Maisonneuve | Face the Music: Music is at least forty thousand years old—probably older than speech. As a form of primitive emotional communication, it likely served an important evolutionary role. One theory suggests that, because music creates social ties, early humans who sang and played instruments together had a better chance of survival. Another theory—one favoured by Darwin and tested (with mixed results) by every teenage guy who ever picked up a guitar—is that the more musical the man, the more mates he attracts.
However it developed, we know that music stimulates the ventral tegmental area in the brain. This pleasure centre produces the chemical messenger dopamine and is linked to reward and motivation; it’s also turned on by chocolate, cocaine and love. When the VTA is stimulated, it triggers emotional responses to music that are separate from our intellectual ones. So even someone who can’t catch blatant musical errors—wrong notes in “Happy Birthday,” for example—can still tell if a song is happy or sad. Studies also show that young children can differentiate between scary and peaceful music, and that people can interpret emotion in music even when a song is in another language.