The music in you

Any party goer can tap her heel to an unfamiliar song without realizing it. Yet when asked on site, she might reply: “Music? I don’t know anything about that.”

Maybe you’ve heard a variation on this theme: “I don’t have a musical bone in my body.” Most of us make music publicly just a few times a year, when it’s someone’s birthday and the cake comes out. Privately, it’s a different story. We belt out tunes in the shower and create rhythm tracks on our steering wheel. But when we think about musical expertise, we tend to imagine professionals who specialize in performance, people we’d pay to hear. As for the rest of us, our bumbling private efforts, rather than illustrating that we share an irresistible urge to make music, seem only to demonstrate that we don’t enjoy essential musical capacity.

But the more psychologists investigate musicality, the more it seems that nearly all of us are musical experts, in quite a surprising sense. A lot of the most interesting and substantial elements of musicality are things that we all share. We aren’t talking about instinctive, inborn universals here. Our musical knowledge is the product of long experience; maybe not years spent over an instrument, but a lifetime spent absorbing music from the open window of every passing car.

In fact, for all its remarkable power, music is in good company. Many of our feelings are governed by a similar rule. We don’t know how we come to like certain food more than others. We don’t know why we fall in love. Yet in the very act of making these choices we reveal the effects of a host of instinctive mental processes. The fact that we respond to music so naturally and normally actually speaks to its strength and universality.