The Influence Of Music On Music

Music: Miracle Drug Or Human Language? Music, an essential component to mankind’s culture, is said to affect the intellect of humans in several different ways. Specifically, it’s affect on infants is more important than any other age group due to the brain’s plasticity at such a young age. Music can improve learning skills, test taking skills, concentration, heartbeat, and relaxation. Understanding the human brain is a great endeavor that countless scientists have spent lifetimes on. It will probably never be fully understood, however, I think that researching music’s relationship with the brain should help uncover many mysteries. Neuroscientific studies have shown music to be an agent capable of influencing complex neurobiological processes

34). Basically, this means that the brain was designed to interact with music and is able to be reshaped by its recurrence. Lin et al. say that music is processed in the brain by traveling through the eardrum into the cochlea, where it is transformed into neural activity and makes its way to the thalamus, where it is essentially distributed to different areas of the brain that extracts and processeses its different qualities (35). The functions of the different areas of the brain are summarized in the table below (36). I believe that this information is crucial

compared musicians’ and non-musicians’ abilities to “evoke musical sensations without external stimuli,” meaning to voluntarily bring to mind and listen to musical compositions without and external auditory stimulus (711). The results of this study showed that 97 of 100 musicians had spontaneous musical sensations, and all 100 could evoke and modify them (“modify” meaning to adjust pitch, tempo, etc.) Of 132 nonmusicians, 39.4% had spontaneous musical sensations, 54.5% could evoke them, and 17.4% were able to modify them. Also, 43.9% did not have spontaneous musical sensations nor could they evoke them