You Are Reading the First 6 FREE Chapters (470 pages)
1.3.6 How Does Music Affect the Brain? The Grammar of Music
Music can best be understood as a system of relationships between tones, just as language is a system of relationships between words
When listening to a piece of music, how does that music affect the brain? How does the brain handle it?
Groups of inter-connected modules for processing music probably developed independently over time. Separate sub-modules likely process tone duration, pitch, loudness, and timbre. Interestingly, lesion studies indicate that separate modules even process the closely-related elements, meter and rhythm.
Pitch patterns that group hierarchically (discussed in Chapter 8) appear to form the basis of musical syntax (set of musically “grammatical” rules).
Our brains have a genetically determined ability to create, learn, and process language, called “Universal Grammar,” one of Noam Chomsky’s seminal discoveries in linguistics. It appears that our brains also have a genetically determined specialization for music. Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, who co-authored a classic book on the subject, labeled it Universal Musical Grammar. They were inspired to a degree by the Polish music theorist Heinrich Schenker.
However, just as people learn a specific language in childhood and don’t understand other languages without learning them, so people learn specific musical styles of their culture and don’t understand the musical styles of other cultures without learning them.
On the other hand, musical universals bespeak the genetic underpinnings of all music (musical universals are listed a bit later). If you make music that breaks the brain’s inborn rules, regardless of culture, the music you make will likely not appeal to more than a handful of humans.