What is our obsession with music?

No, on ever running out of music. I think there are infinite variations on notes and note combination.

As to why we like music, I think it is because music is a mathematical expression, which our brains are hardwired to find pleasing.

Music probably started with people clapping stones together or banging sticks on a log. It was about rhythm at that time, and it probably appealed to our desire to detect patterns. In other words, it speaks to us.

It spoke not just to our brains, but to our bodies. It urged us to move, to dance. It became a social lubricant. It enabled people to express their most urgent needs without actually having to say them.

When combined with voice—and I imagine that could have happened before, simultaneously, or after the first rhythm; actually, now that I think about it, I’m leaning towards before—you got melody and rhythm, and you developed a sound that people responded to on a very deep level—some might call it a soul level. It just felt right, perhaps as @marinelife suggests, because of some inclination towards mathematical expression, but I prefer to think of it as pattern recognition. Math came much later.

Pattern recognition is important to us because it proffers a survival advantage. Music provides training or practice in pattern recognition. It lays the groundwork for speech. To my knowledge, no one knows because no one alive was there, but I think music came before speech and laid the groundwork for speech. Rhythm and tone are very important elements of speech.

Of course, the complexity of music, speech and dance grew over the millenniums. We developed many forms and structures for music. The music of each people around the world is widely varied. The difference between folk music and highly structured forms such as classical and jazz music grows ever more varied and complex.

We’ll never run out of combinations because there are an infinite number of combinations of pitches and chordal structures and melodies and rhythms. Rock music generally uses very simple and basic forms, so it might seem like it isn’t very complex, but the layers and vocals and styles of play offer it the possibility of infinite variation all on its own. Every band has it’s own sound, and they are all unique. Even the cover bands are different from original bands.

Jazz is designed to offer opportunities for uniqueness. It is all about improvisation. Perhaps because I get bored easily, I practically never play the same riff twice. There is something in my brain constantly pushing me to do something new and different. It’s as if I actually hate doing the same thing twice. I could send you some recordings and you’d see. It’s both a challenge and a natural thing, and for me, that creates an obsession right there.

Music is all around us all the time. The pattern of your clicking keyboard is music. The hum of the heater is music. The sound of the fire engine siren is music. You can’t escape it. Humans live music.

@wundayatta : You’re very eloquent this morning.

Music is both an auditory and physical sensory interaction with all things familiar to us since birth. Almost every thing, being or object has a sound or frequency and our interactions through life can bring both pleasant and unpleasant sensations to our senses. The songs like whispers of our mothers comforting us when were were newborns, to the song birds in the trees, to our favorite melodies on the radio as we sit in our favorite chair and read.

Music for me is the sounds that flow as a life force energy bringing familiar, happy and relaxing thoughts together as we once again enjoy the marriage of tones and frequencies all too familiar to our minds.

@Cruiser -Yes,exactly
:)

Because it’s a great song! That’s why :¬)

I think it is amazing that God created us as “instruments” of His praise. The entire Book of Psalms is songs of praise. King David, whom God said was a man after His own heart, was a musician, poet and song writer.

Music is given to us as a means of worship, praise, thanksgiving, mourning, rejoicing, festivals, celebration, expressions of love, teaching…the list goes on and on. There are tribes in the Bible devoted to making and keeping certain musical instruments. It is amazing and beautiful.

I love music. In college I would constantly try to find similar bands to the ones I already like. My music collection is finely tuned and I am very picky about what I listen to. I can barely listen to the radio, because most of the songs I don’t like. When a song comes on that I am not fond of, I have to change the station or turn it off completely. If I didn’t have my music collection I would probably not be nearly as happy as I am right now.

I just like to groove and move to da beat!

Music rhythms and combinations are infinite, and alway for that creativity, its so wonderful.
Music is there from the moment we are conceived, we listen to the beat of our mothers heart.

Here is a nifty article about why we respond to music.

