Why We Love Music How music affects each and everyone of us Story by Ana Linan-Hernandez
People tend to listen to music that matches their emotional state to feel more understood. With this alone, we can tell that music is a huge factor in people’s lives. It is an easy way to change your mood and even an easy way to learn since catchy songs are often easy to memorize. This prompts the question as to why is music so catchy, and why do we love it so much? Music psychology is a branch of psychology and musicology that studies the behavioral patterns of your brain while listening to music. This includes the processes by which music is incorporated into everyday life. Modern music psychology tends to focus on how music can affect performance, intelligence, attitude, creativity and social behavior. Humans have an exclusive ability unlike other organisms to derive joy from complex musical patterns. Some psychologists even believe this is an evolutionary accident. Dr. Elif Tekin Gurgen disagrees with this theory. She believes sounds are far too important to humans for it to be a mistake. For example, when you hear a baby cry, most peoples’ response is to go help. She believes music makes us react similarly, in that when we hear it we feel a certain kind of way. As a kid, she wanted to be a musician. As she grew older though, she realized being a
musician wasn’t a stable career, and instead decided to major in musicology. Gurgen is a professor of musicology at Dokuz Eylül University in Turkey. She cannot live without music, and believes it to be an essential part of life. However, due to Turkey’s stability and condition, she was forced to become professor of musicology, and has recently been holding piano lessons. “Most musicians are jobless,” Gurgen said, “[since] they can’t find a job easily and can’t earn a job easily.” Unfortunately, most research about musicology is done in English which is why she is working on breaking that language barrier for her students. “I am currently working on a student book for my Master’s student,” Gurgen said, “because there aren’t enough books about the psychology of music in Turkish.” She will include books which served as her inspiration for her research. The two most notable were Daniel Levitin’s Your Brain on Music, and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia. Your Brain on Music is more about how your brain responds to music while Musicophilia is more about why we like certain genres of music. These books, along with many articles all of which talk about Gurgen’s favorite topic: why we are so attached to music. Gurgen is currently
Photo by Academia
working on researching a very unusual connection. She has been taking Tai Chi - a form of Chinese martial arts - for two years. While learning Tai Chi, she had an epiphany: Music and Tai Chi are both about controlling yourself. “Playing an instrument needs control over your body and control over your mind and focus,” Gurgen said, “I think Tai Chi is about that.” On the other side of Europe, in Austria, there is another researcher with a passion for music psychology, Dr. Marcel Zentner. He started his career as a postdoc at Harvard University. He later became a professor of psychology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. His research has been published many times before such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Science and has featured on BBC ONE, National Public Radio and
