You can even see the moment we’ve realized the meaning in the music by a spike in the recorded electrical activity across the brain. As we listen to music, our brains are continuously trying to guess what’s coming up, based on what we’ve just heard and on our experience of music over our lives. Humans are expert predictors - we are always trying to figure what’s going to happen next and why. But calculating something that complex requires much more of our brain’s vast processing power. Through auditory stimulation, music could drive neurons to fire at a specific rate - as though our brains are resonating to a beat - that sets our overall mood.īut some of our most powerful responses to music come from expectation, tension, then resolution. Different groups of neurons synchronize their firing at different rates – some slower, around one to five times a second, others closer to 20 times a second – and different rates are associated with different mood states. In this case they allow us to empathize with the emotion of the music, triggering the same emotions in us by activating the limbic system - the emotion hub of the brain.Īnother theory has it that the beat of rhythms, and the frequency of soundwaves, actually drive the intrinsic oscillations of neurons in the brain. These cells mentally simulate behaviors that we perceive in the world around us, which helps us with social understanding and empathy.
How? How can it force us to actually feel the same way? One possibility is that once we’ve understood what the emotional content of the music is, it activates a population of brain cells called mirror neurons. Although it wasn’t always this way around: After all, western cultures have a very different appreciation of dissonance to Arabic music, or to Indian ragas.īut we don’t just sense the emotions in music we feel those emotions too. Much of the emotional significance that we find in music comes from our own life experience: whilst still in the cradle we learn to associate the music we hear with the emotional environment we hear it in - so a mother’s lullaby might imprint us with calm memories for major keys, whilst a lovers’ lament in A minor would remind us of breakups and ex-girlfriends. But these automatic brain mechanisms are only the beginning of how we read meaning into music. Certain chords sound pleasant because of how we divide tones into different pitches: harmonically simple, consonant chords, like majors, are easy to do this for, but harmonically complex chords, like tritones, are harder to distinguish and so we find them dissonant. So if music is a language, how does it convey its meaning? After all, it doesn’t have any words, does it? At the very basic, physical level, loud and fast noises excite us more than slow quiet ones because our brain-stem is tuned to attend to these kinds of noises in the environment. Next time you hear someone speaking emotionally, listen to the acoustic characteristics of their voice - they’ll mirror music of the same emotion: fast, loud and high for excitement and happiness, slower and softer for melancholy. The brain even processes musical syntax using the same area it uses to process language syntax. Music has structure, progression and syntax - just like language. (Inside Science) - From a simple, lonely melody to an intricate sonata, sometimes it feels like music can speak directly to your heart, in a language that you don’t know, but your emotions understand.Īnd that’s because music is a language.
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