The Biological Foundations of Music

The Biological Foundations of Music conference will examine why and how the human brain has such an affinity for music.

Published March 1, 2000

By Merle Spiegel
Academy Contributor

Music is a part of all human cultures – and of almost every individual’s life, from infancy to death. We are uniquely able to produce and respond to music. It’s time we took it seriously.

This spring, the Academy will host a conference on the Biological Foundations of Music that should help us begin to understand why and how the human brain has such an affinity for music as well as an ability to process its language.

“There seems to be some kind of innate predisposition that our species has to produce music,” says Robert Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute, who co-organized the conference along with Isabelle Peretz of the Department of Psychology at the University of Montreal. “Small children are able to do fairly sophisticated things musically, without any training. We tend to overlook this because it’s so simple for us,” he adds. “Our brains do an excellent job of encoding complex patterns. It’s the converse of what computers are good at.”

Computers are still lumbering buffoons at the simple act of recognizing a tune, however, and Zatorre believes that looking at how the brain processes music can provide a unique avenue for understanding brain function. “There are many aspects of brain function that we still don’t understand,” he says. “If you want to know what’s unique about the human brain, you have to look at those functions that distinguish us from other species. In the world of sound processing, the perception of speech and the perception of musical sounds are the two that distinguish us from every other species. We talk to each other and we play music.”

Music, Biology, and the Brain

The Biological Foundations of Music Conference rewards many years of lonely work by a relatively small group of researchers. Both Zatorre and Peretz combined science and music in graduate school when few others considered the field a respectable line of inquiry. “I thought I was the only one on earth doing it,” Peretz says of her early years in graduate school in Belgium.

Nevertheless, both she and Zatorre stuck with their interests, and over the course of the past 10 years the field has begun to be seen as a respectable line of inquiry and to gather serious attention. The upcoming conference, which will be held at The Rockefeller University in New York City, May 20-22, is “the first serious conference on music and the brain anywhere in the world,” according to Rashid Shaikh, Director of Science and Technology Meetings for the Academy.

More than 20 presentations and discussions will be included on topics such as the origins of music, the question of music as an evolutionary adaption, neural processing of complex sounds, electrophysiology of pitch, the history of neurology and music, tonal processing, brain plasticity and musical training, music and emotion, and music and other cognitive functions such as the “Mozart effect.”

Also read: Music on the Mind: A Neurologist’s Take