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Taylor Bell
Human Biology
Miss Carlene Worthington
9/20/2015
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Biology has nothing to do with music. is what I thought before I started researching for this
paper and was even what I thought before I took this Human Biology class. I didn't even think about
studies that people have done on people's brains while listening to music. The fact that you can find
music in nature and animals. I was intrigued to find out that something called biomusicology, has been
studied since the early 90s and late 80s. In most western music there are 8 whole notes and 12 half
notes in between those whole notes in a musical scale. When you play the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes in the
scale it is known as major chord; people tend to associate that major chord with emotions of happy.
When you play a 1st, 3b (flatted 3rd or a half note below the 3rd whole note), and 5th it is known as minor
in which people associate it with sad emotions. It's interesting that neurologists have studied and tested
what happens to people's brains when they listen to happy music as well as sad music
In the mid 19th century Paul Broca observed that when speech was impaired it was because
there was damage to a particular part of the brain. The area of the brain that determines whether or not
you are speech impaired is the left temporal lobe above the ear. This discovery was one of the first
pieces of evidence that different bits of the brain are specialized to do different things. Something that I
find fascinating is that people who had speech impairment did not necessarily have musical impairment
or decreased musical abilities most of the time. For example, a Russian composer who suffered a stroke
to the left side of his brain was unable to understand speech or even speak, but he was still able to
write and compose music up until his death ten years after his stroke. There are many other examples of
people losing their ability to speak and communicate. This example is just one of them and it shows

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that music and language are both processed independently.
In the late 1990's Dr. Liegeois-Chauvel and Dr. Peretz examined 65 patients who had had
surgery on their brains because epilepsy. The doctors took advantage of testing these people (because
the patients were getting parts of their left temporal lobes removed) knowing that the left side of the
brain affected speech. They wanted to see if different areas of the brain affected different ways of
analyzing and understanding music. For example, the way humans hear pitch (the vibrations or
frequencies in the air), the difference in pitch between one note and the next, the set of pitches to which
the notes belong; in western styles of music; the 12 notes of each octave in different musical scales,
how the melody rises and falls, the relative lengths and spacing of the notes, and the speed at which a
melody is played. Each of these they found out were heard or distinguished while using different areas
of the brain. The experiments showed that people with right temporal lobe damage had difficulty
computing both the key (pitch) and the contour of the melody, while those with left temporal lobe
damage suffered problems only with the key. The doctors found that no patients had trouble figuring
out differences in tempo or how fast different melodic rhythms were played, thus they concluded that
pitch and rhythm are both processed independently in different parts of the brain. It is obvious that if
you have a healthy brain then you are going to have less of a problem with music. But even when
people suffer from different types of brain damage it is intriguing that many in that case don't lose
much when it comes to the ability to perceive and create music.
In 1990 many different doctors and scientists used a type of modern brain scanning called
functional transcranial Doppler conography (yes, when I read that for the first time it threw me off
too). This form of brain scanning made it possible for scientists to study people with healthy brains and
watch the blood flow in different specific parts of the brain as music was played. The people they
studied with the modern brain scanning technique were musicians that could play 2 or more
instruments and people who have never played any musical instruments. The scientists found that when

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they played a 16th century madrigal whose words were in Latin (a language chosen because it was not
spoken by any of the participants) the people who were not musical had more blood flow in the right
hemisphere of their brains than the musicians. As for the musicians the opposite was true; the blood
flow in their left hemisphere increased suggesting that their training was affecting the way they
perceived harmony and music. I would have never thought about how the blood levels in the brain react
to different songs and harmonies.
The part of the brain where music has its most profound effects is the brain's emotional core
the Limbic System. In 1995 Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Bowling Green State University, Ohio,
wanted to test if music could actually be considered an anecdote. He asked hundreds of young men and
women why they felt music to be important in their lives. Emotion turned out to be more or less, the
answer. Around 70% of both sexes said it was because music brings emotions and feelings. The next
most popular response was that they listened to music to alleviate boredom. To test the theory that
music can be used as an anecdote even more, Dr. Krumhasl from Cornell University addressed the
question by looking at the physiological changes (in blood circulation, respiration, skin conductivity an
body temperature) that happened in a group of volunteers while they listened to different pieces of
music. The ways the body responds to emotion are well known. Sadness to a slower pulse, raised blood
pressure, decreased skin conductivity and a drop in body temperature. Fear produces increased pulse
rates. Happiness causes faster breathing. They found that music with a rapid tempo and written in a
major key correlated exactly with the induction of happiness. A slow tempo in a minor key induced
sadness. And a rapid tempo combined with dissonance induced fear. It is obvious that the way our
bodies and our minds perceive different rhythms and tempos directly relate to mood and emotion.
Aside from really technical brain scans and observation, a more simple observation we
can see is that human beings are perceiving creatures. We are creatures who perceive our own thoughts!
We have a drive to externalize life outside of what we know, music and creating music is just that. We

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explore areas of the mind and imagination that in which no one before us ever has. I like to think that a
midst evolving as a species, our perception of life and the unimaginable has also evolved with us
mostly due to that fact that we are a species that is constantly pursuing evolutionary change be it
conscious or unconscious change.

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REFERENCES
http://www.economist.com/node/329414
http://www.percepp.com/biomusic.htm
http://www.isorhythm.com/Biomusic.html