How Music Influences the Mind: Culture, Science & Philosophy
Music has a great influence; our mind, the greatest asset we have, can be shaped and affected by music.
Kamilah Abbas 
Imagine walking into a café: the smell of coffee lingers, conversation hums softly, and a song drifts from the speakers—its rhythm subtly shaping your mood, your pace, even your thoughts.
Music is everywhere, sometimes unnoticed, sometimes impossible to ignore, yet its influence runs far deeper than mere background noise.
It can transport us across memories, amplify emotions, and even synchronise our brains and bodies in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Across cultures and centuries, music has healed, inspired, and connected humans, revealing truths about emotion, cognition, and society that words alone cannot capture.
Culture and Society
Music is a ubiquitous aspect of daily life. It surrounds us constantly—sometimes quietly, almost imperceptibly, and other times in ways that demand our full attention.
Whether it plays subtly in the background of a café, shaping mood and attention as one types away at a keyboard, or fills a room because someone has intentionally selected a song, music permeates human experience.
Music shapes human experience in ways we often overlook: it can enhance performance for athletes in training, evoke self-expression through playing an instrument, and shift moods, creating emotional and social resonance.
Yet not everyone experiences music as a chosen companion. Some regard it as an imposition: the inescapable soundtrack that plays in supermarkets, gyms, workplaces, and public transportation.
In these spaces, one does not consciously decide to listen. Music simply appears. This phenomenon reflects what musicologist Tia DeNora calls “musical structuring of the environment,” in which sound is used to “regulate mood, behaviour, and social experience” (DeNora, 2000).
Background music is intentionally curated to shape consumer pacing, emotional tone, or atmosphere. As DeNora writes, such soundscapes function as “aesthetic technologies of the self,” influencing people even when they are unaware they are listening.
Music has also played a crucial role in cultural and social life throughout history. “The ancient Greeks assigned the god Apollo to reign over both music and healing” (Trehan, 2004).
Ancient shamanic curative rituals used rhythmically repetitive music to facilitate trance induction (Lefevre, 2004). Aristotle and Plato prescribed music to those debilitated by uncontrollable emotions: Plato recommended music and dance for the fearful and anxious, while Aristotle spoke of music’s power to restore health and normalcy (Gallant & Holosko, 1997).
Across societies, music serves as a tool for social bonding, emotional expression, and cultural transmission. When people from one culture exchange music with another, they gain insight into different ways of life, fostering understanding, reconciliation, and education.
Even in modern commercial spaces, music is carefully curated to shape behaviour. Sociologist Simon Frith notes that the music industry is built on “the work of selection,” with “gatekeepers who decide what is worth hearing” (Frith, 1996).
Sound in public spaces—such as shops, restaurants, or gyms—is often chosen strategically to create atmosphere, influence dwell time, and evoke a branded identity.
Music affects behaviour in social and cultural contexts. Group singing, dancing, or drumming synchronises participants’ movements and fosters social cohesion.
Anthropological studies have demonstrated that shared musical experiences can reduce aggression, strengthen cooperation, and foster empathy within communities.
Music also serves as a channel for self-expression, enabling individuals to regulate emotions, communicate their identity, and process experiences that might otherwise be difficult to articulate (Patel, 2008; Langer, 1951).
These behavioural effects arise not only from cultural learning but also from the brain’s innate response to structured sound: rhythmic entrainment, emotional resonance, and activation of the reward system all contribute to the ways humans move, feel, and act in response to music.
Science: Music and the Brain
Why does music have such a profound influence on us? The answer lies partly in how the human brain processes sound. “The brain's response to music is… complex. Instead of interpreting each tone individually, the brain groups the sequences of tones together and identifies the relationships between the sounds” (Blood & Zatorre, 2001).
Pitch, tempo, and melodic pattern all influence mood and physiological responses: high pitch, accelerated rhythm, and ascending melodies can increase tension and anxiety, sometimes leading to feelings of loss of control (Lefevre, 2004).
