![]() ![]() Others were motivated by cognitive psychology, aesthetics, cultural psychology, or personality psychology. Some studies were motivated by questions related to development. Empirical studies of musical functions have been very heterogeneous. For many scholars, the motivation has been simply to identify the multiple ways in which music is used in everyday lives (e.g., Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham, 2007 Boer, 2009 Lonsdale and North, 2011 Packer and Ballantyne, 2011). In proposing various musical functions, not all scholars have related these functions to music's presumed evolutionary roots. Nevertheless, evidence from modern listeners might provide useful clues pertinent to theorizing about origins. ![]() Of course, how music is used today need have no relationship with music's function(s) in the remote past. The assumption is that the function(s) that music is presumed to have served in the past would be echoed in at least one of the functions that music serves today. In fact, many scholars have endeavored to enumerate various musical functions (see below). Nevertheless, there are a number of plausible and interesting conjectures that offer useful starting-points for investigating the functions of music.Ī promising approach to the question of music's origins focuses on how music is used-that is, it's various functions. Necessarily, hypotheses concerning the original functions of music will remain speculative. There is little physical evidence-like stone carvings or fossilized footprints-that might provide clues to music's past. The origin of music is shrouded in prehistory. Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, musicologists, and neuroscientists have proposed a number of theories concerning the origin and purpose of music and some have pursued scientific approaches to investigating them (e.g., Fitch, 2006 Peretz, 2006 Levitin, 2007 Schäfer and Sedlmeier, 2010). Throughout history, scholars of various stripes have pondered the nature of music. The ubiquity and antiquity of music has inspired considerable speculation regarding its origin and function. Recognizably musical activities appear to have been present in every known culture on earth, with ancient roots extending back 250,000 years or more (see Zatorre and Peretz, 2001). The enthusiasm for music is not a recent development. Music is a ubiquitous companion to people's everyday lives. Music listening is one of the most popular leisure activities. Moreover, in the array of seemingly odd behaviors, few behaviors match music for commandeering so much time, energy, and money. Most common behaviors have a recognizable utility that can be plausibly traced to the practical motives of survival and procreation. Music listening is one of the most enigmatic of human behaviors. The implications of these results are discussed in light of theories on the origin and the functionality of music listening and also for the application of musical stimuli in all areas of psychology and for research in music cognition. The first and second dimensions were judged to be much more important than the third-a result that contrasts with the idea that music has evolved primarily as a means for social cohesion and communication. Principal component analysis suggested three distinct underlying dimensions: People listen to music to regulate arousal and mood, to achieve self-awareness, and as an expression of social relatedness. These functions were distilled to 129 non-redundant functions that were then rated by 834 respondents. Part two of the paper presents an empirical investigation of hundreds of functions that could be extracted from the reviewed contributions. It is concluded that a comprehensive investigation addressing the basic dimensions underlying the plethora of functions of music listening is warranted. Part one of the paper reviews the research contributions that have explicitly referred to musical functions. ![]() Moreover, there remains no agreement about the underlying dimensions of these functions. However, different theoretical approaches, different methods, and different samples have left a heterogeneous picture regarding the number and nature of musical functions. Why do people listen to music? Over the past several decades, scholars have proposed numerous functions that listening to music might fulfill. ![]()
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