What is the first purpose of the musical art?
Artists attempting to express individuality, attractiveness, distinction and novelty, art has hence a great capacity to induce feelings and emotions in people: listening to a beautiful piece of music, listeners will enhance their imagination or exorcise their individual sentiments.
Arts emerged from the desire to manage the life of the individual in a quest for well being. Human beings tend to stay healthy by maintaining a relatively stable physiological equilibrium, for example through regulation of the body temperature, but also through the use of the brain and the action of the mind, that last notion being assimilated to the notion of self, in the context of cultural evolution. It is in that context that the arts have developed.
Thinking about how bones once became flutes may help to get an idea of how accents could create rhythms and some rhythms could create serendipity. In an environment that was not safe, it must have been a great consolation for the barely born human heart. Even unorganized, it must have contributed to well being or, at least, joy and peace. At the elementary level, art is here to please the mind and the soul. Intellectual elaborations came later. But before the human being was completely minded and conscious, efficient behaviors like those leading to musical creation existed.
Music to orient the body and the soul
Attaining the human mind, music arises into a world populated with attachment, disruptions, bonding processes and all kinds of positive or negative feelings and states, from envy to revenge, from love to peace. In it, music, as a form of art, may be a tool of communication for listeners and a means of well being for artists, conveying emotional and factual information. In that sense, art is subliminal.
For example, even without noticing it, people may want to go watch thrillers to better manage situations in which they hope they would never be involved in. Music can elevate listeners from the level of the body to the threshold of the mind. That is why it is a refinement that people want to achieve. When they experience art, people change for the better.
Art forms, including music, also have a part to play in what psychology researchers call the attachment system. That system manages behaviors related for example to romantic love. It includes three degrees. At a very elementary level that can be called sex drive, when it comes to romantic love, it may help to distinguish one person from another. Then, a little more complex, at the stage of attraction, it is a tool to focus on someone. At the higher level of complexity, which is attachment itself, the system helps us to persevere in a relationship.
In the context of romantic love, what does music bring? Being conscious that they feel romantic love, people begin to consider one person in a very special way: the car of that person is unique, the street in which the person lives is different from all other streets on earth! The person has a special meaning. Romantic love may be an addiction, especially when a person is rejected and it leads to a negative sense of self. A huge part of music is written to cover that subject, especially in popular music.