Since my youth, I've taken refuge in music. Music quieted my troubled, adolescent soul. I could express and evoke powerful emotions without words with more nuance, tone and color than I could with language.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. -Victor Hugo
Magnetic resonance imaging has shown that music triggers a cascade of neurotransmitters, such as endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine, which are associated with positive feelings- changing emotional states. In a PET scan study, readings indicated that music triggers the same neural processes that govern the brain’s ability to produce feelings of euphoria that are commonly associated with food, sex, and drugs (Blood and Zatorre, 2001). Music is feel-good.
Music is also a way to train the mind. Our brains are hard-wired for the benefits of music. Every time we practice, we're integrating sensory and fine motor skills and gross motor skills, all the while expressing what is most alive in us. We're rewiring the brain by strengthening synapses, building new neurons, and rebuilding myelin sheaths which enable transmission of electrical signals between cells. It's good for the brain.
Music can also be good for the body. In a recent systematic review, researchers looked at peer-reviewed articles published from 1980-2020. Data showed that musical tempo correlated with changes in heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure. "Music of various genres and types has been postulated to possess features that stimulate or inhibit the autonomic nervous system, which leads to variable effects on cardiovascular function." There appeared to be a positive impact of listening to music on heart rate variability (a good thing). Other studies found decreases in salivary cortisol levels- a stress hormone (Fleg, et. al. 2022).
Listening to music can enhance exercise performance. It is common to see athletes grinding on a track or at the gym with headphones on. When I was a fitness instructor, the music we were given was designed to reduce exercise-perceived exertion and increase exercise endurance. We can enhance cognitive performance and shift one's arousal state.
Over the years, my love and appreciation for music has evolved into a tool to enhance learning. My 9 year old is playing Satie's Gymnopedie; my middle son plays Fur Elise, and my oldest, 15, produces his own music. They're not just learning the classics, they're brain training. Early musical training greatly enhances connectivity that persists into adulthood and facilitates neuroplasticity beyond music.
As music has been shown to help improve memory and performance, I leveraged it to learn 5 languages. I can still recall the Japanese songs I learned when I lived there from 2000-2002. When music holds our attention, this increases the likelihood that it will be encoded in memory together with details of an event. And this then means music works as an effective cue for recall years later. The connection between music and the hippocampus, a brain area critical for forming and retrieving memories, is why music is frequently used in therapies for conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Music is good for the aging brain. Studies show that people who play an instrument showed significantly better performance in working memory and executive function than those who didn't (Vetere et al., 2023). A recent study found that formal musical training improves working memory (Pino et al., 2024). Working memory seems to play an important role in divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is a cognitive process that involves generating multiple, diverse solutions to a problem or question, often characterized by its open-ended and spontaneous nature. It is a key component of creativity, as it allows individuals to explore a wide range of possibilities and think outside the box.
Musical ability, moreover, seems to grow the brain's cognitive reserves. A cognitive reserve is a buffer against the effects of aging. People with a larger cognitive reserve, in part built up through lifestyle choices and activities, are less susceptible to age-related diseases like Alzheimer's.
Music opens the door to culture. My love of music was not restricted to any genre. I trained my ear to listen until I could understand the nuances and logic of any genre. Recently, I challenged myself as a musician to record music in different genres from ragas to reggae, salsa to samba, gospel to gnawa, baroque to bata. To do this well required hours of study. Afro-beat, classical Arab music, traditional Irish, Bulgarian and Hungarian folk music, classical Japanese, and Gamelan music are on the docket. The more dissimilar to Western music, the better. This project improved my musicianship and my understanding of mind.
When listening to music, the brain seems to prefer hearing and producing rhythms composed of simple integer ratios — for example, a series of four beats separated by equal time intervals (forming a 1:1:1 ratio). Think of the steady kick drum in house music. However, the favored ratios can vary greatly between different societies, according to a large-scale study led by researchers at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and carried out in 15 countries.
To measure how people perceive rhythm, the researchers devised a task in which they play a randomly generated series of four beats and then ask the listener to tap back what they heard. The rhythm produced by the listener is then played back to the listener, and they tap it back again. Over several iterations, the tapped sequences became dominated by the listener’s internal biases, also known as priors.
“The initial stimulus pattern is random, but at each iteration the pattern is pushed by the listener’s biases, such that it tends to converge to a particular point in the space of possible rhythms,” wrote one of the paper's co-authors. “That can give you a picture of what we call the prior, which is the set of internal implicit expectations for rhythms that people have in their heads.”
I experienced this when I tried to replicate a rhythm from Sudan. I used a digital audio workstation and uploaded the drum track. Then I played over it exactly as I thought I heard it. I even used a sequencer to quantize the beats so that they fell exactly on point. Still, I was off. Just as the research predicted, I was imposing my mental representations of rhythm onto the music. I've played percussion for over 4 decades- from traditional Ghanian drumming, to sacred Afro-Cuban/Yoruba rhythms, to Indian kolkatas, but the Sudanese pattern was hard to replicate.
