Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound

Researchers mapped participants’ pain levels in relation to activity in the prefrontal cortex, brain stem, and spinal cord. Music works as a painkiller, they concluded, by evoking a pleasure-reward response that activates the body’s descending analgesia system. (Essentially, signals from the brain travel through the spinal cord, instructing the bod

The renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie, profoundly deaf since age twelve, performs shoeless to allow her feet to feel the vibrations from the floor. The human body, she told The Globe and Mail, is “like a huge ear.”

This guilt-ridden mindset would eventually give rise to the most austere music I’ve ever heard: Gregorian chant. Sung in unison—all the same note—Gregorian chant moves mostly stepwise in small leaps,

I’ve come to believe that how we approach music matters as much as whether we do it at all. Maybe, instead of giving kids music lessons to make them smarter, we could pay more attention to the links between music, personal expression, creativity, and problem-solving.

When they took out the downbeat—the strong pulse that makes us tap our feet—the newborn brains could predict where it should be (just like adults in the same study). This blew me away. The ability to perceive a musical beat, observed the 2009 study, is “functional at birth.”

Music at sixty to eighty beats per minute, the pace of a resting heartbeat—a rhythm we hear in the womb—appears to lower stress best.

contours of melodies and, after birth, can distinguish between

Standard music education tends to focus on an extremely narrow type of music, said Hein, namely, “the aesthetic preferences of Western European aristocrats of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” The system that gave us musical absolutes, such as metronome rhythm and “perfect pitch,” is presented as the best and most universally valid. But, in

Music reaches us at a level beyond conscious thought. More than any other artform, it is both “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” wrote the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. “Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”