Episode 02: Our Musical Brain
In the second episode, "Our Musical Brain," we delve into the fascinating topic of how the brain processes music. From the rhythms and melodies that we hear to the emotions that we feel, music has a profound impact on our brains. We explore the neurology behind this experience and provide an introduction to parts of the brain that are activated by making or listening to music.
Episode Resources:
Article - “How Do We Hear” by the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
Book - “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” by Daniel J. Levitin
Ted Talk - The Science of Hearing
Episode Transcript:
Hi and welcome back to Musical Mindspace! Thank you for your support in our debut episode and for tuning in again today for today’s episode. For those of you who sent in some messages and responded to the interactive polls on Spotify, thank you so much for doing that. It was really cool to see everybody’s response and answers to some of the questions that we put out there.
In the introduction of this podcast, you might’ve heard that this is a podcast that talks about music from many different perspectives - some of those that were listed were psychology, music therapy, neurology, and I think medicine is listed there too. Today, we’re going to focus our attention on the neurologic side of things, music and the brain.
As someone who is fascinated by our brain’s connection to music, I’m really excited to share more about it with you today. One of the reasons I wanted to focus on this topic kind of early on in just the second episode, is because I wanted us to have enough time to really look at the many different ways that music impacts our brain and our cognition.
And in the upcoming episodes, we have a line up of really amazing guest speakers who will hopefully be talking in more detail about these specific neurologic processes. These are individuals who have researched topics, like specific topics, or are specialized in a neurologic or even a psychological area of music.
So that being said, I think it’s important that we go into their conversations with a good foundation of what’s going on internally, you know, when we listen to or make music - and I’m including myself in that statement too. I’m still learning and I have so much to learn. And I’ve learned so much even just preparing for this episode. I feel like these are things we learn about in school and things that kind of come up for me every day at work but it was something I got to really focus on, refresh on, and prepare and share. So, yeah…
Like I said, as a music therapist, we are trained to have an understanding of, you know, the neurological processes behind music. I also completed a training in neurologic music therapy in 2017 and that experience too also contributed to my interest in a lot of these areas, but even then, I still find myself asking so many questions and honestly I have trouble retaining some of this information sometimes and every time that I reread it, I’m like “oh yeah, I knew that”. It’s really a lot of info once you dive into it and it really can be a lot to digest all at the same time. It’s one of those things I have to read several times and maybe it’s something you’ll listen to a couple of times just to take it all in. And that’s okay too.
I also want to disclose that, even though I’ve had training in some of these areas, I’m going to do my best to be sharing my understanding of the references I’ve gathered to create this episode. I’m going to do my best again to present information that is accurate and representative of our musical brains, but I am by no means an expert on this specific topic. There is so much more information out there to be learned, and my goal for this episode is just to provide you, our listener, with general info to get you started if this is something that really interests you. Maybe it’s also something we can get clarification on and go into more detail when our guests come in and join us.
So, for now…this is what’s on my mindspace today. Welcome to episode 2…our musical brain.
One of the things I want to talk about today is how the brain processes music. This is such a complex topic, and honestly, like I said, I’m still learning about how all of this works. There is so much new information becoming available as technology advances and as more studies are being conducted about music and the brain. I had to pull from several sources to put together this episode and, as I said earlier, I’m still on my own journey of making sense of all of this.
So today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned as I prepared for this episode. This is going to be a simplified version, both for the limits of my own understanding and for the sake of time in this podcast episode. This is a collection of information that I’ve gathered from the Kennedy Center website (they have a lot of great info about music and the brain), a corresponding TedTalk called “the science of hearing”, and two books, one called “Psychology of Music” and one called “This is Your Brain on Music”. And I’m also going to include some other journal articles that will be linked on our website. Feel free to visit our website for access and links to all of these.
So let’s start when we hit the play button…
The auditory system is very complex but it involves two main processes: the ear and the brain.
