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

by Daniel J. Levitin

How does a multiple-trace memory model account for the fact that we extract invariant properties of melodies as we are listening to them? As we attend to a melody, we must be performing calculations on it; in addition to registering the absolute values, the details of its presentation—details such as pitch, rhythms, tempo, and timbre—we must also be calculating melodic intervals and tempo-free rhythmic information. Neuroimaging studies from Robert Zatorre and his colleagues at McGill have suggested this is the case. Melodic “calculation centers” in the dorsal (upper) temporal lobes—just above your ears—appear to be paying attention to interval size and distances between pitches as we listen to music, creating a pitch-free template of the very melodic values we will need in order to recognize songs in transposition. My own neuroimaging studies have shown that familiar music activates both these regions and the hippocampus, a structure deep in the center of the brain that is known to be crucial to memory encoding and retrieval. Together, these findings suggest that we are storing both the abstract and the specific information contained in melodies. This may be the case for all kinds of sensory stimuli.