Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash
There is something almost mysterious about music. A melody can move us to tears without saying a word. A familiar song can transport us decades into the past, bringing back a person, a place or a feeling with startling clarity. A great anthem can make thousands of strangers sing as one. A love song can express something we have felt but could never put into words.
Perhaps this is why music has so often been described as a language of the soul.
The word “soul” need not imply anything supernatural. It can simply refer to the deepest emotional and aspirational dimensions of human experience: our capacity to love, to hope, to grieve, to belong, to strive for something greater than ourselves — and to be moved by beauty.
Increasingly, psychology and neuroscience are demonstrating just how deeply music reaches into those dimensions of human life.
Neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music, has argued that music occupies a fundamental place in human nature. In The World in Six Songs, he identifies friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge and love among the fundamental functions of song, connecting them to the social bonding that has enabled human culture to develop.
Other researchers have reached similar conclusions from an evolutionary and psychological perspective. A major interdisciplinary study published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences proposed that social bonding may be an overarching function of human musicality, bringing together research from anthropology, biology, psychology, neuroscience and musicology. Music allows people to synchronise, harmonise and share emotional experiences on a scale that ordinary interpersonal interaction cannot easily achieve.
This helps explain one of music’s most remarkable qualities: it can make us feel that we belong to something larger than ourselves.
Think of the songs that accompany moments of collective courage — the anthems sung during times of war, civil rights struggles, sporting triumphs or national mourning. Think of the music used to celebrate freedom, solidarity and resistance. Music can give emotional form to the human desire to overcome adversity.
Research is beginning to illuminate this connection, too. A 2026 paper by psychologist Scott T. Allison proposes that heroic action can involve the integration of competing emotions, including fear, anger, compassion and moral concern. Music, in turn, is remarkably capable of evoking similarly complex emotional combinations — fear and courage, sorrow and hope, vulnerability and strength. A stirring crescendo, determined rhythm or rising chorus can make the emotional struggle involved in overcoming adversity feel almost tangible.
And then there is love.
Across cultures and centuries, perhaps no subject has generated more songs than the desire to love and be loved. From intimate ballads to wedding songs, lullabies and songs of heartbreak, music continually returns to the same longing: connection with another person.
Psychological research suggests this is no coincidence. Researchers Shira Gabriel and Elaine Paravati have proposed several ways music facilitates social connection, including creating a sense of collective emotional experience, providing narratives, reminding us of other people and even functioning as a kind of “social surrogate.” Research has also found that listeners perceive distinctly social emotions in music, including feelings associated with affiliation and interpersonal connection.
In other words, music does not merely tell us how someone feels. It can communicate how people relate, even belong, to one another.
This brings us to a much deeper question: where did our extraordinary capacity for love and moral concern come from in the first place?
It is a question that sits at the heart of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith’s work on the human condition.
In his treatise, Griffith argues that the loving and cooperative side of human nature is not simply a cultural invention imposed upon an otherwise selfish animal. He proposes that our distant ancestors developed an unusually nurturing way of raising their young, and that this prolonged nurturing had profound evolutionary consequences.
A mother’s care for her offspring may begin as an instinctive mechanism for ensuring the survival of her genes. But, from the infant’s perspective, something extraordinary is happening: it is receiving warmth, food, protection, affection and attention without having to earn them or give anything in return.
Griffith argues that when this nurturing was sufficiently prolonged, infants were effectively “love-indoctrinated” — conditioned through the experience of unconditional care into responding selflessly to others. Over immense periods of evolutionary time, he proposes, this process enabled apparently selfless behaviour to become established as an instinctive part of our nature — the foundation of what we experience today as conscience or our moral sense.
It is an unusual proposition, but it gives a striking new perspective on the human “soul”.
Our deepest moral impulses — our instinct to care for others, protect the vulnerable, sacrifice for someone we love and put another person’s wellbeing before our own — are, in Griffith’s account, expressions of this ancient nurturing heritage.
That helps make sense of something we encounter constantly in music.
Why are we so moved by a parent singing their child a lullaby? Why do songs about unconditional love have such enduring power? Why can music about sacrifice, forgiveness or devotion reach us even when the circumstances described are far removed from our own lives?
Perhaps these songs resonate because they touch something very old in us.
Music may be one of the ways our species remembers its own capacity for connection.
But if this capacity for love and selflessness is so deeply embedded in us, another question inevitably follows: why is human behaviour so often marked by conflict, competition, anger and insecurity?
Griffith proposes that approximately two million years ago, the emergence of a fully conscious, experimenting intellect created an unprecedented problem. Our intellect needed to question, explore and understand; our established instincts, by contrast, provided inherited orientations about how to behave. As the conscious mind began deviating from those instinctive expectations in its search for understanding, Griffith argues, a conflict arose between instinct and intellect.
The result, in his account, was what he calls the human condition: the psychological insecurity that lies beneath much of our anger, egocentricity, competitiveness and alienation.
This gives music an even more intriguing significance.
Perhaps the tension we hear in music — the longing for peace alongside the experience of conflict, the yearning for love alongside heartbreak, the celebration of courage alongside fear and anger — is not accidental. Perhaps music continually gives expression to the two sides of our human experience: the cooperative, loving nature we inherited and the psychologically troubled state that developed as our conscious intellect emerged.
It is also why the heroic theme is so powerful.
Griffith’s interpretation ultimately casts humanity itself in a different light. Rather than seeing our history simply as the story of a selfish and destructive species struggling to become good, he argues that we are a fundamentally loving species that became psychologically upset through an evolutionary conflict we could not understand.
Our struggle to understand and ultimately overcome that conflict can therefore be viewed as heroic.
And music has been celebrating that heroism for thousands of years.
The warrior returning home. The lover sacrificing everything for another. The parent protecting a child. The oppressed rising against injustice. The lonely person finding belonging. The human being confronting fear and choosing courage.
These stories recur because they speak to something deeply embedded in us.
Science can increasingly explain what happens in the brain when music moves us. Psychology can investigate why rhythm synchronises people, why melodies evoke memories and why shared singing strengthens social bonds. Musicologists can analyse harmony, expectation and emotional structure.
But a deeper question remains: why do these things matter so profoundly to us?
Griffith argues that beneath the turmoil of the human condition lies an ancient moral and loving heritage — a nature shaped through nurturing and expressed in our conscience, our longing for connection and our capacity for selfless love.
Seen this way, music is more than entertainment. It may be one of humanity’s clearest expressions of its deepest nature.
The great songs of humanity do not merely document our suffering. They also give voice to our longing for harmony, our admiration for courage, our yearning to love and our hope that conflict can finally give way to understanding.
Perhaps that is why music can sometimes make us feel more fully human than almost anything else.
Before we could explain who we were, we were already singing about the kind of beings we longed to be.
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