Music and the Brain

Music and the Brain

In the company of Ian Cross, Director of the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge, Tom Service explores the gamut of neurological and musico-scientific enquiry. Just how is it that we experience emotion through music? Why is it that music seems to involve so much of our minds and our bodies; our feet tapping, hearts beating, and millions of neurons firing in our brains?

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The Fragmented Orchestra is a project which explores the way the brain interprets music, and is the winner of this year’s PRS Foundation New Music Award. From 24 places around the country, from churches to rugby stadiums, musical ‘neurons’ feed a central ‘brain’ at the FACT Gallery in Liverpool to create a two-and-a-half month piece of music. Tom visits the composers and creators behind the project to discover how this micro-map of the brain works.

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From Edinburgh, Professor Colwyn Trevarthen talks to Tom about how we are all born with an innate ‘communicative musicality’ – that even in the interactions between weeks-old babies and their mothers there is musical activity as sophisticated as improvised jazz.

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And composer Nigel Osborne explains how music can heal trauma, in his work with traumatised children around the world.

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Mick Grierson, a composer and electronic sound artist, has designed a piece of software that allows you to make music just from the power of your thoughtwaves. Tom visits Goldsmith’s College in London to be plugged into a handful of electrodes and have his brainwaves read.

And is music really common to all of us? Tom hears about ‘amusia’, a recognised condition in which people do not or cannot respond to music, from Jane Perry who does not understand the difference between being in tune or out of tune, and from Goldsmith College’s Lauren Stewart.

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For most of us it’s not about firing neurons – music transcends all that, and becomes emotional. Tom talks to Stefan Koelsch from Sussex University about his research into music and emotion, and violinist and music and medicine specialist Paul Robertson explains how his brain is hard-wired for music.

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Finally neurologist and author Oliver Sacks reveals that musicians’ brains literally look different to those of non-musicians: musical practice develops the brain, physically, in ways that no other discipline does.