Before we can make any interpretations about the music that is being played, our brain must receive the information that is carried by sound waves traveling from the space around us, to the outer ear and through the ear canal. As it travels through the middle ear, the sound waves cause the eardrum, also known as the tympanic membrane, and the tiny bones in the inner ear to vibrate. You can think of this pressure hitting like a drum. The movement amplifies the sound and creates waves in the fluid of the inner ear, specifically in the cochlea. And before we continue, I want to share a little bit about this specific part of the ear. It’s really fascinating to me.
So the cochlea is a fluid filled snail shaped organ that is divided into an upper and a lower section by an elastic partition called the basilar membrane. The sounds get pushed from the middle ear through the cochlea like a little wave as the pressure vibrates through the ear drum. And, this is where it gets really interesting for me…
So inside of the cochlea, the inside of it is covered with 20,000-30,000 tiny little hair cells that move with the motion of the fluids. This is all in the inner ear. These hair cells are actually really important in pitch perception and determine how we perceive different musical tones or the pitches of different sounds. These hairs are found all along the inside of that basilar membrane and the hairs that respond to the movement of the fluids, right, are what the brain interprets as pitch or frequencies.
And this is kind of fascinating actually. So imagine this little shell, this little snail, inside of our ears and how it spirals kind of in the shape of that snail. So if you can picture this, the hairs on the outer side of the shell are what responds to higher pitched sounds and as we move through the shell and spiral around to the inside of the shell those are the hairs that respond to lower pitched sounds. And that’s how we’re able to interpret the different notes we have in music. Lower notes on the piano, or any instrument, will be picked up through the vibrations on the inner side of the cochlea and the higher notes that we have in music will be picked up through the vibration of hairs on the outer part of the cochlea.
This reminds me of working as a music therapist with older adults. One thing I heard a lot is to speak louder, and not higher in pitch. This is because higher frequencies can be lost first when someone experiences hearing loss. It is believed that this is because of where those little hairs are located in the cochlea. They are the first to receive the sound in the outer part and so I guess that makes them more vulnerable to the potential damage when there is a lot of exposure to those like high noise levels. So that’s really interesting. I never really, you know, thought about that before. I remember hearing that in classes and it’s really interesting to kind of think about now after having worked as a music therapist for a little while.
So, while all of this is happening, the sound is traveling through the inner ear, and that energy is being converted from a sound wave to an electro-chemical energy (or a neural impulse) in a process called transduction. And this is the ear’s, like, main task in the auditory system. When we’re talking about processing music, this is the ear’s main task. Once the waves are converted to a neural impulse, these electrical signals then travel through the cochlear nerve to the brain’s cerebral cortex.
Wow. So hold on, let’s take a minute there. I know that was a lot of information and if you’re a visual learner like me, I would recommend that TedTalk I mentioned earlier (they’ll be a link on our website) just to see how this process works. And they have like a visual, like a little video where you can really see it all together.
But, what this all tells me is that our bodies are truly remarkable. Remember, this is all happening from the time we hit play to the time we’re actively listening to a song. And we’re probably just like talking about milliseconds at this point. It’s not even something that we also actively think about. It’s just something that happens.
Okay, so let’s move on to the second part of this. We’ve talked about the ear. Now let’s see that the brain does. Now that the brain has received all of this information, its task then is to interpret these electro-chemical signals and make sense of them. This is not an easy task. Well, we’ll see that as we keep going.
Although we’re still learning, you know, and discovering more and more about all of this, what we do know is that there is not a single part of the brain responsible for processing music, but rather, it’s a combination of many parts of the brain. I’ve heard it said before that listening or even actively making music is kind of like a workout for the brain because there are so many parts of the brain that are activated in response to music. I even heard once that playing music is one of the only things we can do that involves that much of the brain all at the same time. And that’s pretty cool.
So in the book “Your Brain on Music”, they go as far as to say that and I’ll quote here “musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about and nearly every subcortical system.” And it goes on to say, “different aspects of the music are handled by different neural regions. The brain uses functional segregation for music processing, and employs a system of feature detectors whose job it is to analyze specific aspects of the musical signal, such as pitch, tempo, timbre, and so on. Some of the music processing has points in common with the operations required to analyze other sounds”. So this can include what you can think of as parallel processes like understanding speech while lyrics are being sung. So that part of the brain that processes lyrics would be the similar parts of the brain that analyze speech. So essentially, there's going to be some overlap between musical processing and other functional processes that we use on a daily basis.
