Why do I listen to music so much

Music is one of the most enjoyable human experiences. Music is an ever-present companion to people’s everyday lives. Music can alter our mood, emotions, motivation, and movement. We listen to music and experience emotions in the absence of any events causing us to feel joy, sadness, or excitement. Over the past several decades, scholars have proposed several purposes that listening to music might fulfill (Schäfer, 2016). Music provides a positive mood, offers a valued companion, and allows us to express emotions.

1. Musical pleasure

The key reason people listen to music lies in the reward center of the brain. Listening to pleasurable music activates areas of the reward system. The same brain-chemical system that enables feelings of pleasure from sex, recreational drugs, and food is also critical to experiencing musical pleasure. Musical pleasure arises when a pattern is interrupted in some way. Listeners experience strong emotions when something unexpected happens. However, not everyone experiences intense emotional responses to music. Roughly 2 percent of the general population do not experience chills. This incapacity to derive pleasure specifically from music has been called musical anhedonia (sometimes called tone-deafness).

2. Mood regulation

Music provides a means of escape. Music distracts our minds from the outside world. The use of music as background entertainment serves to get us into a positive mood or to become more alert. Music can relax the body because brain waves are able to synchronize with the rhythm of a song. People’s moods can reflect what they choose to listen to. Fast or energetic music may make people feel alert and pumped, while slow music calms them down. For example, the music is fastest and loudest at lunchtime and then begins its slow descent into the early evening.

3. Nostalgia

Music is one of the strongest means for evoking feelings of nostalgia. Listening to music that was played a lot during a significant life event (e.g., a family celebration) many years ago can trigger a deeply nostalgic emotional experience. The feeling is not the music, but in what it reminds us. Maybe we have just come to hear a particular song as sad because we have learned to associate it with an experience of loss.

4. Aesthetic pleasure

Music listening is also explained by the aesthetic impact of music: enjoyment, being moved or inspiring. Subjectivity is central to aesthetic responses. A piece of music that is aesthetically appealing to one person can be repulsive to another. These differences come from personal experience and the attitude toward the music, and the current mood. The aesthetic experience also involves the context, such as the external physical environment surrounding the individual during a musical activity. For example, listening experience changes depending on whether it is consumed alone or with peers, in a concert hall, or at home.

5. Identity motive

People can use music to express their identity and values to others. Music helps us to show that we belong to a given social group. Music is part of who we are. For example, listening to innovative music can serve to communicate the belief that one is creative and unconventional.

References

Schäfer T (2016) The Goals and Effects of Music Listening and Their Relationship to the Strength of Music Preference. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0151634.

Brain imaging reveals how neural responses to different types of music really affect the emotion regulation of persons. The study proves that especially men who process negative feelings with music react negatively to aggressive and sad music.

Emotion regulation is an essential component to mental health. Poor emotion regulation is associated with psychiatric mood disorders such as depression. Clinical music therapists know the power music can have over emotions, and are able to use music to help their clients to better mood states and even to help relieve symptoms of psychiatric mood disorders like depression. But many people also listen to music on their own as a means of emotion regulation, and not much is known about how this kind of music listening affects mental health. Researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä, Aalto University in Finland and Aarhus University in Denmark decided to investigate the relationship between mental health, music listening habits and neural responses to music emotions by looking at a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging data. The study was published in August in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

"Some ways of coping with negative emotion, such as rumination, which means continually thinking over negative things, are linked to poor mental health. We wanted to learn whether there could be similar negative effects of some styles of music listening," explains Emily Carlson, a music therapist and the main author of the study.

Participants were assessed on several markers of mental health including depression, anxiety and neuroticism, and reported the ways they most often listened to music to regulate their emotions. Analysis showed that anxiety and neuroticism were higher in participants who tended to listen to sad or aggressive music to express negative feelings, particularly in males. "This style of listening results in the feeling of expression of negative feelings, not necessarily improving the negative mood," says Dr. Suvi Saarikallio, co-author of the study and developer of the Music in Mood Regulation (MMR) test.

To investigate the brain's unconscious emotion regulation processes, the researchers recorded the participants' neural activity as they listened to clips of happy, sad and fearful-sounding music using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at the AMI Center of Aalto University. Analysis showed that males who tended to listen to music to express negative feelings had less activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In females who tended to listen to music to distract from negative feelings, however, there was increased activity in the mPFC. "The mPFC is active during emotion regulation," according to prof. Elvira Brattico, the senior author of the study. "These results show a link between music listening styles and mPFC activation, which could mean that certain listening styles have long-term effects on the brain."

"We hope our research encourages music therapists to talk with their clients about their music use outside the session," concludes Emily Carlson, "and encourages everyone to think about the how the different ways they use music might help or harm their own well-being."

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Materials provided by Academy of Finland. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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