Why do we need Music?

Music seems to be, literally, everywhere we go, from down into the Tube to the park to Carnegie Hall. In a recent article in The New York Times (2024, “Why Do People Make Music? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/science/universal-music-evolution.html ) Carl Zimmer reports on this phenomena.
Zimmer shares that “Some researchers are developing new evolutionary explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing, that did not need natural selection to come into existence. In recent years, scientists have investigated these ideas with big data.” Zimmer also reports that recently (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adm9797) a “team, which comprised musicologists, psychologists, linguists, evolutionary biologists and professional musicians, recorded songs in 55 languages. . . . Across cultures, the researchers found, songs share certain features not found in speech . . . It’s possible that songs have distinct features because they have a special role in human communication separate from speech, said Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University who was not involved in the study. What’s more, our brains appear to be sensitive to those features. In 2022, Dr. Patel pointed out, researchers discovered human neurons that only responded to singing — not speech or music played on instruments.”
For more information on the psychological implications of hearing music, read this article. (and search for “music” in our search bar top right, or create your own report on “music” top left!).