Teie has been developing a theory to explain why music plays on human emotions. His theory is that music relates to the most primitive sounds we make and respond to, like laughter, heartbeats, or a mother’s cooing.

“When I thought I had all the pieces put into place, I figured any good theory is testable, so one of the ways to test it would be to see if I could write music that would be affective for species other than human,” he says.

The idea that we make and enjoy music because it reminds us of primal human sounds makes a lot of sense to me. A lot of the music we like must mimic the rhythms of things like heartbeat and breathing, right? They test the theory by making sped-up music designed to appeal to monkeys. It’s pretty neat.

Music is completely useless and no other creature apart from Man shows any interest in it. It gives us absolutely no advantage in evolutionary terms. Why I, we, like it so much I have no idea but I don’t think we will ever run out of music.

I have to disagree with you, @flutherother, about music being meaningless.
On its own, because it’s a form of communication, of art; communication isn’t useless. Neither is art.
And also because it lends itself easily to other things—one of those things I’m thinking of is dance… but that’s more personal than anything, I guess. Music is used in rituals, to convey mood in movies, as the awkward-silence-filler in elevators, to set the tone of a restaurant or store, etc.
Folksong is one of the ways earlier humans passed on tales and knowledge to the next generations before we could write books and film movies and access internet. So it was important in the evolutionary process. It’s still used that way, too, although with less absolute-necessity. (How do we learn the ABCs?)
People would, do, sing to pass the time, to connect with others. Slaves sang to keep in time with each other as they worked, to pass on escape information, and to preserve the cultures they were torn away from.

If it was truly useless, I just don’t see it being held onto for so long, refined, taught, learned, created. And even if its only function were to entertain, is that useless? I don’t think so.

There’s actually a region (regions?) of the brain that is a dedicated music center, much like the ones we have for language, math, etc. I want to say it’s on the right hemisphere, but I may be wrong on the exact details. It lights up when it recognizes music. We’re hardwired for it.

On a side note, I had a bird that would sing along with the songs the radio played. Not the commercials, not the talkhosts, just the songs. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought he liked the music.

To answer the OP’s question on running out: I don’t think so, either. As long as humans are able to create, new things will be created. I think we have as much danger in running out of musical ideas as we do any other creation of ours.
I think we can get stuck in ruts for a while—maintstream pop songs, I think, are getting to be suspiciously similar in sound…—but we’ll break free of them when enough, or even one person, gets sick enough of the same to create something new.

we’ll never run out of music! hopefully.
i think humans are obsessed with music as it touches them and that it is a way to express oneself, They find it an escape sometimes from many stresses

@DancingMind I don’t think that music is meaningless though its meaning is usually impossible to put into words. I agree that music in its mysterious way can add meaning to a film, or to words or to an occasion. But I was thinking of music by itself as a pure activity, producing it or listening to it. It fascinates us and takes up a lot of our time without being of any direct benefit to us. But that’s art I suppose and there is more to life than survival and making money.

@flutherother—oops, thanks for that. Didn’t mean to miss-quote you, used the wrong word. Sorry!
And I see what you’re saying better now, too.

@DancingMind No, not at all and reading again what I wrote gives the impression that I don’t like music, which isn’t the case. I love it, folk music, jazz, some rock and roll and a bit of classical :-)

@flutherother I couldn’t disagree with you more. I would like to refer you to my comments above. Music is essential! Without it, we would not be here today, I believe. It is the most basic form of communication, and I bet that without music, speech would have had a hell of a time developing. Speech is impossible without making music.

I would also add for @flutherother to consider is that through out time, music was the only possession a man had. For people in captivity or enslaved, music was all they had and was a form of hope and comfort to be able to endure and/or survive their situations and often served as a form of communication of vital information.

@Cruiser : Here’s an excellent example of what you’re talking about. I was watching it the other day and thinking the same thing.

@JilltheTooth That was a really great movie!

Music makes the world go round. music is the mood-maker for humans.

And yes, i think the writers of music, have run out of ideas. there is no good new music today.