This neuroscience of music page is the product of my independent research project as a sophomore in high school.

 

Suggested Resources for Further Study

The resources I include below represent the multitude of resources that are available on the internet, in journals, public libraries, and other collections of information and are not comprehensive in nature. With the inventions of new technology and by extension, our improved understanding of the brain and nervous system, the twenty first century represents a promising era of discovery and advances in neuroscience research. Furthermore, through understanding the neuroscience of music, scientists as well as the general public can utilize this groundbreaking research to understand the mysteries of human nature.

 

Websites

Neuroscience

  1. Oxford Neuroscience features a wealth of information that includes research on every subject within the field of neuroscience, as well as seminars, and other opportunities to study neuroscience.

  2. The International Youth Neuroscience Association encourages the next generation of aspiring neuroscientists to foster a strong relationship with this subject matter and science writing through the IYNA Journal, Mentorship Program, and other resources.

  3. The Society For Neuroscience is one of the premier organizations in the nation for the study of the brain and nervous system. The society features The Journal of Neuroscience, as well as information and archived articles on the history of neuroscience and other important topics relating to all aspects of the brain sciences.

  4. The Cognitive Neuroscience Society is an internationally recognized society that focuses on cognitive neuroscience, which is a field that explores the intersections between cognitive science and neuroscience. Cognitive science often is centered around human cognitive skills such as higher level thinking and thought processing and learning, drawing from multiple fields such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and others.

  5. The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation is an organization committed to funding neuroscience and psychiatric research that is focused on advances and discoveries in the mental health field. The foundation features multiple scholarly articles on the following mental illnesses, in addition to other categories. These include addiction, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, autism, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and mental illness (in a general sense). The research categories include basic research, new technologies, diagnostic tools and early intervention, as well as next-generation therapies.

Music

  1. Case Western Reserve University College of Arts & Sciences features a comprehensive Early Music Instrument Database that is a master list of the history of all instruments from the medieval, renaissance, and baroque periods.

  2. The Library of Congress Performing Arts Databases has an immense collection of all different genres of music and their scores, sheet music, history, and other areas of music study. As can be inferred from the title, this database also includes information on other forms of performing arts which include music, theater, and dance.

  3. The Global Jukebox is a worldly collection of more than six thousand songs from one thousand cultures. The work of Alan Lomax (1915-2002) had a profound impact on folklore and ethnomusicology and in his time, he created The Global Jukebox, which was not completed before his death. However, the project was recently completed by Lomax's daughter, Dr. Anna Lomax Wood, and an extraordinary team of specialists and assistants at the Association for Cultural Equity. The Jukebox offers insights into the distribution patterns of song, dance, and other expressive traditions worldwide, and through this can tell us about human history and cultural evolution. Furthermore, the Association for Cultural Equity is a non-profit organization located in New York at Hunter College and was founded by Alan Lomax.

  4. Noteflight: Online Music Notation Software is an online music writing application that allows users to compose, share, and play music from different platforms.

  5. Music Theory Online a Journal of the Society for Music Theory is a journal of criticism, commentary, research and scholarship in music theory, music analysis, and related disciplines.

  6. The purpose of the American Musicological Society is to advance scholarship in the various fields of music through research, learning, and teaching. To do this, it publishes a Journal and a Blog, holds an Annual Meeting, supports books in musicology, and offers a broad array of grants, fellowships, and awards throughout the year.

  7. All Music Guide is dedicated to popular music and has an abundance of resources for the exploration of this genre, as well as biographies for many musicians.

  8. Musicals 101 is a guide to all aspects of musical theater and the website provides opportunities to attend, via in person or livestream, lectures on musicals, as well.

  9. The University of London Royal Holloway Digital Repository has an Early Music Online database that features an impressive collection, which holds digitized images of some of the world's oldest surviving volumes of printed music.

  10. The University of Richmond Boatwright Memorial Library has a comprehensive Music Research Guide that includes books, journal articles, scores, CDs and LPs, DVDs, Streaming Video & Audio, recommended websites, articles on music in the news, and music journals, as well as other resources.

 

Articles

  1. The Neuroscience of Music written by Jonah Lehrer and published in Wired investigates why and how music has the power to make people feel emotions.

  2. Neuroscience News has a category with many articles dedicated to music and by extension, focus on the brain and music. Articles range from topics such as exercise and music to the debate on whether music is a universal language or not.

  3. New Ways Into the Brain's Music Room written by Natalie Angier and published in the New York Times explores several fundamental questions that are centered around the neuroscience of music. As Dr. Kanwisher, a neuroscience professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asks in an interview, "Why do we have music? Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”

  4. To Tug Hearts, Music Must First Tickle the Neurons written by Pam Belluck and published in the New York Times presents the reader with multiple studies and scientists that together hope to achieve a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool.

  5. Implications of Music and Brain Research written by Donald A. Hodges and published by MENC: The National Association for Music Education is and introductory article offers an overview of neuromusical research and articulates some basic premises derived from this research.

  6. Music in the Brain, written by Anne Trafton and published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology News Office claims that scientists have identified a neural population highly selective for music. The associated short informational video is suggested for viewing further down the page.

  7. What Music Looks Like in the Brain, written by Jill Suttie and published by Greater Good Science Center, which is based at the University of California, Berkeley and Huffington Post, explores the meaning of music in our lives and what parts of our brain are associated with music listening.

 

Scholarly Research Articles

  1. The Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas states that they "are interested in the interface between musical structure and engagement, especially in listeners without formal training, and especially as it occurs dynamically across the course of the listening experience. [The scientists at the lab] use a combination of empirical methods (behavioral and neuroimaging studies), quantitative analysis, and theoretical approaches to tackle fundamental questions about the human passion for music." Furthermore, the lab has a wealth of resources, which include scholarly research articles, books, and more, all available to the general public.

