Well looked at, music is nothing more than a sequence of ordered sounds, a kind of incarnation of the passage of time based on noise, silences and rhythms. Yet its power to elicit emotional reactions in humans, from depression to ecstasy, is such that it has become a touchstone of our behavior as a species. Besides language, the ability to enjoy music is one of the few skills that differentiates us from other animals. And like speech, it is difficult to think of a day when we do not hear a single note.
A new stimulus for neurology
Is music really that important to our lives? The latest findings in neurology, psychology and biology seem to show that it does: listening to pleasant melodies not only modifies our mood but can have a very positive influence on human cognitive development, on the stimulation of our intelligence and even on health. Until very recently, these questions had not received the attention of science, but now, the study of the relationships between music and well-being has become a fertile source of research and, thanks to them, we are beginning to find answers to some questions secular. Is there some physiological mechanism that controls the cascade of emotions suggested by the music? Is our ability to appreciate and create melodies related to the functioning of our body? Is the love for grades inherited? One of the most defended theories in this regard reports that human nature dictates the conditions that a sequence of notes must have in order for us to interpret it as a piece of music. In fact, music may remotely mimic the organization of our body’s internal rhythms, such as the heartbeat, the tempo of breathing, or the vocal loudness of words. In this way, it could be explained why all the musical manifestations of the world have a common emotional base. No matter how different their structure, tonality or rhythm, the world’s music shares a basic line: a Japanese person, even if he does not know a single word of flamenco, is capable of detecting that a bulería transmits happy feelings and a taranta produces sadder emotions .British psychologists John Sloboda and Patrik Juslin, from Keele University, have studied this phenomenon in depth and have related it to the human being’s capacity for surprise. Sloboda assures that “the basis of our emotional behavior is the capacity to respond to situations that, in some way, surprise us”. Winning the lottery produces a sudden change in our lives for the better, and that generates positive emotions. Knowing that a loved one is ill also surprises us, in this case negatively, and produces emotions of sadness. “It seems that music,” says Sloboda, “sets in motion the same astonishment mechanisms.” Humans, even musically lay people, are able to recognize subtle coherent structures in a piece of music and project expectations onto them, as if anticipating what sequence of notes will come next. When music amazes us with changes compared to what is expected, it generates an emotional reaction in us. Good successful songwriters master this mechanism perfectly.
The best thing is its ability to surprise us
According to Juslin and Sloboda, the origin of this sensation is in language. All human beings share an inherited code to interpret speech. In any language, anger manifests itself by screaming and affection by whispering. No matter what race we belong to, the minimal emotional rudiments of speech are universally recognizable. The same thing happens with music. The studies of these two psychologists with hundreds of volunteers show that, unfailingly, slow melodies with descending cadence generate in those who listen to them feelings of sadness while ascending cadences produce stimulating feelings. The conjunction of these effects causes a cascade of emotions in the human brain. But the main question is to know if this mechanism is biological or cultural. Does music act like this because our genes dictate it or is it that human culture has developed a limited type of sound manifestations?
Amusia: when sound says nothing
As in other neurological studies, the first approach to the cerebral bases of musical knowledge, dating from the beginning of the 20th century, was based on the study of disabled patients. It is about identifying if there is any area of the brain that, when damaged, impairs the ability to apprehend music. Experience shows that many people with disorders of speech processing centers do not necessarily lose musical function. There have even been cases of people suffering from amusia (total inability to distinguish musical notes) who hear words and speak without problems. More recently, the anatomical study of the brains of deceased patients and neuroimaging techniques have established that musical knowledge is processed globally in several parts of the brain at the same time. For example, people with diseases that affect the left temporal lobe may have problems identifying scales of notes, while those with diseases in the right temporal lobe show difficulties with musical contour, that is, the interpretation of whether the melody is ascending or descending.
With the brain we hear, see and remember notes 
French neurologist Herv Platel has used positron emission tomography to determine more precisely which areas of the brain are dedicated to music. The results were surprising since the studied brains showed incredible activity, not only in the areas of sound and language processing, but even in foreign centers such as those destined for vision. It seems that the evocative power of melodies is practically total: it stimulates the visual imagination, the linguistic environment, memory … After advancing in the identification of brain areas involved in our musical behavior, the next step is to determine if this knowledge can be of some clinical utility.Does listening to a lot of music have any functional effect on our body?Many recent studies confirm that it is. Just as physical exercise increases muscle mass, musical exercise could stimulate mental training. Neurologists from the Beth Deacones Medical Center in Israel have shown that professional musicians have more developed the areas of auditory processing and psychomotor control than other mortals. The difference in size of these areas of the gray mass can reach up to 50%. Thus, it would not seem strange that the musical experience could have some beneficial effect on health and, from what science is beginning to know, it does. . An analysis from the University of California in 1997 showed that listening to pleasant melodies reduces stress levels in the middle of a medical intervention. Gastroscopy is a really unpleasant test that hundreds of patients have to undergo every day. The Californian study consisted of letting the patients choose a type of music to listen to while the test was carried out.
