Why do we like wind chimes?
Dmitri Tymoczko writes:
You know your question, “why do we like to listen to music over and over again?” I think the question reveals that our relation to music is sensory and pleasure-based rather than cognitive and information-based. Music (like food and alcohol and sex) gives us pleasure, which is why we do it over and over. Anyway, I am writing because there is a mirror version of the question: “why do we like wind chimes?” Wind chimes are essentially random notes, but people like them. We don’t really like random words, because our relation to words is information based.
I wanted to title this post, “Why do we like to ask, ‘Why do we like to listen to music over and over again,’ over and over again?”, but I decided that was too cute so I switched to the more SEO-friendly version above. Everybody likes wind chimes, right?
To answer Dmitri’s question, my personal theory of “Why do we like to listen to music over and over again?” is that there’s a big difference between listening to music actively (or playing music), and listening passively (which is how I usually do it).
P.S. Unlike Dmitri, I don’t know anything about music, and I have a horrible feeling that being a fan of dad-rock heroes REM doesn’t help my street-cred here, but I’ve written a lot on the topic; see the recent post Playing music, listening to music, background music, talking about music, which links to a bunch more:
Why do we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories?
How Music Works by David Byrne, and Sweet Anticipation by David Huron
This guy is to music as I am to statistical graphics
Genre fiction: Some genres are cumulative and some are not.
The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars
Who are the culture heroes of today?
Cohort effects in literature (David Foster Wallace and other local heroes)
And I’m not about to stop!
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