We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition.

Electric_Druid

Musician here. This is definitely true, BUT interest can also come from subversion of those expectations. Can be seen in prog music, math rock, funk, etc

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Interestingly there is a body of research that suggests enjoyment of music comes from having exactly one of two things, never both:

Familiarity and predictability

If it's neither familiar nor predictable, it is inscrutable and therefore discomforting to listen to

If it is both familiar and predictable it is boring

If it's familiar but unpredictable, it feels like a journey through known emotions

If it's predictable but unfamiliar it feels like 'logical discovery' and is fun and satisfying

A bit reductive but I love this idea

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Explain why Jazz is so fucking awesome then.

rockerface 🇺🇦

Just like in any form of media, we enjoy a balance between familiarity and novelty. Different people have a different sweet spot for that balance, which is where we get different genres and styles

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Exactly. Good music never ever goes where you expect and should always suspend the listener in a delightful unease.

Ephera

More wild speculation:

Patterns make brain release happiness hormones, because it rewards itself for correctly guessing how the pattern continues. The rewards stop when the pattern is overly repetitive, because the brain recognizes that this isn't a challenge to guess correctly. And then it also quickly becomes not worth paying attention to, because if it's not going to change, it's irrelevant to our continued survival and all.
This applies to anything where humans perceive beauty. A painting with a consistent color scheme or technique is nice, but just a blue canvas is pretty boring. A poem that rhymes is nice, but if it rhymes twice or thrice by using precisely the same device, then it doesn't entice.

Electric_Druid

Jazz is my favorite genre to play- this thinking sill applies but it's a lot more abstract- even if there is heavy improv as is the style, it's still musical patters over repeating chord changes. Couple that with the subversion of expectation thing I mentioned elsewhere in this thread and it's a winning formula if I've ever heard one.

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Ya let’s not pretend why humans enjoy music. No one can explain it.

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That's why I like comedy and soulslikes. The subversion of expectations

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For a long time lots of European music was mostly thorough-composed, where there was little to no repitition. Madrigals (the popular music of the renaissance) were mostly like this, the melody would follow it's own journey with no chorus / verse or other repetitive structure. I might be remembering wrong, but I think it was early baroque and Monteverdi's Orfeo that popularised repeating structures, and turns out people love them. If you back and listen to some madrigals, it's a very different approach to music. (also, there was folks music and all sorts of other traditions, which used more repeating patterns, that seem more familiar to us.)

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Smoke - Everything 1973 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQoGSIO2H94 (entry point 20m50s)

Kollectiv Live 1973 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFduBZSUO7s

Vladimir Ussachevsky Electronic 1950 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_cjxT5baQY

Missus Beastly - Dr Aftershave & The Mixed Pickles 1976 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQoGSIO2H94

Pink Floyd Atom Heart Mother 1970 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ErOK3kgbDc

Ramsey Lewis Trio Live 1983 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8QZUi3Htrg

Herbie Hancock Cantaloupe Island Live 1991 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZOkyQx3jIw

Flying Luttenbachers - Destroy All Music - Fist Through Glass 1995 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4e20WDe7lA

folkrav

Jazz has patterns and repetition, like any interesting music genre. If it didn't, it'd be called noise. They just aren't as in your face and predictable as the ones employed by pop genres.

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And then you listen to Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (275 time signature changes)

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I've heard that before, but isn't this easily defended by the fact that people who listen to the same song over and over again exist?

I can listen to Ado music over and over, it gets better every time. So then there is familiarity and predictability (since I know that piece of music rather well by then).

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I think it's also about the surprise of something violating the pattern. That's why jokes are entertaining too. When crafting a joke, you need to build some expectations and then break them all of a sudden. Music has patterns and moments that break those patterns to an extent, so why wouldn't the same thing apply here?

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As a speculation it's really pretty good. Many years ago there was a Scientific American article about why people like music. It was long and complicated but the tl;dr would go something like:

Well-liked music of any genre tends to contain fractal patterns. If you probe our peripheral nervous system you get a lot of white noise, but the closer you get to the central nervous system the more fractal it becomes, as if our nervous system is filtering out the noise and letting the fractal part of our perceptions get through to our brains. This makes it very likely that our thoughts and memories are fractal patterns, which means that at the purely mathematical level there could be similarities between patterns that encode ideas that aren't related by context - for example, when a piece of music makes you think of the ocean, or flying birds, or the big city, it's probably because those patterns in your head are mathematically similar.

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We like music because it acts like a pleasurable drug. Probably something hormonal that is connected to mating (like birds do with bird song).

folkrav

Music (and other art forms) happen to trigger our brains to shoot the same happy/sad/etc chemicals other less abstract physical experiences do, for reasons we don't completely understand. I'm utterly confused why being aware of them, or having the curiosity of wanting to learn more about it, is "what's going wrong with society". If anything, curiosity is one of the main things that kickstarted us as a species, and brushing it off to some abstract "deeper layers of human existence" like it was some sorcery we shouldn't dare try to understand would be way more concerning about our state as a society.

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Lighten up, Francis.

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Music showers my brain!