From an evolutionary perspective, listening to music engages ancient neural mechanisms. Whelan argues that the modern experience of live music is a vestige of primitive adaptation.
Early mammals, most likely nocturnal, relied heavily on acute hearing to detect predators, navigate their environment, and interpret social signals. In a concert hall, surrounded by layers of timbre, reverberation, and dynamic shifts, “the brain has to sift through all the ambient noise… It’s a much more primitive form of listening compared to a focused conversation” (Whelan).
This suggests that musical engagement taps into survival-based attentional and auditory circuits that predate language.
Neuroscientific research further demonstrates that music activates a distributed network of brain regions. Blood & Zatorre (2001) found that pleasurable musical experiences engage systems involved in emotion, reward, memory, and movement.
Emotional centres such as the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex become more active, while the nucleus accumbens and ventral striatum release dopamine, reflecting the brain’s core reward circuitry.
The hippocampus integrates musical structure with memory, and motor regions activate even without physical movement, explaining our instinctive drive to tap, nod, or sway in time to the rhythm.
Listening to music thus engages cognitive, affective, and sensorimotor systems, demonstrating that humans are neurologically wired to respond to structured sound. As cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Levitin observes, “We are a musical species no less than a linguistic one” (Levitin, 2006).
Philosophy: Music as a Language of Feeling & Consciousness
While neuroscience explains how music affects the brain, philosophers have long explored what it communicates. Susanne Langer noted that “the most highly developed type of such purely connotational semantics is music” (Langer, 1951, p. 93).
In other words, music conveys meaning before words exist to describe it. Langer argues that music is a “language of feeling”: it expresses emotional rhythms through crescendos, diminuendos, major and minor keys, and temporal unfolding. She writes that music “reveals the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach” (Langer, 1951, p. 199, original emphasis).
Music thus communicates emotion directly, without reliance on logic or vocabulary.
This philosophical perspective complements both cultural and scientific understandings. Music is more than entertainment: it is a medium of healing, ritual, and emotional insight. Across history, humans have recognised its power to influence the mind and body, from ancient Greek healing practices to modern therapeutic applications.
By revealing the morphology of emotion, music provides insight into human experience that words alone cannot convey.
Another angle is the consciousness of music: Philosophers have long argued that music uniquely engages consciousness by shaping our temporal and affective awareness.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1911) suggested that music provides a direct experience of duration (la durée), an inner flow of time that cannot be captured by conceptual thought.
According to Bergson, music mirrors the continuous, lived experience of consciousness, unfolding moment by moment, and allowing listeners to become aware of the passage of time as an emotional and subjective process.
Unlike language, which organises thought into concepts, music engages the mind’s immediate temporal awareness, making us conscious of feeling itself.
Building on this idea, contemporary philosopher John Dewey (1934) emphasised that music is an “experience in itself” rather than a symbolic representation.
Listening to music brings the mind into a state of present-focused awareness, blending sensation, emotion, and imagination.
Through dynamic contours, rhythmic tension, and harmonic progression, music draws attention to subtle shifts in feeling, fostering an awareness of inner states that might otherwise remain unconscious.
In other words, music can make us conscious of our own consciousness, revealing the rhythm and texture of our emotional life.
Conclusion
Music’s influence on the human mind is at once cultural, biological, and philosophical.
It binds communities, conveys emotion, and transmits cultural knowledge; it activates neural systems involved in emotion, reward, memory, and movement; and it offers a unique medium for exploring consciousness and the temporal flow of feeling.
From ancient healing rituals to modern concert halls, from the instinctive sway to rhythm to the subtle shaping of mood in public spaces, music demonstrates an unparalleled ability to shape human experience.
In revealing the interplay between emotion, cognition, and culture, music confirms itself as a fundamental element of what it means to be human—a language of feeling, a mirror of consciousness, and a bridge between individuals, societies, and generations.
