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

by Daniel J. Levitin

The swampy Deep South ambience of “Green River” by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son”; the oboes in Beethoven’s Sixth (conducted by Karajan),

Music

Stevie Wonder’s “Golden Lady” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Hypnotized” establish a tactus that is changed when the rest of the instruments come in.

Songs

Music processing helps infants to prepare for language; it may pave the way to linguistic prosody, even before the child’s developing brain is ready to process phonetics. Music for the developing brain is a form of play, an exercise that invokes higher-level integrative processes that nurture exploratory competence, preparing the child to eventually explore generative language development through babbling, and ultimately more complex linguistic and paralinguistic productions.

Music