Music and the Brain

Exploring the distinction between music and musicality; while musical styles change, musicality is the stable array of mental processes that underlie one's ability to appreciate and produce music; one's capacity for relative pitch perception.

Darwin believes that musical behavior arises because it gives the early ancestors a biological advantage; Darwin's theory and other adaptationist explanations for the evolution of music; invention theories and gene-culture co-evolution theories.

Following two lines of research that put ideas about music's origins to the test; music perception in monkeys; an ingenious experiment with young children evaluates the theory that musical behavior enhances social bonds between group members.

Learning what makes a piece of music sound sad, joyful or angry; why music has expressive power beyond words; exploring the different ways that music conveys emotion; testing responses to musical passages composed for this presentation.

Delving deeper into the emotional reactions that people have to music; the chills induced by certain musical passages; the theories about where these powerful feelings come from; eight psychological mechanisms by which music arouses emotions.

The perception of pitch and timbre are two processes fundamental to musicality; pitch allows one to order sounds from low to high; Timbre lets one distinguish two sounds with the same pitch, loudness and duration; both are constructed by the brain.