Your Brain on Music

The idea is at once intriguing and fanciful: capture both the image and function of the human body and determine the location of neurological function in many forms—love, hate, problem-solving, language comprehension, music appreciation, even the act of lying. Such is the purported promise of functional imaging that is achieved by procedures such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and combination positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT). These diagnostic imaging tools allow for spatial localization of signals that are a measure of blood oxygenation level and metabolic processing, respectively. Changes in these levels can be correlated with brain activity, and the analysis has given way to an explosion of studies that subject persons to stimuli while they are undergoing these measurements. While the medical applications are obvious, these tools are being used not only to assess pathology but also to attempt to measure the human experience. It is deceptively simple to play music through a subject’s headphones, perform the standard pulse sequences for fMRI studies or inject a subject with a biological marker and run them through a CT scanner, and then point to the part of the brain that is thought to process the cognition of the music. Interpretation of the results is complicated and requires great depth of understanding (and a healthy commitment to disproving null hypotheses). Yet, the technology continues to capture the attention of scientists and non-scientists alike as a way to peek into the wondrous inner workings of the human body, to link the sublime with the physical.

Three recent books draw on advances in the science of music cognition, largely spurred by recent developments in fMRI and other functional imaging modalities. Each of the three introduces the terms that are used to describe music and explores how we perceive pitch, timbre, rhythm, tonalities, and most other topics that are typically covered in a music appreciation course. What distinguishes them from one another is the background of the authors and their approach to the subject.

In How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond, John Powell—who holds both a PhD in physics and a master’s degree in music composition—introduces the science of music through a decidedly conceptual, non-technical framework. Powell writes with the assumption that his readers are a tabula rasa for organized knowledge of what music is and how it works, that they have experienced music only by listening to it. He proudly proclaims that his book has no graphs or formulas—not even written music itself. After all, he says, “[b]ooks full of graphs and math have a limited readership—and this is why the only people who seem to know anything about how music works are a few badly dressed academics.” Setting aside such clumsy attempts to ingratiate himself with readers via self-deprecation, Powell’s pedagogical approach is laudable, as he begins most chapters with observations of musical phenomena, followed up by relevant questions, which are answered by the end of the chapter. The ensuing amusing discussion of scales, rhythm, pitch, and temperament treats these and other musical topics and their relation to humans as perfectly understandable without the scientific tools such as those described above, even though Powell sometimes draws on such findings, particularly in his discussion of timbre and absolute pitch. Remarkably, he manages a solid description of the loudness units phon and sones (good Scrabble words!), no small feat to achieve without mathematical or graphical explanation.

Moving down the publicized academic pedigree scale and up one defined by sophistication of description, Elena Mannes, a noted documentary producer, uses her position as a descendent of the founders of Mannes College The New School for Music as reason to explore and write about The Power of Music: Pioneering Discoveries in the New Science of Song. The book is a companion to the television series The Music Instinct: Science & Song that Mannes produced for PBS in 2009. Mannes reminds readers several times that although she is not a professional musician, she grew up listening to music and thus “music is in her genes”: music is part of her core being. Mannes sees science as a more or less magical tool for understanding music and its effects on humans; she describes observing an electroencephalography (EEG) study as “surreal.” Frankly, I was puzzled by her description of an fMRI study in which one member of a rock band lies inside an MRI unit, singing along to the guitar music produced by his bandmate sitting next to the scanner. Those familiar with the field would know that the mouth movement of the singer would disrupt the imaging, and any metal parts to the guitar would be attracted to the strong magnetic field of the machine. Clearly there was more to the procedure than Mannes’ naïve description would suggest. This “gee, whiz!” view of science is prevalent throughout the book, as she breathlessly references study after study in an attempt to answer questions such as how innate musical ability can exist, whether music is a more fundamental language than the spoken or written word, and how music might be used for therapeutic purposes. One is left wondering how well the author truly understands the findings of the studies, especially their limitations for making definitive statements of how we are affected by music.

In The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It, prizewinning science writer Philip Ball goes to extraordinary lengths to bring together descriptions of how music works with recent advances in music cognition. Each chapter is titled with a musical term that is connected to the topic, and the book includes many examples of both musical quotations, some quite obscure, and graphs of analyses such as tonal hierarchy, pitch space, and harmonic space, in some cases extending beyond the knowledge that one might gain through a decade or more of music lessons. Of the three authors, Ball also appeals the most to results from social science in explaining music’s role in cultures and cognition, giving a more complete picture of the human affinity for music. Ball’s scientific training and experience in communication enable him to explore the science of music with both an authoritative and accessible perspective. But you would be hard pressed to know Ball’s science background from any information about him in the book. The book jacket describes him as a freelance writer and “avid amateur musician,” neglecting to mention that he holds a PhD in physics and spent several years as an editor of the journal Nature.

These books are interesting attempts in their own right to characterize the sublime nature of music, but together they make a statement on the motivation of those with formal training to share their knowledge with others and forge a connection between science and the arts. Ball, credentialed as he is, downplays his academic background while communicating the most sophisticated material. Powell reminds us constantly of his academic roots, yet seems to be embarrassed by them, and takes the least technical point of view. For each there is a mismatch between expertise and approach. In Powell and Ball we observe tension in applying science to an art, an example of the discomfort these two worlds unfortunately often have in relating to each other. Perhaps both authors thought that treating their subject in a way that was commensurate with their training and experience would somehow make it less approachable, and desirable, to a wide readership.

Mannes would, I think, love to be inaugurated into the halls of scientists so that she could better understand their work, but instead stands starry-eyed on the sidelines. Perhaps it is fitting that she quotes Richard Feynman, the bongo-playing physicist, as saying, “There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.” It is easy to extend this quotation to apply to music, for which scientific knowledge is a treasured and welcome companion in Mannes’ eyes. She offers us a glimpse of a joy of understanding that may be reached in the future, when the elucidation of the mystery of the human experience of music is accompanied by a robust application of the science of functional imaging.

Heather M. Whitney is assistant professor of physics at Wheaton College.