Humans are built to enjoy music.

Our strong suit as humans is the ability to speak. We evolved to be so good at it that we can now do it with people on the other side of the planet as well as people who are not on the planet. As a byproduct, we developed a new art: music. We have practiced it for 35,000 years (Smithsonian) and have created an incredibly valuable industry around it. In 2020, the music industry generated $59.48 billion (McCain 2022). Clearly, us humans find a lot of value in music. Most of us.

Four percent of the world does not like music due to congenital amusia, or tone deafness from birth (Peretz, Cummings, Dubè, 2007). In 2007, Isabelle Peretz, Stèphanie Cummings and Marie-Pierre Dubè researched the relationship between hereditary speech impediments and congenital amusia. They found that congenital amusia is hereditary. The hereditary nature of tone deafness makes the cognition of music a biological trait. Not only can you predisposed to have no tone recognition ability, but you can be born with the ability to recognize tones perfectly.

Some people with absolute pitch, the ability to name a note when played, experience it in a way that is ineffable. They can not describe how they recognize the note, they just do. For people with tone-color synthesia, or chromesthesia, it is a different case. Synthesia is perceptive disorder that causes the subject receiving sensory or cognitive stimuli to involuntarily experience another sensory or cognitive path as well (Campen, 2009). There is also congenital synthesia (Stehlikova, 2021), congenital meaning the condition is with the patient from birth. Congenital amusia is also hereditary (Tilot, et al., 2019).

Predisposition for affinity or lack thereof is one thing. Something most of us can experience is our emotional and cognitive reaction to music.

Music can alleviate choking. To “choke” in reference to sports and other competitions, is to fail due to the pressure of the situation; to crack under pressure. Researchers at Victoria University discovered that playing music during stressful situations lowered the subject’s self-awareness, allowing them to perform better. To prove their hypothesis they used the game of basketball. They had two type of scenarios: low pressure and high pressure. It was discovered that when music was played during the high pressure scenarios decreased self-awareness, and enabled participants to minimize explicit monitoring of execution and reduce general distractibility”. It allowed them to think clearly during a stressful situation. (Mesagno, Merchant, Morris, 2009).

Music therapy is the clinical use of music to accomplish goals one would in regular therapy (Cleveland Clinic). It involves creating, performing and listening to music. Music therapy has shown to lower blood pressure, improve memory, enhance social skills and even reduce muscle tension. There are a bunch of types of music therapy but they all prove effective in some way shape or form.

Each example of the human brain’s relationship to tonality, not even mentioning rhythm, is proof that we have an innate ability to process musical concepts and that music is not just a cultural phenomenon.

Carden, J. (2009, July 9). Absolute pitch: Myths, evidence and relevance to music education and … Sage Journals. Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305735619856098

Cervellin, G. (2011, March 22). From music-beat to heart-beat: A journey in the complex interactions between music, brain and heart. European journal of internal medicine. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21767754/

Doolittle, Emily, and Bruno Gingras. “Zoomusicology: Current Biology – Cell.com.” The Cell, Current Biology, 5 Oct. 2015, https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.cub.2015.06.039

Tilot, Amanda K., et al. “Investigating Genetic Links between Grapheme–Colour Synaesthesia and Neuropsychiatric Traits.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, The Royal Society Publishing, 21 Oct. 2019, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0026#d4976642e1

Art & Music. The Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program. (2022, September 19). Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/art-music#:~:text=Making%20music%20is%20a%20universal,the%20world’s%20earliest%20musical%20instruments.

Peretz, I., Cummings, S., & Dubé, M. P. (2007). The genetics of congenital amusia (tone deafness): a family-aggregation study. American journal of human genetics, 81(3), 582–588. https://doi.org/10.1086/521337

The Hidden Sense: On Becoming Aware of Synthesia. (2009, January). Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20110628222645/http://www.pucsp.br/pos/tidd/teccogs/artigos/pdf/teccogs_edicao1_2009_artigo_CAMPEN.pdf

Music Therapy: What Is It, Types & Treatment. (n.d.). Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/8817-music-therapy