Music is now within a vast digital network. With applications like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and others, it’s not just music but also “podcasts” that are in our ears. Why do we even listen to music! On the metro, on the bus, on the road—everyone has headphones on… I’ve always wondered what people are listening to. This is an innocent curiosity, not intended to criticize. In this article, I will praise music. We will travel from music therapy to the Mozart Effect. Musicophilia, in other words, our devotion to music, is somewhat related to how the human brain works. Doesn’t everything, our entire existence, happen within the brain?
Could music be one of the best things humanity has ever produced? I think so; I’m glad we invented music. Of course, today, with digital platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, our musical taste has become artificial as well. Music platforms decide what we listen to. “Hit music, most played” lists are entirely advertisement-oriented. We must not forget that bad music exists too. Just like books, music is a prisoner of advertisements in the hands of greedy digital platforms. We can no longer even truly own the music.
Online music now just means “making money.” Today, music has become “junk food” or “fast food” for the consumer society. There is a massive musical obesity. Now, let’s get to our topic. The “benefits for the soul” is a famous expression. But since it was the human brain that invented music, we essentially have a brain that takes pleasure from itself. I am not someone who believes in dualistic concepts like the soul. Soul equals the human brain itself. Of course, for those who ask, “Is music a sin?” my response is: this feast of colors emerging from your mind, covering your dreams, the universe, and your existence, can only be considered a “good deed.”
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Why Do We Listen to Music? Music Therapy and Musicophilia
Is musicophilia the human devotion to music? The state of being unable to do without it. There are dozens of terms ending with the suffix “-philia,” meaning “devotion” or “predilection.” This musical inclination appears in infancy. In a way, it is etched into human genetics. The Greek suffix “philia” refers here to brains devoted to music. Some people’s brains constantly produce music. Even when Beethoven was deaf, he was able to compose. There is no specific single area in the human brain solely for music.
There are scattered neural networks. Regarding why humans listen to music, Oliver Sacks in the preface of his book Musicophilia. He says that our love of music and other aspects of our aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual lives use our minds as a “back door.” Darwin says that music did not play a significant role in human evolution. We listen to music because the human species has an innate devotion to it. When we ask “What is musicophilia?” it should occur to us that we might be musicophiles ourselves. Additionally, there are people with synesthesia. These people see musical notes and sounds as colors. Every note, sound, and rhythm has a color, and sometimes a subject.
Music in Reality and the Quantum World
Let’s take a short journey from the question of “What is musicophilia?” into quantum physics. Music consists of notes and sound waves vibrating at different frequencies. In fact, there is no such thing as “sound” in the outside world. Nor are there colors, light, smells, sunsets, or love in the external world. Everything consists of our brain’s interpretation. The sounds we can hear are within certain frequency ranges. Colors correspond to frequencies between violet and red in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Everything in the external world consists of energy and frequencies. We even construct the reality of objects we perceive as solid within our brains. According to string theory, even subatomic particles are formed by two-dimensional vibrating strings. In short, music, like everything else, emerges from the reaction of billions of neural networks and chemicals in our brain. we live inside our brains, not in the world or the universe. Musical reality is just this simple; I don’t think there’s a need for more complexity.
Dance and Music
Especially music accompanied by dance… Those who disparage dance or consider ballet a “perversion” are mistaken. Dance figures and the forms of the human body, purified of lust, create perfect patterns in our brains. Refined, harmonious dance figures root out the excesses in our minds. Our mirror neurons kick in. We dance too. Mirror neurons allow us to empathize. Most TikTok videos consist of short dances. This isn’t nonsense; teenagers or adults aren’t doing “absurd movements.” They express themselves through dance figures. That’s how they communicate. Our mirror neurons copy these movements immediately: this is actually a flawless mental communication. Let’s get back to our topic.
Pythagoras and the Music (Harmony) of the Spheres
The famous Greek philosopher Pythagoras worked on mathematical ratios in music. He suggested that everything in the universe is in a harmonic relationship and stated that stars, planets, our physical and spiritual bodies, and our emotions create their own unique music. According to the proposition of “Harmony of the Spheres” or “Music of the Spheres,” the distances between planets arranged according to musical ratios corresponded to musical intervals. The fact that musical notes were associated with mathematics 2,000 years ago was absolutely a magnificent discovery.
Healing Music Therapy
Music also has a therapeutic effect. Patients whose frontal lobes were damaged and who had lost their abilities for abstraction and language were sometimes able to sing along with music. Similarly, music has played a healing role for patients with aphasia (loss of speech).
It has also been observed that for patients with amnesia—specifically those with long-term memory issues who are almost isolated from time and space, whose memory resets every few seconds to a few minutes—their condition vanished while they were engaged with music.
Paralyzed patients, those with tics, Parkinson’s, and dyskinesia patients, and athletes have all succeeded in overcoming their difficulties with music. It has been proven that music and keeping tempo set a person in motion, distinct from speaking or thinking. In all neurological diseases, brain damage, and bodily stiffness, music has been uniquely healing.
Why Do We Listen to Music? The Mozart Effect
A study conducted in 1995 titled the “Mozart Effect” is quite remarkable. Seeing similarities between the mathematical structure of classical works and electrical neural activity, Gordon Shaw suggested a relationship between music and the electrical activity of neurons. He specifically claimed that listening to Mozart would increase brain functions.
Later, Shaw conducted experiments and saw that the IQs of students listening to Mozart increased by 8–9 points. However, subsequent experiments could not replicate Shaw’s results. The Mozart Effect was shelved.
However, listening to music—music that appeals to us and soothes our “soul”—makes us happier, even if it doesn’t make us smarter. It removes the negatives from our minds and can enable us to think more calmly. Music has the power to distance us from the negative situations we are in.
🎧 Note: Don’t forget to leave a comment. This article is entirely from my reading notes. I know we are in a time where artificial intelligence has taken over information. Personal blogs and websites have lost their value. I have republished this article by re-editing it. It is a fairly old blog post. Now, websites have the status of digital museums.
