Why Is Music So Powerful?

Singing “how wonderful life is while you’re in the world” is more powerful than just saying it. Music moves people. Why? Here is my speculation: The human brain gains satisfaction in picking up regularities. Music is built upon structures, rhythms, scales, melodies, chord movements, repetitions and variations. Recognizing patterns excites our brains. That is why hearing something sung is not the same as hearing it said.

Singing it is more powerful than saying it. Why?

Saying “I did it my way” is different from singing it. Singing “how wonderful life is while you’re in the world” is more powerful than just saying it. Music motivates people. Music consoles people. Music moves people. Music changes people's mood. Why? Here is my theory.

Our brains are evolved to pick up regularities

The human brain likes to spot regularities. That is in-built for survival, I suppose. “Whenever birds flee from the bushes, danger is lurking”. Many of our ancestors who failed to notice this died. The survivors learned that regularity.

We gain satisfaction in picking up regularities. That is why rhyming words catch our attention. Poems catch our attention because apart from using rhyming words, they use certain rhythms, which are repeated. For example:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
(Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare)

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.
(We Wear the Mask, Paul Laurence Dunbar)

Music is built upon regularities

Music follows specific rhythms. For example, in Greensleeves the first note is half as long as the second note. The third note is as long as the first note. The ratio between the length of two notes is normally in the order of 2 (e.g 1/8th, 1/4th, 1/2th, 1, 2, 4, etc.). We have more freedom in speaking. That is one reason why singing is different from speaking: it is more regular.

Besides, music notes repeatedly use fixed pitches. For example, Western musich normally use do, re, me, fa, so, etc; rarely does one use pitches in between them. We don't use fixed pitches in speaking. That is another reason why singing sounds more interesting than speaking.

In Western music, we use C, C#, D, D#, etc. Pitches for these notes share mathematical properties. For example, the frequency of a note is doubled one octave up (the frequency of C4 is 261.63, C5 523.25). The frequency of G is 1.5 times the frequency of C. The frequency of D is approximately three-quarters of the frequency of G. Though we may not be aware of these mathematical relations, these 1:2, 3:2 and 3:4 frequency ratios (see Appendix) may have some effects on us when we hear the notes. For example, we naturally feel harmony when we hear C, E and G sung or played together, either simultaneously or in sequence.

Structures in music

A piece of music normally follow some structures. For example:

• Twelve-bar blues adopt a certain structure in the number of bars and the chord movements.
• Rhythms, melodies and chord movements often repeat themselves within a piece of music.
• The rhythm and melody and chord movement of the second group of four bars sometimes repeat the first set of four bars with minor variations.
• When lyrics are involved, they often use rhyming words at the end of each sentence. Lyrics often repeat themselves, sometimes with variations.

Summary

To summarise, music is built upon regularities. These include musical structures, rythms, scales, chord movements, (when lyrics are involved) rhymes, repeats and variations. Our brains probably echo the mathematically-related frequencies in the notes, though we may not be aware of it. We gain satisfaction when patterns are recognized. That may be why music moves us.

• The Physics Behind Music by B. H. Suits, Physics Department, Michigan Technological University
• The world's ugliest music by Scott Rickard, TEDxMIA, 2011