Psychology Of Music: All Your Questions Answered
Music is an incredibly powerful tool. From being a source of great controversy to bringing together entire nations, it’s as old as humankind itself. What became as a simple melody to pass the time during hard labor has now turned into a trillion-dollar industry.
You rarely find someone who doesn’t enjoy music. It stimulates one‘s brain, releases and influences one’s moods, and is full of emotions ranging all the way from happiness to rage, making it perfect for anyone regardless of their mental state at the moment. In this article, we’re going to answer some of the most frequent questions related to the psychology and science of music.
Why the more we listen to a certain song, the more we like it?
Have you ever had a song you didn’t really like at first, but the more you listened to it, the more it grew on you? Well, this is a result of a concept called cognitive ease. By listening to a song on repeat, our brain develops a false sense of familiarity to it, thus making it feel more pleasant the more we familiarize ourselves with the patterns of the song.
Of course, as is often the case with psychology, all of this happens in our subconscious. That’s why some of us prefer to put on the same playlist over and over again – the sense of ease, familiarity and effortlessness is what feels good for our brain. The same holds true for songs you used to hate but now enjoy. Since the songs were unfamiliar and featured patterns your brain wasn’t accustomed to, it found it hard to „like“ the song.
A good example of a genre utilizing cognitive ease is reggaeton. Its beats usually feature the same rhythm, creating a sense of familiarity and ease for the brains of reggaeton fans. Speaking of Latin music, let’s discuss another phenomenon: symbolism of sound.
Why do we like to listen to songs we don’t understand the lyrics of?
The magic of listening to foreign songs comes from something called sound symbolism. For us, foreigners to a certain language, it is the various sounds (not words) and their combination that …….
Source: https://weraveyou.com/2022/05/psychology-of-music-all-your-questions-answered/