So, let’s break that down a little more to the different regions of the brain and how each one is affected by either listening or playing music.
The brain is made up of four lobes: the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the occipital lobe, and the temporal lobe. The listening of music and sounds begins in the subcortical region of the brain, which is comprised of like the brain stem, and the cerebellum. This is the part of the brain that is usually associated with our central nervous system. Our brainstem is responsible for regulating our automatic functions for survival like our respiratory rate, our heart rate, and other body functions. It also processes our stress responses and we know now that it can play a role in how our bodies respond to stress. And this is interesting because we know that music can decrease our feelings of stress and also our heart rate and it can bring down our respiratory rate. But I think that's a story for another episode…
So from the brain stem, it travels through to the auditory cortices that are located on both sides of the brain. Let’s say we’re now not just listening to a song. We hit the play button earlier right? We’ve been kind of following our process. But we didn’t just hit any song. We decided to play a familiar song, and that’s going to bring in some other regions of the brain, parts that are responsible for memory like the hippocampus and the other sections of the frontal lobe. That aspect - because when we listen to songs often times memories come up for us. I said that in the last episode when we talked about musical audiobiographies and we talked about clients who are experiencing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. The songs that we like, the songs that we’re connected to, often have memories associated with it also. So that’s this part of the brain. That’s one part of the brain that gets activated here.
Maybe we start to tap along to the music, or maybe we’re just imagining that we’re tapping along. We’re imagining the beat. The brain will then recruit the cerebellum for its timing circuits along with the motor cortex and frontal lobes to help with motor planning and actually executing these motor movements. The same is true of playing along to the music, so those are the parts of the brain will be involved to help us physically play the instrument - the fine motor skills to play the guitar, the gross motor skills for your bowing arm on the cello, our range of motion, maybe the bilateral coordination of playing two things at the same time on the piano or on the drums. Those are all the motor parts of the brain: motor planning, motor execution.
Now, when we’re playing music, there’s also like a sensory component that comes into play: how we hold the instrument, what the instrument feels like in our hands, the vibration of the strings. That’s all tactile feedback so we would add then the sensory cortex.
And maybe after we started playing along to the music, we decided to pull up some sheet music and follow along with the chords. Now we’re reading the melodies on the page or we’re looking at those chords on the page (or even on our iPad if you’re like me I usually use my iPad) now we have the visual cortex involved. This area is found towards the back of our heads in the occipital lobe that helps with our vision. So now we’re adding that part of the brain.
And now, let’s say, we’re reading the lyrics or we’re listening to the lyrics of the song…earlier we talked a little bit in how this was similar to processing speech. This is because the lyrics that we listen to or even think about engage now the language centers of our brain…the Broca’s area, the Wernicke’s areas and other language areas in the temporal and frontal lobes too. So now we’ve got the speech and language areas.
And I want to take a minute to pause because I know this is a lot of info. But also, I want to share a little about how, for me, this is just so interesting and how it affects me personally as a music therapist. As we talk about all of these musical elements and we talk about their parallel neurologic processes, I want to share a little bit about why I think this is so important, specifically when we’re talking about therapy and healing and medicine.
I think this whole episode is such a big rationale for why music is therapy and why this field is so important…why it makes such a big difference in the lives of people with work on a daily basis. You know, whether you’re a music therapist in a hospital, a rehab center, school district, I have some friends in psych facilities, private practice, wherever you are, you’re doing so much through the music. And if you’re someone who’s not a music therapist listening…I just want to highlight how important it is to advocate for music and advocate for the work that these amazing music therapists are doing. Because it’s not just singing, it’s not just listening or just tapping along, we’re connecting (in some cases maybe reconnecting) all of these neural pathways and making it possible for the brain to function in a different way. And this goes for any of the areas we’ve spoken about so far. We’ve talked about the language regions. We talked a little bit about the memory centers of the brain, a little bit about stress responses, auditory processing, motor functions. These are things that music therapists use as goals for clients and we’re trained to use all of this information to create music interventions that target these areas and we have an overall goal of ultimately improving someone’s life and their daily functions.
