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ABSTRACT - The organisation of the musical brain is a major focus of interest in contemporary neuroscience. This reflects the increasing sophistication of tools (especially imaging techniques) to examine brain anatomy and function in health and disease, and the recognition that music provides unique insights into a number of aspects of nonverbal brain function. The emerging picture is complex but coherent, and moves beyond older ideas of music as the province of a single brain area or hemisphere to the concept of music as a 'whole-brain' phenomenon. Music engages a distributed set of cortical modules that process different perceptual, cognitive and emotional components with varying selectivity. 'Why' rather than 'how' the brain processes music is a key challenge for the future.
All normal human brains can recognise music. How does the brain do it? The apparent universality of music implies that our musical experience, in all its exuberant variety, is underpinned by certain basic processes that reflect the anatomical and physiological organisation of our brains. It follows that the perception of music (like other higher brain functions) may be susceptible to specific disease states and brain lesions. Recent progress in the basic and clinical neurosciences, notably structural and functional brain imaging, have confirmed these predictions.1,2 In this piece I draw on some of these approaches to outline a framework for the organisation of the musical brain. I use 'musical brain' here to refer to the brain areas and mechanisms that enable any normal listener to perceive and understand music, rather than the brain specialisations that may support music perception and production in individuals with musical training.
Problems in studying the musical brain
The neuroscientific study of music poses a number of problems. These reflect the nature of music (and musicality) itself, prevailing concepts about it, and the tools available to study it.
It is stating the obvious to say that music is not simple: even a single voice melody has multiple dimensions of pitch (the individual intervals, and the overall pattern of 'ups and downs'), time (tempo, rhythm, metre) and the distinctive instrumental or human voices ('tone quality' or timbre) that carries the tune. It is not obvious a priori how these dimensions might translate to brain organisation, though it would seem unlikely...