The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

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MUSIC AND THE

NEUROLOGIST: A

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

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Abstract

Neurological disorders affecting musical function can produce either positive or negative symptoms.

Positive phenomena include musicogenic epilepsy (seizures triggered by music), musical partial

seizures (hallucinated music as the expression of the seizure), musical release hallucinations

(nonepileptic musical hallucinations, usually associated with impaired hearing), and synesthesia

(hallucinated colors triggered by musical tones). Negative phenomena comprise the amusias, which

can be receptive, expressive, or both, and can selectively involve particular components of musical

processing, including pitch, interval, contour, rhythm, meter, timbre, and emotional response.

Amusia is often accompanied by aphasia, but each can occur in the absence of the other. Neurological

disorders provide evidence that musical processing is multimodal and widely distributed in both

cerebral hemispheres.

Keywords:Musicogenic seizures; Musical partial seizures; Release hallucinations; Amusia;

Aphasia

Introduction

In nearly all right-handed people the left cerebral hemisphere is ‘dominant’ for proposi-

tional or analytic processing (exemplified by language), whereas the right hemisphere

is more responsible for appositional or gestalt processing (exemplified by spatial manipu-

lation and aspects of emotional expression or response). How the brain processes

music has intrigued neurologists and psychologists for over a century. A straightforward

answer would not be expected, for the components of music—for example, pitch, timbre,

duration, loudness, and rhythm—are likely processed through separate circuits. Music

can be both linear (e.g. melody) and nonlinear (e.g. chords), and different kinds of music

make different intellectual and emotional demands on different kinds of listeners or

performers.

The biological survival value of music remains an enigma. Darwin believed that musical

‘calling systems’ evolved into speech,^1 whereas Herbert Spencer believed that music evolved

as a stylized form of speech.^2 Steven Pinker notes, ‘Of [all] mental faculties...music...shows

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