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

by Daniel J. Levitin

Music is unusual among all human activities for both its ubiquity and its antiquity. No known human culture now or anytime in the recorded past lacked music.

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.

A couple of generations ago, before television, many families would sit around and play music together for entertainment.

Through studies of people with brain damage, we’ve seen patients who have lost the ability to read a newspaper but can still read music, or individuals who can play the piano but lack the motor coordination to button their own sweater. Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem. Could

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

The basic elements of any sound are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location, and reverberation.

Here is a fundamental quality of music. Note names repeat because of a perceptual phenomenon that corresponds to the doubling and halving of frequencies.

every culture we know of has the octave as the basis for its music,

Every tone is 6 percent higher than the previous one,

damage to an area in the center of the brain—the hippocampal complex—can block the ability to form new memories, while leaving old memories intact.

(The research on the development of the first CT scanners, precursors to MRI, was performed by EMI, financed in large part from their profits on Beatles records. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” might well have been titled “I Want to Scan Your Brain.”)

This told us that attending to structure in music requires both halves of the brain, while attending to structure in language only requires the left half.