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

by Daniel J. Levitin

The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth,

We have the cognitive capacity to detect wrong notes, to find music we enjoy, to remember hundreds of melodies, and to tap our feet in time with the music—an activity that involves a process of meter extraction so complicated that most computers cannot do it.

Mothers throughout the world, and as far back in time as we can imagine, have used soft singing to soothe their babies to sleep, or to distract them from something that has made them cry.

As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, “Music is organized sound.”

This phenomenon leads to the notion of circularity in pitch perception, and is similar to circularity in colors. Although red and violet fall at opposite ends of the continuum of visible frequencies of electromagnetic energy, we see them as perceptually similar.

The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain,