A One Sided Coin
Ever since music became a distributable form of art it has rapidly evolved. The late 19th-century invention of the gramophone allowed people to be able to listen to music in their own homes without a live performance. As the 1900s rolled around, music became an integral part of human culture with jazz and folk. But it wasn't until the 1950s and the advent of rock 'n' roll and pop where music became synonymous with culture itself. Ever since then, music has become an essential part of the human experience, and because of this, it changes as we change.
Now I would like to jump to the 1980s when pop music became synthesized and drums became pads instead of kits. Ever since then, music has become more and more electronic, almost as if it is in transition from human, to machine. In a sense "dehumanization" is occurring both to humans themselves (i.e. dependence on cell phones) but also to music. The reason I put dehumanization in quotations is that I do not mean it in the traditional negative sense, I simply mean less organic, more cybernetic. While that is a great proposition, I must also provide evidence to the fact that they are not just correlated, but connected by some causation.
The avenue by which I say that the dehumanization of music and people are connected is stimulation. Smartphone addicts and narcotics addicts both experience similar neural patterns when using their phone or drug and choice respectively(1). Specifically, they both cause the brain to produce dopamine. Something important to know about dopamine is that the more dopamine your brain produces, the more dopamine it takes to feel dopamine's signature "rush(2)." In the words of James Ferraro, this creates "dopamine-driven feedback loops"
But how does this connect to music? Well, I hypothesize that this process also occurs with the process of music listening, in fact, dopamine excretion has been shown to be caused by listening to music(3). Another study shows that music of higher BPM (up to a certain point) causes more dopamine to be excreted than slower tempos. Furthermore, at points in music where a "drop" occurs, dopamine is shown to spike(4). Much of electronic is fast-paced and is full of build-ups and drops. So, using the information we have, we can now conjecture with relative confidence, that the same drive of dopamine that causes us to become inseparable from our technology is the same one that drives our taste in music to a more chaotic, complex, loud, and electronic direction.
Dedicated To SOPHIE. Rest In Peace.