We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition.

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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!

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I think this is getting it backwards. Here I’ll go (warning, evopsych style speculation follows):

Our brains are great pattern recognizers because it makes us better at learning music (and other structured forms such as poetry). Music is older than all the civilizations on earth. We learn music because it’s an incredibly powerful aid to memorization. Memorization and oral recitation is the oldest form of cultural transmission we have.

Culture is the secret of our success as a species. It’s the original problem solver that gave us so many tools and techniques to survive on every continent on the planet (except Antarctica of course). Culture is the reason we learned to prepare so many foods which would have been poisonous otherwise (such as cassava).

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Imo it's very unlikely that we grew to like music that already existed rather than growing to like audio patterns and then noticing we can make music.

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Almost nothing in evolution happened sequentially. We almost certainly didn’t start creating music before our brains were equipped for it. Instead these things would’ve evolved in tandem. Each one driving the other, in a virtuous cycle.

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This is a cool take! I don't think I agree though. I assume we developed pattern recognition before music/language. Many animals have the ability to note attributes about plants and animals even without the ability to communicate complex ideas (ie language or oral tradition). I assume that type of pattern recognition was a good blueprint for functions like music and language, but my guess is it started from a general pattern recognition, then was retuned for music and language.

Again, pure speculation, but there is some logic behind it!

Ogmios

It's absolutely worth an entire lifetime of exploration. But dismissing things you can't explain away immediately with chemical processes, as some sort of unknowable sorcery is exactly why I call it reductive. As far as I'm concerned, maintaining a reverence for the fact that you will never be capable of conclusively explaining such things, because there is vastly more detail involved than even a thousand lifetimes could ever uncover, is necessary if you want to actually begin to learn about what's really happening.

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I strongly believe that our brains are fundamentally just prediction machines. We strive for a specific level of controlled novelty, but for the most part 'understanding', i.e. being able to predict, the world around us is the goal. We get boredom to push us beyond getting too comfortable and simply sitting in the already familiar, and one of the biggest pleasures in life is the 'aha' moment when understanding finally clicks in place and we feel we can predict something novel.

I feel this is also why LLMs (ChatGPT etc.) can be so effective working with language, and why they occasionally seem to behave so humanlike -- The fundamental mechanism is essentially the same if massively more limited. Animal brains continuously adapt to predict sensory input (and to an extent their own output), while LLMs learn to predict a sequence of text tokens during a restricted training period.

It also seems to me the strongest example of this kind of prediction in animals is the noticing (and wariness) when something feels 'off' about the environment around us. We can easily sense specific kinds of small changes to our surroundings that signify potential danger, even in seemingly unpredictable natural environments. From an evolutionary perspective this also seems like the most immediately beneficial aspect of this kind of prediction. Interstingly, this kind of prediction seems to happen even on the level of individual neurons. As predictive capability improves, it also necessitates an increasingly deep ability to model the world around us, leading to deeper cognition.

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I agree, LLMs have the amazingly human ability to bumble into the right answer even if they don't know why.

It seems to me that a good analogy of our experience is a whole bunch of LLMs optimized for different tasks that have some other LLM scheduler/administrator for the lower level models that is consciousness. Might be more layers deep, but that's my guess with no neurological or machine learning background.

Possibly linux

I think it is way more deep than that.

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We like music for the same reason we like games, stories and successfully accomplishing tasks.

It's the vibe that it evokes.