UC Irvine

Music exists in a variety of forms and is nearly ubiquitous in modern society but the reasons for its prevalence are poorly understood. Current attempts to answer this question are lacking in substantive explanatory power. Taking a wider view of music helps to clarify the reasons that it has developed. Musical activity engages an extensive network of brain regions and musical training confers a host of behavioral, motor, emotional and social benefits onto the practitioner. The fact that it engages such a wide swath of the brain also means that musical experiences can be more deeply encoded in memory. Although there are a number of shared resources for music and language processing, at later stages in the processing network, a different set of neuroanatomical regions are recruited for the two systems. Prosodic contour can carry information from a speaker to a listener via a separate set of neuroanatomical channels than other parts of language; it also carries cues about the emotional state of the speaker. The genetic links between creativity, musical proclivity and mental illness provide a critical key for understanding the role of music in human evolution. Interpreting evidence from disparate scientific fields creates a better understanding of music’s role in shaping the human experience.