The more “records” we own, the more patterns we can recall to send out that perfect dopamine hit. Like a needle tracing the grooves of a record, our brains trace these patterns. When the corticofugal network registers that of “Someone Like You,” our brain releases just the right amount of dopamine. The majority of our brains have memorized this progression and know exactly what to expect when it comes around. Take the chorus of “Someone Like You” by Adele, a song that has one of the most recognizable chord progressions in popular music: I, V, vi IV. This is the essential reason why music triggers such powerful emotional reactions, and why, as an art form, it is so inextricably tied to our emotional responses.
When a specific sound maps onto a pattern, our brain releases a corresponding amount of dopamine, the main chemical source of some of our most intense emotions. When it comes to hearing music, a network of nerves in the auditory cortex called the corticofugal network helps catalog the different patterns of music. Our brains change as they recognize new patterns in the world, which is what makes brains, well, useful. It has to do with the plasticity of our brain. It can help us understand why listening to new music is so hard, and why it can make us feel uneasy, angry, or even riotous. But there is a physiological explanation for our nostalgia and our desire to seek comfort in the familiar. It’s a dictum too obvious to dissect, a positive-feedback loop as stale as the air in our self-isolation chambers: We love the things we know because we know them and therefore we love them.
One of my favorite pieces of arts criticism is a 2016 article from The Onion titled, “ Nation Affirms Commitment to Things They Recognize.” From music to celebrities to clothing brands to conventional ideas of beauty, the joke is self-explanatory: People love the stuff they already know. Instead of a reliable Debussy ballet, many left the theater that night miserable, agitated, with few jettisoned cabbage leaves stuck to their dresses, and for what, just to hear some new music? Life was on one track, and suddenly they were thrust off into the unknown. Maybe the Parisian audience wasn’t expecting a feat so unfamiliar and new that night, they simply wanted to hear music they recognized that drew upon the modes and rhythms they had come to know. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is now hailed as the most sweepingly influential piece of music composed in the early 20th century, a tectonic shift in form and aesthetic that was, as the critic Alex Ross wrote in his book The Rest Is Noise, “lowdown yet sophisticated, smartly savage, style and muscle intertwined.” Within the brambles of The Rite are the seeds of an entire outgrowth of modernism: jazz, experimental, and electronic music flow back to The Rite.
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