Try to find a person without headphones in the subway. It is unlikely to succeed - everyone nowadays carries their favorite tunes in their phone or player. Ask what the music is for, and everyone will answer that it is a great tool for creating mood and a way to influence our emotional state.
How did the music come about?
The first music on Earth was rhythm, and the first musical instruments were drums. Change of day and night, seasons, heartbeat - everything in our life is rhythmic. It is not surprising that the primitive man felt this influence and tried to reproduce the rhythm that he heard in the world and inside himself with the help of improvised means, already guessing why music is needed.
The rhythmic pattern set the desired mood. To boost morale, the drum beats were quick and powerful, and the shamanistic trance was achieved thanks to the slow and seemingly extended beats in time. Human culture did not stand still - along with it the complexity of creating musical instruments increased. Nowadays, the forms of music are diverse: from living, happening here and now, to electronic, created without a single tool, only with the help of a computer program.
Music is like a vibration
Many religions mention the creation of the universe through sounds. First of all, any sound is a vibration of energy waves of a certain length. Knowing the essence of these waves, you can know the essence of the universe, - this was believed in antiquity, arguing about what music is for. The gods created the worlds by the power of their will, expressed in a voice. According to one of the Indian tribes of America, the world was blown out by the creator-demiurge from a musical horn.
What is music for in the modern world?
At this stage, music has reached the climax of its development - in parallel with technical knowledge and human capabilities. We do not yet know what music awaits us in the future, nor do we know what new inventions humanity will create. New developments will lead to the creation of new forms of music that we still cannot imagine.
Now music is a way to isolate oneself from the rest of reality and literally drown in sounds. Favorite song listened in the morning can provide a good mood for the whole day. For sports, people often choose music that makes them stronger, from hard rock to drum and bass.
Remember the silence
With all the positive effects of music, the influence of silence cannot be underestimated. We’ve already figured out why music is needed, but why do you need to listen to silence from time to time?
There are so many sounds in the modern world that scientists have even come up with the concepts of “sound noise” and “sound pollution”. If sound affects us so subtly, then, constantly being in the sound field of a big and noisy city, we doom ourselves to stay in an excessive tone. Remember how calm it becomes in nature, where the number of sounds is minimized. And how can a constantly recurring sound stimulus like a barking dog or crying little children sometimes get on your nerves. Speaking of children: it is believed that the sounds of their crying are specially programmed by nature at such frequencies to cause an adult to react immediately - after all, no one can bear children's cries for a long time.
What is music from headphones for? To protect your internal sound from extraneous noise. This undoubtedly saves in the crowd of a megalopolis or on a long trip. But when you are left alone, try at least sometimes turning off the music in order to hear your own thoughts. Often we listen to our favorite songs, when we want to run away from something, knowing that as soon as the melody stops, our thoughts will return to what we are so eager to escape from. This is neither good nor bad - it just needs to be accepted as a fact and learn to find harmony both in sounds and in their absence.