Toward a Biological Account of Music Experience

Interestingly, neuroscientists working on music no longer need to justify their research enterprise. Most people, from the scientific community as well as from the general population, are keen to know more about music as a brain function. This general interest is likely to carry over to the next millennium. But why do people suddenly consider music worth studying? For more than a century, music has been ignored by both the scientific community and, more recently, by our educational system. This attitude probably reflected the widely shared opinion that music was superfluous. This opinion has changed recently, because it has become increasingly clear over the years, with massive access to the music media, that humans are avid consumers of music. Can neuroscience provide an answer as to why this is so? We contend that studying music as a brain function holds indeed great promises in this regard. Until recently, the study of music cognition in the human brain has relied primarily on clinical case studies. In contrast to other fields such as vision, the study of the neural basis of music cognition cannot be based on animal models. For one thing, it is not clear whether animal vocalization, including bird singing, is the precursor of language or of music in humans. Thus, a major obstacle to generalization across species lies not only in the language specialization of the human brain but also in human inclination for music. Humans possess both language and music as means of auditory–vocal communication while animals possess only one channel, as far as we know. This obstacle to animal modeling can now be overcome with the advent of new methods for the functional exploration of the human brain, such as neuroimaging (e.g., PET, fMRI, high density ERPs, MEG) and brain stimulation (TMS, for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) techniques. We no longer