This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

Music, then, can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to experience emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music. After all, we don’t get all weepy eyed when we experience other kinds of structure in our lives, such as a balanced checkbook or the orderly arrangement of first-aid products in a drugstore (well, at least most of us don’t). What is it about the particular kind of order we find in music that moves us so? The structure of scales and chords has something to do with it, as does the structure of our brains. Feature detectors in our brains work to extract information from the stream of sounds that hits our ears. The brain’s computational system combines these into a coherent whole, based in part on what it thinks it ought to be hearing, and in part based on expectations. Just where those expectations come from is one of the keys to understanding how music moves us, when it moves us, and why some music only makes us want to reach for the off button on our radios or CD players. The topic of musical expectations is perhaps the area in the cognitive neuroscience of music that most harmoniously unites music theory and neural theory, musicians and scientists, and to understand it completely, we have to study how particular patterns of music give rise to particular patterns of neural activations in the brain.