, as people age, the significance they ascribe to music declines, and so does the amount of time they spend listening to it.

Adolescents use music as an identity marker, a need that becomes less pronounced as we age, states the report by researchers at University of Cambridge (published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2013).

Four years later, the lead author of that report, Arielle Bonneville-Roussy, co-authored an article in the journal Musicae Scientiae, citing additional causes for the waning of open-earedness. The way we process musical properties such as timbre, dynamic and tonal clarity changes as we age, the article states; which helps explain the correlation between age and music tastes. It is possible that the newer tunes literally do not sound as good.

It’s interesting to me, as a music journalist, that the more we learn about how music affects our brains and bodies, the more clearly we see why music matters. Studies have shown that familiar tunes can unearth hidden memories and alleviate post-partum depression. Even unfamiliar tunes encourage the brain to create new neural connections, boosting neuroplasticity and helping it heal from injury.

Meanwhile, understanding the impact of music invariably leads to us to a better understanding of the physics and chemistry of emotion, and of shared experience. Because even a solitary listening session involves at least two people: musician and listener. And even the memory of that solitary session involves at least three: the musician, the listener then, and the listener now.

If I could reach out and convey something to the 12-year-old listening to Smells Like Teen Spirit for the first time, I would say: “You’re not wrong. This matters. It’s going to matter years from now.” But I think he already knew that.