Music, it is sometimes said, is a universal language. Well, yes and no.
Every human culture has some form of music, but the language of music can vary wildly. You can learn to appreciate the music of another culture, but when you first hear it, it may sound like unstructured noise.
New research is beginning to reveal how much of music’s appeal is based on biology, and how much is cultural.
Music begins as vibrations in the air which set our eardrums vibrating and cause our ears send nerve signals to the auditory cortex, parts of the brain just above both ears. The right side of the cortex perceives pitch and aspects of melody, harmony, timbre and rhythm; the left processes rapid changes in frequency and intensity in both music and words. The two have to work together for proper perception of rhythm.
The frontal cortex, where we store working memories, is also vital to perceiving rhythm and melody, and still other parts of the brain generate the emotions we feel in response to the music. And even if you’re not dancing or tapping your toe, the regions of the brain that control movement are active–it seems your body just naturally wants to move to the beat.
So there’s definitely biology involved–but culture plays a role, too, as a study published in the January issue of Psychological Science shows.
Erin E. Hannon of Cornell Univesity and Sandra Trehub of the University of Toronto had 50 North American college students and 17 first- or second-generation Bulgarian and Macedonian immigrants listen to four folkdance tunes from Serbia and Bulgaria. Two of the songs had a simple meter (2 + 2 + 2 + 2), while two had a complex meter (2 + 2 + 3). Then the study participants listened to versions of the same tunes altered so that the ones with simple meters had complex meters, and the ones with complex meters had simple meters.
The researchers found North Americans noticed when the simple rhythms became complex, but couldn’t recognize the change from complex to simple, while the immigrants could tell the difference in both cases.
The same experiment performed with 64 six- and seven-month-old infants revealed that, like the immigrants, the infants recognized the change in meters from simple to complex and vice versa, looking at or away from the speakers as the change occurred.
This seems to indicate we are born with the ability to process complex rhythms, but in North America we lose it, probably because the music that bombards us constantly mostly has simple meters. This mirrors the way we lose our early ability to process different word sounds and speech patterns and become focused on the sounds and patterns that are most common and meaningful in our own culture.
Understanding the biology of music is of interest because its strong influence on the brain means it can also influence physiology. For instance, people who have undergone coronary bypass surgery sometimes suffer from erratic changes in blood pressure. Studies have shown that patients in intensive care units where background music is played need lower doses of blood-pressure drugs than those in units without music.
Similarly, when soft background music is played in intensive care units for premature babies, and nurses and parents hum to them, the babies gain weight faster and leave the unit earlier on average.
And you might want to rethink wearing that iPod when you exercise: one study showed that the heart muscle of people exercising on treadmills didn’t work as hard when they listened to music as when they exercised in silence.
Playing music also has its advantages. The primary motor cortex and the cerebellum are bigger in adult musicians than in non-musicians, and the connection between the two lobes of the brain, the corpus callosum, tends to be larger. Preschoolers who have had six months of piano lessons are better than other preschoolers on puzzle-solving tests. Second graders who take piano lessons and play special computer math games score higher on math tests than children who play the math games but have English language instruction instead of piano lessons.
Music seems to be a workout for your brain, especially if you play it, but even if you just listen to it.
But if, like so many other North Americans, you ain’t got rhythm–at least not complex rhythm–just remember:
It’s your parents’ fault for not playing more Bulgarian folk music.
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