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

by Daniel J. Levitin

For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey “truth for now”—to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new “truth,” because that is the way science advances.

No known human culture now or anytime in the recorded past lacked music. Some of the oldest physical artifacts found in human and protohuman excavation sites are musical instruments: bone flutes and animal skins stretched over tree stumps to make drums.

Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries.

The Sesotho verb for singing (ho bina), as in many of the world’s languages, also means to dance; there is no distinction, since it is assumed that singing involves bodily movement.

Why do we listen to music, and why are we willing to spend so much money on music listening?

Understanding why we like music and what draws us to it is a window on the essence of human nature.

A subtle point in Darwinian theory is that living organisms—whether plants, viruses, insects, or animals—coevolved with the physical world. In other words, while all living things are changing in response to the world, the world is also changing in response to them.

Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain.

The power of music to evoke emotions is harnessed by advertising executives, filmmakers, military commanders, and mothers. Advertisers use music to make a soft drink, beer, running shoe, or car seem more hip than their competitors’.

Music is being used to manipulate our emotions, and we tend to accept, if not outright enjoy, the power of music to make us experience these different feelings. 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.

On the other hand, if we all hear music in the same way, how can we account for wide differences in musical preference—why is it that one man’s Mozart is another man’s Madonna?

Why do people seem to get stuck in their musical tastes as they grow older and cease experimenting with new music? This is the story of how brains and music coevolved—what music can teach us about the brain, what the brain can teach us about music, and what both can teach us about ourselves.

The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God. The church also banned the musical interval of an augmented fourth, the distance between C and F-sharp and also known as a tritone (the interval in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story when Tony sings the name “Maria”). This interval was considered so dissonant that it must have been the work of Lucifer,

What do the music of Bach, Depeche Mode, and John Cage fundamentally have in common? On the most basic level, what distinguishes Busta Rhymes’s “What’s It Gonna Be?!” or Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata from, say, the collection of sounds you’d hear standing in the middle of Times Square, or those you’d hear deep in a rainforest? As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, “Music is organized sound.”

Miles Davis famously described his improvisational technique as parallel to the way that Picasso described his use of a canvas: The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between objects.

This is particularly apparent in his album Kind of Blue.

What is pitch and where does it come from? This simple question has generated hundreds of scientific articles and thousands of experiments. Almost all of us, even without musical training, can tell if a singer is offkey; we might not be able to say whether she is sharp or flat, or by how much, but after the age of five, most humans have as well a refined ability to detect tones that are out of tune as to discriminate a question from an accusation (in English, a rising pitch indicates a question, a straight or slightly falling pitch indicates an accusation).

we can hear music under water or in other fluids if the water (or other fluid) molecules are caused to vibrate. But in the vacuum of space, with no molecules to vibrate, there is no sound. (The next time you’re watching Star Trek and hear the roar of the engines in space, you’ll have some good Trekkie Trivia to share.)

Great little piece of music/scientific trivia.

Like Einstein, Newton was a very poor student, and his teachers often complained of his inattentiveness.)

Newton was the first to point out that light is colorless, and that consequently color has to occur inside our brains. He wrote, “The waves themselves are not colored.” Since his time, we have learned that light waves are characterized by different frequencies of oscillation, and when they impinge on the retina of an observer, they set off a chain of neurochemical events, the end product of which is an internal mental image that we call color. The essential point here is: What we perceive as color is not made up of color. Although an apple may appear red, its atoms are not themselves red.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (The question was first posed by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.) Simply, no—sound is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Similarly, there can be no pitch without a human or animal present. A suitable measuring device can register the frequency made by the tree falling, but truly it is not pitch unless and until it is heard.

If you want to be a smart ass and answer a philosophical question scientifically

Sound can theoretically be heard for vibrations from just over 0 cycles per second up to 100,000 cycles per second or more, but each animal hears only a subset of the possible sounds. Humans who are not suffering from any kind of hearing loss can usually hear sounds from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.

The beats we hear on 50 Cents’ “In da Club” or N.W.A.’s “Express Yourself” are near the low end of our range of hearing; the ending of “A Day in Life” on the CD of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has a few seconds of sound at 15 KHz, inaudible to most adults over 40! (If the Beatles believed to never trust anyone over 40, this may have been their test, but Lennon reportedly just wanted something to make people’s dogs perk up.)

The sound that a singer hits when she causes a glass to break might be 1000 Hz. The glass breaks because it, like all physical objects, has a natural and inherent vibration frequency. You

When the singer hits just the right frequency—the resonant frequency of the glass—it causes the molecules of the glass to vibrate at their natural rate, and they vibrate themselves apart.

