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Why i listen to music


Keep Your Brain Young with Music

If you want to firm up your body, head to the gym. If you want to exercise your brain, listen to music.

There are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does. If you want to keep your brain engaged throughout the aging process, listening to or playing music is a great tool. It provides a total brain workout.

Research has shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory.

The Brain-Music Connection

Experts are trying to understand how our brains can hear and play music. A stereo system puts out vibrations that travel through the air and somehow get inside the ear canal. These vibrations tickle the eardrum and are transmitted into an electrical signal that travels through the auditory nerve to the brain stem, where it is reassembled into something we perceive as music.

Johns Hopkins researchers have had dozens of jazz performers and rappers improvise music while lying down inside an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine to watch and see which areas of their brains light up.

Music is structural, mathematical and architectural. It’s based on relationships between one note and the next. You may not be aware of it, but your brain has to do a lot of computing to make sense of it.

Try It Learn an Instrument 

When 13 older adults took piano lessons, their attention, memory and problem-solving abilities improved, along with their moods and quality of life. You don’t have to become a pro, just take a few lessons.

Everyday Brain Boosts from Music

The power of music isn’t limited to interesting research. Try these methods of bringing more music—and brain benefits—into your life.

Jump-start your creativity.

Listen to what your kids or grandkids listen to, experts suggest. Often we continue to listen to the same songs and genre of music that we did during our teens and 20s, and we generally avoid hearing anything that’s not from that era.

New music challenges the brain in a way that old music doesn’t. It might not feel pleasurable at first, but that unfamiliarity forces the brain to struggle to understand the new sound.

Recall a memory from long ago.

Reach for familiar music, especially if it stems from the same time period that you are trying to recall. Listening to the Beatles might bring you back to the first moment you laid eyes on your spouse, for instance.

Listen to your body.

Pay attention to how you react to different forms of music, and pick the kind that works for you. What helps one person concentrate might be distracting to someone else, and what helps one person unwind might make another person jumpy.

Definitions

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI): A large machine that uses powerful magnets and radio waves to see inside your body. Unlike an X-ray, MRI testing does not use radiation. If you undergo this test, you’ll lie on a narrow table that slides inside a tunnel-shaped scanner for about 30 to 60 minutes while health-care professionals watch from another room. If you feel anxious in small, enclosed spaces, ask your physician about an open MRI that is not as close to the body.

5 Reasons Why We Listen to Music

Music is one of the most enjoyable human experiences. Music is an ever-present companion to people’s everyday lives. Music can alter our mood, emotions, motivation, and movement. We listen to music and experience emotions in the absence of any events causing us to feel joy, sadness, or excitement. Over the past several decades, scholars have proposed several purposes that listening to music might fulfill (Schäfer, 2016). Music provides a positive mood, offers a valued companion, and allows us to express emotions.

1. Musical pleasure

The key reason people listen to music lies in the reward center of the brain. Listening to pleasurable music activates areas of the reward system. The same brain-chemical system that enables feelings of pleasure from sex, recreational drugs, and food is also critical to experiencing musical pleasure. Musical pleasure arises when a pattern is interrupted in some way. Listeners experience strong emotions when something unexpected happens. However, not everyone experiences intense emotional responses to music. Roughly 2 percent of the general population do not experience chills. This incapacity to derive pleasure specifically from music has been called musical anhedonia (sometimes called tone-deafness).

2. Mood regulation

Music provides a means of escape. Music distracts our minds from the outside world. The use of music as background entertainment serves to get us into a positive mood or to become more alert. Music can relax the body because brain waves are able to synchronize with the rhythm of a song. People’s moods can reflect what they choose to listen to. Fast or energetic music may make people feel alert and pumped, while slow music calms them down. For example, the music is fastest and loudest at lunchtime and then begins its slow descent into the early evening.

3. Nostalgia

Music is one of the strongest means for evoking feelings of nostalgia. Listening to music that was played a lot during a significant life event (e.g., a family celebration) many years ago can trigger a deeply nostalgic emotional experience. The feeling is not the music, but in what it reminds us. Maybe we have just come to hear a particular song as sad because we have learned to associate it with an experience of loss.

4. Aesthetic pleasure

Music listening is also explained by the aesthetic impact of music: enjoyment, being moved or inspiring. Subjectivity is central to aesthetic responses. A piece of music that is aesthetically appealing to one person can be repulsive to another. These differences come from personal experience and the attitude toward the music, and the current mood. The aesthetic experience also involves the context, such as the external physical environment surrounding the individual during a musical activity. For example, listening experience changes depending on whether it is consumed alone or with peers, in a concert hall, or at home.

5. Identity motive

People can use music to express their identity and values to others. Music helps us to show that we belong to a given social group. Music is part of who we are. For example, listening to innovative music can serve to communicate the belief that one is creative and unconventional.

Why music affects our emotions so much

  • David Robson
  • BBC Future

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Image caption,

Music can evoke a wide variety of feelings and experiences in a person

In an article from the "Ask and Answer" series designed to quench the reader's curiosity, a journalist BBC Future explores the impact of music on people's emotional state.

"Why does music have a direct effect on our emotions? What is the evolutionary meaning of this phenomenon?" asks Philip Loerish, who emailed us his question.

Each person experienced the emotional power of music, which sometimes literally takes our soul.

We can get into a state of euphoria from driving music in some rock club, and listening to a romantic ballad, experience the deep longing of unrequited love...

Music expresses our emotions much more powerfully than words can.

However, as our reader rightly notes, the reasons for this do not lie on the surface.

(Other BBC Future articles in Russian)

"I understand why rhythm can be so appealing, and I also understand anticipation, surprise, fulfillment. All these things explain why music can be interesting But why it affects us at a deep level - it remains a mystery to me," he wrote.

An anthropological riddle

Our reader Philip is not the only one who has asked this question. And by the way, he's in good company.

Even the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, was puzzled by the human ability to perceive music and called this ability "the most mysterious of those with which [mankind] is gifted."

Some academic thinkers, such as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, have even questioned whether there is any special value in music at all.

According to Pinker, we like music only because it stimulates our other, more important abilities - the ability to recognize patterns, for example.

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Image caption,

Descending melodic-harmonic sequences tend to have a calming effect on us

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In itself, according to Pinker, she is of no value and acts only as an irritant to hearing.

If this were the case, would people all over the world spend so much of their lives playing and listening to music?

If you consider yourself a music freak, compare your obsession with the attitude towards music in the Babinga tribe. This Central African people is known for singing and dancing in every activity, from collecting honey to hunting elephants.

Anthropologist Gilbert Rouget, who lived among the babing in 1946, found that non-participation in the ritual of joint music-making is considered among them the most terrible of crimes.

"Perhaps you cannot express it more clearly that song and food are equally necessary for a person to live, - the scientist noted. - For this reason, many people (including myself) can hardly believe that music is just background soundtrack to the story of human evolution".

Fortunately, there are alternative theories regarding the purpose of music. According to one particularly popular hypothesis, music arose in response to sexual competition among humans, like the brightly colored tails of peacocks.

Indeed, developed musical abilities make a person more sexually attractive.

However, there is still little evidence for this theory: a recent study of 10,000 twins did not show that musicians are somehow especially lucky in matters of "bed" (Mick Jagger and many other rockers, however, can argue with this).

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Photo caption

Playing our heartstrings, music helped us connect emotionally with the world

It is also suggested that music was an early form of human communication. Indeed, some musical motifs carry the emotional codes of our ancestors.

For example, ascending staccato turns us on emotionally, while long descending sequences have a calming effect. Apparently, certain sound structures contain universal meanings that are equally read by adults of different ages and cultures, small children, and even animals.

So it can be said with a high degree of certainty that music arose on the foundation of associations with the cries of birds and animals as a means by which an ancient person who did not yet have a language could express his feelings and emotions. It is even possible that music became the proto-language that paved the way for the emergence of speech.

In addition, at a certain historical stage, music may have helped bring people together in communities. Group dance and sing-along have made people more altruistic and more likely to identify with the community in which they exist.