But there’s one part we haven’t touched on, and this is a big one…the emotional responses when we listen to music. And this is a so much deeper, this is such a deep level when we tlak about our connection to music. And I don’t know really anyone that has ever heard a song and not had an emotional response. And again, that can be like a positive response. It can be a negative response. Maybe it’s even a neutral response, but it’s a response nonetheless. And you know, these responses to music are also processed in what is considered the more primitive part of the brain , and we talked about it earlier with stress, but the cerebellum, the amygdala, those are the parts that are responsible for emotions. So, they’re the parts that are responsible for processing the emotional response to music.
And again, even though, you know, there are areas that are associated with all of these types of responses, we always end up back in the same place, right?…there is not one musical part of the brain so there’s not one area of the brain responsible for music and that’s it. No, instead we have this vast system of coordinated responses that simultaneously form how we process music. Right? So when we receive those soundwaves, and they’re converted into those electrical signals…all of these areas of the brain are lighting up at the same time - the language parts, the emotional parts, everything’s happening at the same time. The brain is using all of itself to understand this input that we’ve received, this music.
And what we’re learning now is that music also promotes neuroplasticity, a process that describes, kind of like, describes the brain’s ability to form and reorganize synaptic connections. This is basically like the brain’s ability to rewire itself, particularly after like a traumatic experience so I like to think of it as a GPS system. Our brain has all of these connections, or routes if you will, and if one route is damaged (maybe through a traumatic brain injury or possibly a neurodegenerative condition), music has the potential to reroute the GPS and form new ways those neurons from point A to point B.
And that’s such a powerful thing. What else could do that but music? What a powerful tool we have in music. It’s truly incredible and it’s something I continue to see every day as I’m working with clients in our area, even clients over telehealth. You see that difference because music connects with us on so many levels and it’s activated all these parts of our brains. Like I said earlier, it's a workout, it’s a workout for the brain because there’s so much going on. And again, this is kind of like, I know we kind of went through this really fast today, but at the same time, that was a lot of info. It kind of feels like both, it was a lot but at the same time, but also, we’re just touching the surface. We’re just starting to scratch the surface of what’s going on internally when we listen to music, when we make music.
And that’s something I want to continue to talk about over the next couple episodes. Like I said, my hope for this episode is that we’re able to think about the many things going on in our brain, how music is impacting our brain in so many ways, and have that foundational understanding so that way we can expand on this topic in future episodes and really ask some meaningful questions and just have a good understanding as our guests come in and share a little bit more with us. So, I really hope that gives us a good foundation moving forward in both our understanding of music and our upcoming topics.
So before we go today, I wanna say, thanks again for listening as always and thanks again for taking the time out of your day to be here in my mindspace. This was a heavy one. This was a very heavy neurologic episode, but that’s okay. That’s okay.
So I hope now, as you go off on your day, for the rest of the day, I encourage you to really think about that. Notice your responses to music. When you hear a song on the radio, think about that. Think about all of those things that are going on at the same time.
Maybe consider music in your day to day life a little more when you are feeling stressed. We talked about stress response. How can you, maybe, put music on on your way home to decompress from the day? How can we use music at the start of our day to re energize ourselves? If we can’t find the right words to talk to someone about something, can we find a song that’ll speak for us? If we’re struggling to learn a new instrument because - let’s be honest- learning instruments are hard. They’re movements that are not really part of our day to day routines. Maybe seeing music in this way, maybe seeing how complicated even listening much less playing music is internally, maybe we’ll have a little more patience with ourselves…give ourselves a little more grace because so much is happening. And it’s okay to take our time. It’s gonna be hard. There’s so much going on. I don’t know how our brain does it! And so quickly too!
So think about this as we kind of move forward into our day and move forward into the rest of our podcast, our musical brains will be with us on this journey.
Thank you again for being here. I really look forward to our next topics coming up and if you have any ideas or any topic requests, please reach out to us. Let us know. Interact with us on those Spotify polls and hopefully we’ll hear from you soon. Have a good rest of the day. Thanks!