Above 20,000 Hz most humans don’t hear a thing, and by the age of sixty, most adults can’t hear much above 15,000 Hz or so due to a stiffening of the hair cells in the inner ear.

All of us have the innate capacity to learn the linguistic and musical distinctions of whatever culture we are born into, and experience with the music of that culture shapes our neural pathways so that we ultimately internalize a set of rules common to that musical tradition.

For example, the main accompaniment to “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder is played on only the black keys of the keyboard.

The twelve notes in our musical system are called the chromatic scale. Any scale is simply a set of musical pitches that have been chosen to be distinguishable from each other and to be used as the basis for constructing melodies.

John Lennon said that the essence of rock and roll songwriting for him was to “Just say what it is, simple English, make it rhyme, and put a backbeat on it.”

Loudness is one of the seven major elements of music along with pitch, rhythm, melody, harmony, tempo, and meter. Very tiny changes in loudness have a profound effect on the emotional communication of music.

Whenever the Eagles play this chord sequence in concert B minor / F-sharp major / A major / E major / G major / D major / E minor / F-sharp major they don’t have to play more than three chords before thousands of nonmusician fans in the audience know that they are going to play “Hotel California.” And even as they have changed the instrumentation over the years, from electric to acoustic guitars, from twelve-string to six-string guitars, people recognize those chords; we even recognize them when they’re played by an orchestra coming out of cheap speakers in a Muzak version in the dentist’s office.

It is difficult to appreciate the complexity of the brain because the numbers are so huge they go well beyond our everyday experience (unless you are a cosmologist).

Through experience, I’ve learned to associate car horns with danger, or at least with someone trying to get my attention. How did this happen? Some sounds are intrinsically soothing while others are frightening. Although there is a great deal of interpersonal variation, we are born with a predisposition toward interpreting sounds in particular ways. Abrupt, short, loud sounds tend to be interpreted by many animals as an alert sound; we see this when comparing the alert calls of birds, rodents, and apes. Slow onset, long, and quieter sounds tend to be interpreted as calming, or at least neutral.

There is a related reason why so many of us are attracted to recorded music these days—and especially now that personal music players are common and people are listening in headphones a lot. Recording engineers and musicians have learned to create special effects that tickle our brains by exploiting neural circuits that evolved to discern important features of our auditory environment.

music is simply a pleasure-seeking behavior that exploits one or more existing pleasure channels that evolved to reinforce an adaptive behavior, presumably linguistic communication.

“As far as biological cause and effect are concerned,” Pinker wrote in The Language Instinct (and paraphrased in the talk he gave to us), “music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.”

“Survival of the fittest” is an oversimplification because it leads to the distorted view that genes that confer a survival advantage in their host organism are those that will win the genetic race. But living a long life, however happy and productive, does not pass on genes. An organism needs to reproduce to pass on its genes. The name of the evolutionary game is to reproduce at all costs, and to see that one’s offspring live to do the same, and for their offspring to live long enough to do the same, and so on.

Might music play a role in sexual selection? Darwin thought so. In The Descent of Man he wrote, “I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.

Darwin believed that music preceded speech as a means of courtship, equating music with the peacock’s tail. In his theory of sexual selection, Darwin posited the emergence of features that served no direct survival purpose other than to make oneself (and hence one’s genes) attractive.

This may account for why, according to a recent European study, 10 percent of mothers reported that their children were being raised by men who falsely believed the children were their own. Although today reproduction may not be the motive, it is difficult to separate out innate, evolutionarily derived preferences for mating partners from our societally and culturally induced tastes in sexual partners.

We can say, conservatively, that there is no tangible evidence that language preceded music. In fact, the physical evidence suggests the contrary. Music is no doubt older than the fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute, because flutes were unlikely the first instruments.

The archaeological record shows an uninterrupted record of music making everywhere we find humans, and in every era.

When we ask about the evolutionary basis for music, it does no good to think about Britney or Bach. We have to think what music was like around fifty thousand years ago.

One striking find is that in every society of which we’re aware, music and dance are inseparable.

But it is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of “experts” performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unknown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.

It’s not that we need less sleep as we get older—it’s that changes in the aging brain make it difficult for older adults to get the sleep they need. And the consequences are serious. Sleep deprivation in the aged is directly responsible for cognitive decline, not to mention increased risk of cancer and heart disease.