Almost all the people walking around town, taking the bus and the subway, are listening to music with their iPods, people at the gym are listening to music, people in a plane are wearing headphones for 10 hours in a row.
We are constantly fed with music and we incessantly feed ourselves with songs and tunes. Why this constant need? We don’t need music to survive live oxygen or food, but it has become a continuous need in our life, an enduring habit of each day.
It has not been always the case, of course, before the iPod, the walkman, the radio K-7, the turntable,… it was more difficult, but it seems we have evolved with this urge to supplement every act of our life with music.
I have read a few articles discussing the subject, and some are saying that teenagers are the ones listening to music the most, and since 40% of the lyrics of songs are about relationships and sexual behavior, listening to a sexy song would help to attract mates. I mean, exactly like for the birds!
Of course, the ones attracting the most are the singers themselves, and music, which is time and energy consuming to produce, would have a real function in survival and reproduction of the species. In short, musical production is sexual success,… ask the groupies. The same thing could be said of any creative production by the way.
But there are several problems with this theory: There are of course a lot of men who appreciate other men’s music, and the same can be said for women. Does it mean they are all secretly gay? I don’t think so!
Also natural selection always gives the advantage to the people who are the most fit, and it is not necessarily the case for many singers or musicians!
Another idea would be that music binds groups together, so music would have a very important social role. Everybody has experienced this collective bounding at a concert, and fan groups are a clear illustration of this solidarity: people find their group, their identity. But it’s not clear what kind of social benefit people would gain from this? Do Michael Jackson’s fans have a better chance to survive and reproduce than non-fans? I don’t think so…
But an interesting point is that, if everybody or almost everybody, is able to listen and appreciate music, only a few are able to write music, so music would not be a collective adaptive skill common to all people, like language for example. Researchers have proven that neural circuits that produce and respond to music are different from those involved in language.
We don’t really know why we listen to music so much, it’s not clear what biological function music has, and we don’t know why some individuals have better musical skills than others. It is complex, but it corresponds to a real need.
Some have suggested that music has no real function but was a happy accident with no influence on the evolution of our species. May be, and if there is a function for music after all, it is still a big mystery!