Levels of cortisol, ACTH, and other stress hormones were substantially reduced. Along the same lines, Dr. Bárbara Miluk-Kolasa has measured cortisol levels in patients to whom bad clinical news is announced while they are exposed to a musical stimulus. Their reaction is much calmer than in cases where there is no background music. But the effect is not universal. Other studies show that loud, rhythmic music increases the amount of stress hormones in the blood of athletes during workouts. According to Norman Wienberger, a physician at the University of California, “all these data, put together, show that there is no direct relationship between music and stress hormones. The effect depends not only on the type of composition but also on the cognitive background and cultural of the individual “. The more one deepens the knowledge of the subject, the more evident the virtues of music seem.
UK Cancer Research Institute
The UK Cancer Research Institute is a pioneer in studies of music therapy oncology. The first results of research carried out since 2002 show that relaxation techniques using melodies can reduce the side effects of breast cancer treatments by up to 30 percent. For example, pain and nausea from chemotherapy are greatly reduced. The same center also studies the use of melodic pieces to reduce the anxiety that some patients experience when entering an MRI machine. Some experts are taking this knowledge to the extreme and propose the possibility that there is a way of curing certain ills based only on music: music therapy. There are many centers that use instruments to stimulate disabled people, children with developmental delay or disabled patients due to a stroke. Although in many cases the improvements in the quality of life of these people are evident, we are still far from understanding, from the point of view of medicine and biology, what relationship there is between music and their recovery. The funny thing is that the opposite effect is also possible: a mental illness can condition the way we listen to or create music.
It seems that this is the case of Maurice Ravel, the composer of the famous Bolero, suffering from progressive dementia. Among the symptoms of this disease, Ravel suffered from loss of language, motor difficulties and a decrease in the activity of the left hemisphere of her brain. French neurologist Francois Boller believes that the Bolero is a transcription of these symptoms. The work only has two musical themes, each of which is repeated eight times. But it has 30 overlapping melodic lines and 25 different sound combinations. Ravel himself defined it as an “orchestral fabrication without music.” According to Boller, such a piece was the only thing Ravel could hope to compose given his neurological limitations in 1928 (the disease began to manifest itself before 1927). If artistic ability is affected by disorders of this type, would it be possible to use music as a diagnostic tool? Experts fromNational Alzheimer Research Center of Brescia, in Italy, they are convinced that it is. Their idea began to take shape when they detected that two patients with frontotemporal dementia began to enjoy musical styles that they previously abhorred. One of them, 68 years old, began to listen at full volume to songs by an Italian pop singer typical of fifteen-year-old audiences. Another, in this case a woman in her early 80s, surprised her caregivers with a sudden love of rock. These symptoms have not been detected in other types of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s; therefore, doctors believe that sudden changes in musical preferences could serve as an early indication of the onset of a particular mental illness.
Is it true that it makes us smarter?
Another fertile field of research is that which studies the relationships between music and child development. Some preliminary studies in animals and humans could suggest that melody plays a role in stimulating intelligence. Certain mice exposed to musical auditions have been more adept at finding their way out of a maze. The idea has become so popular that almost no one today disputes that the study of scores, musical education and contact with instruments are basic pieces in early childhood education. However, there is still no evidence that music directly favors intelligence. Some data indicate that, after listening to specific pieces, groups of volunteers obtain better results in IQ tests, especially in those that have to do with spatial memory and sequences. But it is not possible to demonstrate, at the moment, that the effect can be permanent.
In the case of children, it is evident that music generates states of relaxation and concentration that are very beneficial for study and that auditory stimulation produces effects on the complex and plastic network of neural connections that is woven during childhood. But does all this have any effect on IQ? The answer is still vague. What we do know is that the little ones are familiar with songs they have heard in the womb and that their memory of these events can last up to a year. And also that babies as young as a few months old are capable of recognizing the melodies of a lullaby that their mother sings to them habitually even if the key and tone are changed. No one can deny it. The human being is a musical animal and that prodigious language of notes and rhythms that the species has devised is part of our nature.
Jorge Mayor
