This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

A melody is an organized succession of notes forming a song. The melody of a piece of music is its main theme, which a vocalist or soloist often carries and to which the piece continually returns throughout its duration. A listener perceives a melody as a recognizable whole because of the relationship between its composite notes rather than through any innate characteristic of the individual notes themselves. Levitin discusses the recognition of melody as a primary element in how the brain processes music and generates schema.

Genres in music are categories identifying pieces that share characteristics belonging to common traditions and conventions. Genres are loosely defined, and significant overlap exists among categories, which generates some debate about where boundaries lie between subgenres and similar genres. Examples of popular music genres that Levitin mentions in This Is Your Brain on Music include classical music, rock and roll, and jazz. Genre plays an important role in musical preferences: Many people settle on a preference for a few music genres in adolescence and only rarely deviate later in life. Levitin links genre to schema because past experience with a genre of music dictates expectations for future pieces within the same categorization.

The most important cells in the brain and nervous system, neurons specialize in transmitting information across connections called synapses via chemicals called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that the brain releases when a neuron fires an electrical impulse in response to stimuli (including the presence of neurotransmitters from another neuron in its receptor). The human brain contains tens of billions of neurons, which accounts for the near-infinite complexity of human consciousness and cognition. Studying the firing of neurons is extremely challenging, and Levitin describes how scientists use technology such as EEGs and MRI machines to learn which regions of the brain are active at particular points in time. This provides information on the function of the brain.

In cognitive science, a schema is a framework of knowledge that the brain constructs based on previously experienced stimuli. The brain extracts features from objects, circumstances, and other elements of experience, categorizing certain ones together, which creates expectations for new members of the same category based on those features. Levitin discusses how the brain forms musical schema based on the music that a listener has previously heard. Levitin discusses schema prominently in Chapters 4 and 5 because of their focus on expectation and categorization, and schema prominently contribute to his discussions relating to one of the book’s main themes, The Neurological Underpinnings of Musical Enjoyment.