  2. A Research Topic titled, The Musical Brain in the Frontiers in Neuroscience journal has seventeen published articles in their collection that specifically focus on the neuroscience of music.

  3. Anatomically Distinct Dopamine Release During Anticipation and Experience of Peak Emotion to Music written by Valorie N Salimpoor, Mitchel Benovoy, Kevin Larcher, Alain Dagher, and Robert Zatorre and published in the Nature Neuroscience Journal is available for download in PDF format on Research Gate.

  4. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Music and Musicality written by Sandra E. Trehub, Judith Becker, and Iain Morley and originally published by Royal Society Publishing is available for download in PDF format on Research Gate.

  5. Explain the Brain: Websites to Help Scientists Teach Neuroscience to the General Public written by Eric Chudler and Kristen Clapper Bergsman and published in CBE Life Sciences Education is available for download in PDF format on Research Gate.

 

Books

  1. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of A Human Obsession written by Daniel J. Levitin

  2. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain written by Oliver Sacks

  3. Music, Language, and the Brain written by Aniruddh D. Patel

  4. Emotion and Meaning in Music written by Leonard B. Meyer

  5. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Anticipation written by David Huron

 

Informational Videos

  1. A Brain on Chopin, published by the New York Times features an animation showing changes in brain activity while study subjects listened to a performance of a Chopin etude in E major.

  2. How Musicians Communicate Emotion published by the New York Times is a video from Daniel J. Levitin's lab at McGill University explaining a study on music perception, cognition and expertise. Daniel J. Levitin is also the author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of A Human Obsession, as well as interviewed in the PBS Documentary, The Music Instinct: Science and Song, which is recommended below.

  3. Nancy's Brain Talks is a website that features a collection of short talks on the different scientific methods scientists can use to study the human mind and brain. Nancy Kanwisher is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. For an overall introduction, Kanwisher encourages those who are interested in this subject matter to watch the TED talk titled, A Neural Portrait of the Human Mind, which is recommended below.

  4. A Neural Portrait of the Human Mind is a fascinating TED talk delivered by Nancy Kanwisher in March of 2014, who is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. In the talk, Kanwisher shares what she and her colleagues have learned: the brain is made up of both highly specialized components and general-purpose "machinery." Another surprise: There's so much left to learn.

  5. Music in the Brain is in coordination with the article above and was published by the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The premise is that scientists have long wondered if the human brain contains neural mechanisms specific to music perception. Now, for the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a neural population in the human auditory cortex that responds selectively to sounds that people typically categorize as music, but not to speech or other environmental sounds.

  6. A study done by professors at MIT and Brandeis University investigates why certain individuals prefer different types of music and whether musical tastes are cultural in origin or hardwired in the brain, as the title of the short informational video suggests: Are Musical Tastes Cultural or Hardwired in the Brain? By extension, “this study suggests that preferences for consonance over dissonance depend on exposure to Western musical culture, and that the preference is not innate,” says Josh McDermott, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

  7. Music on the Brain is a TEDxWaterloo Talk delivered by Jessica Grahn in 2013 and the focus of the lecture is to investigate the power of the human mind and how it can be transformed through music. Grahn is a cognitive neuroscientist who chases the musical mysteries of the mind. For her, music and the brain inspire her to ask how and why does music make us move? How does music influence different types of movement, and how could we optimize this effect to help patients with neurological disorders? Jessica, a musician herself, is curious about why humans have developed a musical culture (and why monkeys haven't) and how does musical or rhythmic ability relate to movement and language ability. This Assistant Professor at the Brain and Mind Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario is using her neuro-musical insights to explore the age-old mystery of why some people can 'feel the beat', while others have two left feet. Jessica Grahn also has a website for her Music and Neuroscience Lab, which features this video, as well as other talks, research opportunities, and more resources for further study and for the public to learn about the lab.

 

Documentaries

  1. The Music Instinct: Science and Song is a PBS documentary that is a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG – one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers. The focus is on the science of music and the fact that researchers and scientists from a variety of fields are using groundbreaking techniques that reveal startling new connections between music and the human mind, the body and the universe. Together with an array of musicians from rock and rap to jazz and classical, they are putting music under the microscope. The documentary is available on YouTube, as well as other platforms. There is also a brief page on the documentary that explains the premise.

  2. Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus, a program from the 2009 World Science Festival seeks to answer the following questions: is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? John Schaefer, scientist Daniel Levitin, and musical artist Bobby McFerrin engage in live performances and cross-cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s noteworthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.

  3. The Music and Brain Series, which was published by The Great Corses on Kanopy is an eighteen episode series that covers a variety of topics on the science of music. The episode titles are the following. The first is titled, Culture, Biology or Both? The second is titled, Seeking an Evolutionary Theory of Music. The third is titled, Testing Theories of Music's Origins. The fourth is titled, Music, Language, and Emotional Expression. The fifth is titled, Brain Sources of Music's Emotional Power. The sixth is titled, Musical Building Blocks: Pitch and Timbre. The seventh is titled, Consonance, Dissonance, and Musical Scales. The eighth is titled, Arousing Expectations: Melody and Harmony. The ninth is titled, The Complexities of Musical Rhythm. The tenth is titled, Perceiving and Moving to a Rhythmic Beat. The eleventh is titled, Nature, Nurture, and Musical Brains. The twelfth is titled, Cognitive Benefits of Musical Training. The thirteenth is titled, The Development of Human Music Cognition. The fourteenth is titled, Disorders of Music Cognition. The fifteenth is titled, Neurological Effects of Hearing Music. The sixteenth is titled, Neurological Effects of Making Music. The seventeenth is titled, Are We the Only Musical Species. The eighteenth is titled, Music: A Neuroscientific Perspective.