KEVIN COURTNEYreviews The Music InstinctBy Philip Ball Bodley Head, 452pp, £20

WHY DO we like music? Now, there’s a question we don’t ask ourselves very often. We don’t even ponder why we prefer Led Zeppelin to Leo Sayer. Goes without saying, doesn’t it? But turn off your Zep remasters for a minute and lend an ear to Philip Ball’s theories of music – you might hear something even more dazzling than a Jimmy Page guitar solo.

In a book packed with left-field musical ideas, off-beat scientific thought and headspinning mathematical equations, Ball sets out to answer the mysteries of music – how it works, how our brains interpret it and why the world can’t survive a day without the bloody stuff.

Call him the David Attenborough of sound, but Ball reaches some far-flung places in his quest for the true meaning of music. From the gamelan music of Indonesia, rated one of the most complex musical forms in the world, to the short, simple phrasings of the Siriono Indians of Bolivia, The Music Instinctcircles the globe to learn how music manages to convey moods, emotions and higher ideals, how some cultures use it to communicate with the dead, and how others use it to inculcate national pride.

Theories abound as to how and why music became so all-pervading, and Ball considers each one. Did music evolve from the cooing communication between a mother and her infant (The Ronettes' Be My Babytheory), or was it a social tool for bringing a community together (the New Seekers' I'd Like To Teach The World to Singtheory)? Or was it developed as a way to attract the opposite sex via overt displays of instrumental prowess (the Jimi Hendrix theory)?

You don't have to be a musician to enjoy this book, but it helps if you like music. Musicality is, says Ball, innate in us all, even those of us who can't sing or play an instrument. Most of us can make sense of a Mozart symphony, an avant-garde Radiohead track or Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

When someone tells you they're tone deaf, they're most likely just using a cliche. In reality, medically defined tone deafness only occurs in a tiny percentage of people – the majority of us can detect minuscule changes in pitch and pinpoint the tonic (root) note of most tunes from a very early age. We may find it hard to sing or play a Beatles song, but we can tell whether someone else is doing it right or not. If Jedward had been singing in tune, for instance, they'd probably never have stuck out from the flat landscape of perfectly pitched vocalists on The X Factor.

Ball joins the dots between music and brainpower, but poo-poos the so-called Mozart effect that has parents pumping The Marriage of Figarointo their toddlers' ears in the hope of hothousing a mini-genius. There is nothing to prove that Mozart has any greater influence on your child's IQ than Motorhead. Learning music can, however, have a positive effect on your IQ, and help develop good motor, auditory and visual-spatial skills, though that doesn't quite explain Ozzy Osbourne.

The 17th-century German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler believed the planets were singing in harmony – this may be a little far-fetched, but it’s no stretch to say that music does appeal to our higher, more celestial instincts. When we hear a wonderful, uplifting piece of music, we really do believe we can fly.

So turn on your mind, relax and float down this phantasmagorical stream of musical consciousness. It may at times feel like you’re ploughing through Wagner’s Ring cycle, and you may feel a bit blinded by the science, but you’ll feel all the more emotionally intelligent at the end if it.

Kevin Courtney is an Irish Timesjournalist