Notes and Neurons
How Music and the Human Brain Can Interact and Influence One Another By Cadalyn Burris
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ou watch the cellist’s fingers move along the fingerboard of the instrument. Their right hand gently holds a bow, bending flexibly, arm flowing along with the fingers, masking the strength behind the movement. Their left hand creates a beautiful vibrato, rotating with a quiet precision and bringing a subtle warmth to each carefully crafted note. The cellist’s head bows towards their instrument, eyes closed in concentration. You feel your eyes fill with unspilled tears of emotion. How, you ask, can music affect me so profoundly? Music is an experience that most people enjoy. In middle and high school, there are many students in band, orchestra, choir, or who are taking music lessons outside of school. Music is playing at all hours of the day on the radio, and there is al-
Diagram of a human ear. Image courtesy of MIT OpenCourseWare
ways seasonal music to listen to. However, the secrets of hearing music are not always residing in the quality of headphones or the tone of a note, but in the human brain. First, someone may play music on their instrument, creating sound waves. These sound waves travel through the air to the ear canal, where they cause the eardrum to vibrate. This then causes tiny bones in the middle ear most commonly called the hammer, anvil, and stirrup to be displaced. This vibration is sent to the inner ear, or the cochlea, through the ossicles in the middle ear. The vibrations are then dissected by the cochlea. Spencer B. Smith, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the director of the Texas Auditory Neuroscience Lab, says, “There is a place in the cochlea that best represents every single frequency in music… if you’ve opened up the top of a grand piano, and if you’ve seen all of the strings for each piano key, it’s very similar to the orientation of what’s going on in the cochlea.” According to Smith, there are certain parts of the spiral of the inner ear that are tuned to the
different frequencies in sound, and these parts will vibrate. Electrical impulses are then sent to the brain conveying the information of which parts of the cochlea are vibrating. The brain receives the first wave of information within the first 50 milliseconds of a sound occurring. “The auditory system is one of our fastest senses,” Smith said, “and that’s because it has evolved really well to convert mechanical vibration energy into electrical impulses, and that’s a very fast way of relaying information.” After this information is delivered, the brain may recognize the type of instrument being played from the combination of different frequencies. The information may be relayed to other parts of the brain. Music is actually one of the few experiences that can activate all parts of the brain. “Our respiration rate, our blood pressure, our heart rate, our galvanic skin response, all of that is influenced by music, not only because of the features of music itself, not only because of music’s sound and tempo and contour…, but also because we form associations with music that we hear,” says Robert A. Duke, [insert credentials here]. If a song has emotional signif-
