An Oceanic lullaby, ‘Gimme Shelter’ and more elucidate how music taps into our emotions

‘We find music wherever there are people,’ says the professor and musician Milton Mermikides near the opening of this lecture at Gresham College in London, in which he sets out to make sense of why that’s the case. Taking the audience on a journey that begins with an image of a 30,000-year-old flute carved from a wooly mammoth tusk and ends with an audiovisual rendering of Eclipse (1973) by Pink Floyd, Mermikides traverses musicology, anthropology, psychology and neuroscience to detail the myriad ways music triggers our primal instincts and activates our emotions. Brimming with fascinating examples and moving moments, Mermikides offers captivating insights into the many things humanity has learned about our love of music, and what remains a mystery.