Music, Language, and the Brain (review)

Some months ago, a conservatory student who had recently completed a course I teach on the cognitive psychology of music made an appointment to see me. I sensed caution in his manner and voice, and indeed he had been unhappily surprised by an aspect of his own behavior, a recurring response to music-making that he regarded as unusual. Of late, during periods of intense practice, and sometimes in performance as well, he found himself weeping silently but uncontrollably. He felt no awareness of any profound associations with the circumstances when this occurred, nor did the prospect of performing consciously elicit anxious or dispiriting thoughts. In a few cases he had felt embarrassed before other musicians, but chiefly he worried that the growing distraction would impede his concentration. Thus his concern was practical: he was interested to discover what lay behind his unprompted crying in order to preempt it. For my part, the episode served as a distinct reminder of how ill-prepared those of us involved in arts education are to frame, much less pursue, questions we may have about relationships between our behavior and our biology, or perhaps more precisely, about the biology of our behavior as individuals.

Knowledge of our perceptual and cognitive faculties might be thought integral to a cultivation of awareness of how it comes to pass that we perceive and cognize—experience—aspects of our own behavior. But practicing artists and musicians do not find exploration of relevant disciplines, from genetic evolution to neuropsychology, constituent within arts education; it seems fair to generalize that most of us either remain at sea or take refuge in platitudes about the primacy of human self-expression (whatever that may mean). This is unfortunate, for it is hard to imagine what we have in common more than the continuities of our biological inheritance. I do not mean to suggest that closure on central questions now lies within our grasp, if only we would expend a little effort: on the contrary, neurobiology stands at a very considerable distance from consensus—to take but one of many beckoning questions—on adaptationist models of the origins of artistic behaviors. But benefits both calculable and incalculable accrue from engaging in debates over the very essence of what it means to be human—and it may yet turn out to be of practical interest whether, to follow out the example, behaviors we categorize with facile discernment as musical, their cultural particulars aside, have evolved “as a response to the needs of a faculty that has biological functions” (Isabelle Peretz, “Brain Specialization for Music,” The Neuroscientist 8 [2002]: 372–80, here at 379).

In fact, new contributions to the understanding of music as a defining human-behavioral complex now appear at an astonishing rate, part of a veritable tsunami of neurological research in recent decades made possible by an array of technological advances having largely to do with brain imaging. A certain irony revolves around the fact that, while the visual system holds center stage in cognitive, behavioral, and affective neurosciences research, the cognitive neuropsychology of visual artistic behaviors derives less than vigorous inspiration from it (but see Anjan Chatterjee, “Prospects for a Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Aesthetics,” Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 4 [2004]: 55–60). An altogether different trajectory characterizes the interest across many disciplines in the biological origins of music, especially in view of the comparatively modest time frame of research activity on the auditory system itself (I rely on overviews by Robert Zatorre, “Sound Analysis in Auditory Cortex,” Trends in Neuroscience 26 [2003]: 229–30; and by Lauren Stewart et al., “Music and the Brain: Disorders of Musical Listening,” Brain 129 [2006]: 2533–53). A certain advantage may pertain in this context to music, it must be admitted—namely, music’s partly analogous functional correspondence with language and speech—an advantage enlivened by the conspicuous attention of researchers in linguistics and speech science. Historians of antiquity will insist that the...