10/10/2025

Is Music a Recreational Drug?

The Mystery and Apparent Pointlessness of Music

Music is something that most of us enjoy listening to, and many of us enjoy making it.

But we don’t really know what music is. Our ability to identify what is musical and what is not musical is entirely subjective. We do not know any objective criterion that distinguishes what is music from what is not music.

There is no clear evidence that music satisfies any biological purpose.

There is another category of things that we enjoy and also apparently serve no biological purpose, and that category is Recreational Drugs.

A plausible hypothesis, to explain this similarity, is that music actually is a recreational drug.

Of course music is not actually a chemical substance that one takes by mouth (or some other means) – it’s a category of patterns of sounds that we listen to.

Nevertheless, we can consider all the ways that music is like a recreational drug, and maybe that can help us understand what music actually is, and how or why it affects us the way that it does.

Recreational Drugs

Recreational drugs exist on a continuum that ranges from drugs that are mostly safe and socially acceptable, like coffee, to drugs that are not at all safe or socially acceptable (at least in most modern societies), like heroin.

Somewhere in between those two extremes lies alcohol. Alcohol is socially acceptable in many societies, and in a variety of situations within those societies. At the same time alcohol causes a significant amount of harm, both to those who drink and to those around them.

Alcohol is a good example of a recreational drug that we can compare to music, because we can actually compare many aspects of how people comsume music and and alcohol:

Parties

In many social circles, there are two things that are going to be there at most parties:

There will be lots of alcohol, and the music will be very loud.

Nuff said.

When you feel sad

Sometimes people, when they feel sad, have a drink, to help them feel less sad.

And sometimes, when people feel sad, they listen to some music.

When you feel happy

Recreational drugs can do more than make sad people less sad – they can also make happy people even more happy.

This leads to “let’s celebrate with a drink”.

But people also celebrate with music, and, perhaps, dancing in the streets (which will usually involve music), depending on what is being celebrated and by how many people.

Addiction

Alcohol addiction is a well-known phenomenon, and it has its own special name, ie “alcoholism”.

Music addiction is less well known.

Most music addiction is associated with maladaptive daydreaming, where:

So in effect the person is addicted to listening to music.

In general the definition of “addiction” is somewhat fuzzy, and there are even those who claim that “addiction” doesn’t really exist.

A common-sense criterion is that addiction is where a person has such a strong desire to do something that it severely interferes with their ability to do all the other things that a person normally has to do in order to live life.

In the case of music-induced maladaptive daydreaming, the addict will spend all their available spare time daydreaming while listening to music, and in severe cases this may exclude any possibility of studying for a formal qualification or holding down a job.

(And there can be “functional maladaptive daydreamers”, just like there can be “functional alcoholics”.)

Harmful Consumption

Even when a person’s pattern of alcohol consumption is not considered to be an addiction, alcohol still causes significant harm.

For example, in the long term, regular consumption of any amount of alcohol will cause health problems.

In the case of music, the main long-term health problem caused by its consumption is hearing damage caused by listening to excessively loud music.

As with alcohol consumption, most people know that “too much can be bad for you”, but there are many situations where people ignore the risk and just do it anyway, and everyone agrees not to talk about the downside of what they are doing (or perhaps mention it, but only in a joking manner – “the concert was really great, the music was so loud, I might go deaf, HA HA”).

Implications

If we accept the hypothesis that music is like a recreational drug, what can this tell us about music, ie how and why does it affect us as it does?

When we take recreational drugs, they cause us to have certain feelings, or they alter the feelings that we already have, perhaps reducing or increasing the intensity of them.

The important thing to know about these drug-induced feelings and alterations in feelings is that they are false.

The changes in our feelings are not the result of receiving relevant information or of performing better processing of the information that we already have – rather they are caused by chemical subversion of our brain’s mechanisms for processing information.

Typically the drugs interact with the mechanisms whereby the neurons in our brains communicate with each other chemically.

Music is not a chemical substance – it is a stimulus, a somewhat complex one.

Can a stimulus subvert the brain’s information processing mechanisms in the same way that an ingested chemical substance can?

Actually, we already have a name for stimuli which are contrived to create false perceptions – we call them illusions.

So, could music be an illusion?

Most known illusions are visual illusions, and in most cases we can define fairly precisely the specific false perceptions that they cause.

For example, a pattern of alternating white and black curved lines might create an illusion of motion, where it looks like the pattern is moving, even though we know that is a picture printed on a piece of paper, so it can’t be moving.

We can tentatively identify the emotional feelings that music invokes as being false, in the sense that the music itself is just set of patterns of sound, which are not a thing to be emotional about.

But of course when we consider language, and in particular spoken language, we know that the sounds of language can invoke emotions in the listener, based on the listener’s response to the meaning of what is said by a speaker.

So the sounds of music might be emotional because music is some kind of language, one that expresses emotional meanings.

The main problem with the idea that music is a language of emotion is that people do not use music to express emotion in a pragmatic sense. If something makes a sad, and we want to tell someone about it, we don’t normally start singing about it – normally we just talk about it.

Features of Music that are Illusion-inducing

If indeed music is some kind of illusion, then, even without knowing exactly what type of illusion it is, we can potentially identify the specific features of music that induce the illusion.

Illusions typically consist of stimuli which lie outside the set of naturally occurring stimuli, and as a result of this they lie outside the boundaries of the set of stimuli that our senses and brains have evolved to process correctly.

So if we can identify which features of music lie outside these boundaries, ie which aspects of music are the most “unnatural”, this might give us a clue about how it is that music induces some kind of illusion.

Exact Repetition

One particularly unnatural aspect of music is exact repetition.

There are at least two distinct aspects of music that involve exact repetition:

We know that the strength of the effect of music does depend quite a lot on the ability of the performers to perform melody and rhythm with a reasonable level of precision – to the extent that musicians have to put in years of conscious practice to achieve the require precision of pitch and timing.

This is consistent with a hypothesis that the exactness of repetition is critical to the strength of feeling that music induces.

A Full Theory of Music …

Probably there a multiple things going on when we respond to music.

For example, music might actually be a combination of an illusory mechanism and a prehistoric proto-musical language of emotion spoken by our distant ancestors.

I have written up quite a few ideas about what music might be and how it might have evolved in my What is Music? blog at https://whatismusic.info/blog.