According to the latest research in neuroscience, when you move in sync with another person, you - thanks to the signals sent to you by the brain - cease to be aware of yourself as something separate.

It is as if you are peering into another person in a mirror and recognize yourself in him. Well, as we all know very well from our own bodily reactions, in order to start moving people in unison, there is no better means than music.

However, in order for internal transformations to take place, active physical involvement in music is not at all necessary (although it can enhance the effect).

Emotional contact with the world

If a melody causes pleasant vibrations in the body, simply listening to it is enough to reduce our ego. Sounds reassuring, especially for those whose musical life, like mine, is tied to the couch and iPod.

A group that has more solidarity and less internal strife has a higher chance of surviving and prospering. This was most widely illustrated by the example of the Babinga tribe, with their obligatory daily music-making.

Photo credit, Thinkstock

Photo caption,

All human life on Earth is accompanied by a certain musical series

Anthropologist Rouget wrote about babing: one with a group of singers. "

The role of music as a social glue can also be seen in the songs that slaves sing at work, as well as the choral songs of soldiers and sailors. It seems that music really brings people together, makes them closer to each other.

Music seems to be at the very foundation of our relationship with the world, and there is a deep sense that, by plucking our heartstrings, it helps us to establish emotional contact with other people and in general with everything that exists.

Each culture can build on this rudimentary instinct in its own way, creating its own lexicon of musical chords and motifs that will become associated with certain feelings and emotions.

Whatever the genesis and original purpose of music, modern people can no longer help but associate it with the important events of their own lives.

Our current existence on Earth - from conception, gestation, birth to burial, with everything that can happen in between - is accompanied by a certain musical range.

And it is no wonder that the sounds of your favorite melodies can give us such a heady cocktail of emotions and memories.

Read the original of this article in English is available on the website BBC Future .

Ask us any question

BBC Future journalists would love to know what topics you care about. If, like our reader Philip, you have questions that you would like us to comment on, please contact us (in English) via Facebook or Twitter or send your question by email to the address of the social media department ( [email protected] or [email protected]).

Essay on Music in my life

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  • Music in my life

Music is a wonderful art form, which will be discussed in my essay. In my free time, I like to listen to music. She inspires me, motivates me, from her I am charged with positive energy for the whole day. Music is an important element in my life. If I'm in a bad mood, after listening to good music, I return to a positive state. Thoughts come to my mind that can help me in any situation.

Music relaxes me, sometimes calms me down, gives me strength. I consider myself a music lover, I listen to different musical directions. I like Russian and foreign performers. I also combine with pleasure, as the saying goes, the pleasant with the useful, I clean the room to the music. If I'm in a good mood, I turn on loud, perky music, dance and sing. I take a bath to sad music, it calms me down, I can also fall asleep under it. Interested in the genre of classical music, I really like the sound of different musical instruments separately. Sometimes you want to be distracted and be alone, and music is the only and good option. There are songs that touch the soul.

Listening to the lines from the composition, they seem to be written from my own life. Sometimes I write the lines myself, I haven’t seriously thought yet, maybe music is my future profession. There is a great desire to enroll in courses at a music school, it will provide a chance to learn a lot of useful and necessary information. Learn to play a musical instrument on the guitar. I look forward to picking up a guitar, putting in all my efforts and learning how to play. The main event this year will be the purchase of a musical instrument.

Music is not just a hobby to say more - my hobby. As I said in all my free time, I enlighten her. Music is very important to me, it makes it easier to express different kinds of emotions. When comrades come to visit me, we turn on the computer and listen to a variety of music, look for new releases and discuss musical compositions together. I can't imagine my life without music, it plays an important role in my life. I love listening to music with headphones. With the help of an accessory, walking down the street, I turn on the song to the fullest and immerse myself in the world of the music track. And most importantly, no one suspects what track is in my player. I can't imagine my life without music.

My whole family loves to listen to music, although parents have their own preferences, but there are songs that we all listen to together.

Grade 8, 3, 4, 5, 7, 6 grade

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