“When you hear somebody playing something and they have errors in their performance, you’re going to mentally correct for those by mapping them onto where you implicitly think they ought to be,” the researcher posited. This is true even if the listener and musician are one and the same.
The researchers found that in every group they tested, people tended to be biased toward simple integer ratios of rhythm. However, not every group showed the same biases. People from North America and Western Europe, who have likely been exposed to the same kinds of music, were more likely to generate rhythms with the same ratios. However, many groups, for example those in Turkey, Mali, Bulgaria, and Botswana showed a bias for other rhythms. The brain’s bias toward simple integer ratios may have evolved as a natural error-correction system that makes it easier to maintain a consistent body of music, which human societies often use to transmit information.
Perceptual pitch also varies across cultures. I replicate the Sudanese melody because it was microtonal and did not map to the 12 key, Western chromatic scale. But I still had fun learning and trying. I ended up using artificial intelligence to isolate the sounds I could not replicate. I felt very much like a foreigner speaking with a strong accent.
It goes both ways. When I first heard recording of Latin music from African-American jazz legends, it was as if they were speaking with accents. They spoke very good mambo, but they spoke with a detectable accent.
Music opens the door to neuroscience. Nerve cells in the brain and body can become activated by music such that the frequency of neural impulses synchronizes with the frequency of sound. Listening to electronic music makes neurons in our brain fire in time with the beat, which appears to alter our reaction time and sense of unity.
The brain, in a sense, becomes an instrument releasing neuromodulators like dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin and neurotransmitters like GABA, acetylcholine and glutamate at the same frequency of sound, creating a symphony of brain activity. This explains why people report listening to music to relax (90%), to improve their mood (82%), to process emotions like sadness (46.5%). Indeed, listening to sad music when we're sad can be cathartic.
Music can induce a flow state. Flow was first identified and studied by the pioneering psychological scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He defined it as ‘a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. A study on jazz improvisation found that the creative flow state involves two factors: extensive experience, which leads to a network of brain areas specialized for generating the desired type of ideas, plus the release of control – “letting go” – to allow this network to work with little or no conscious supervision. Creative flow can be achieved by training people to release control when they have acquired enough expertise in a particular domain (Rosen, 2024).
The EEG results indicated that heightened flow conditions correlated with heightened activity in auditory and tactile regions of the left hemisphere, which are implicated in music perception and performance. Notably, increased flow was also linked with diminished activity in the superior frontal gyri, a region responsible for executive control. These findings align with the notion that experiencing creative flow involves a decrease in conscious control, signifying a state of surrender or release.
Among highly experienced musicians, the state of flow was linked to heightened activity in auditory and visual regions and reduced activity in parts of the default-mode network, indicating that this network played a minimal role in facilitating flow. Less experienced musicians did not exhibit these brain patterns.
The key take away according to the lead researcher in the study was this: “If you want to be able to stream ideas fluently, then keep working on those musical scales, physics problems or whatever else you want to do creatively—computer coding, fiction writing—you name it. But then, try letting go. As jazz great Charlie Parker said, ‘You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.’”
By experimenting and applying research findings, I was able to manipulate my brain's reward/reinforcement system. A popular idea in neuroscience is that our brain's are predictive machines. When our predictions are accurate, we receive a subtle reward. At the experiential level, it feels like motivation which promotes a sense of agency. The effect is more pronounced when we receive a prediction error. At the experiential level, it feels like frustration, disorientation, irritability.
A class of neurons called "prediction-error neurons" respond when sounds violate expectations, thereby sending a message that a mistake has been made (Audette and Schneider, 2023).
"Brains are remarkable at detecting what's happening in the world, but they are even better at telling you whether what happened was expected or not," David Schneider, an assistant professor in NYU's Center for Neural Science, explained. "We found that there are specific neurons in the brain that don't tell you what happened, but instead tell you what went wrong."
The paper's authors add that the results could potentially help better illuminate the learning process, identify the causes behind certain afflictions, and spot sound-related aptitudes.
"Neurons like these might be vital in learning how to speak or how to play a musical instrument," observes Nicholas Audette, a postdoctoral fellow in NYU's Center for Neural Science and the paper's lead author.
In another study, researchers found that how we understand melody is entwined with how we understand speech. The brain follows the pitch of notes, one set of neurons follows the changes in vocal pitch that lend meaning and emotion to speech. A second set of neurons tries to predict what notes will come next. A third set are solely devoted to predicting melodic notes (Sankaran et al., 2024). There's a low-level processing of the individual notes of the melody, and high-level, abstract processing of the context of these notes. Listening to a melody can sway our emotions because the auditory neurons that process music are in conversation with emotional centers in the brain.
I leveraged this function quite intuitively on my musical exploration. I would dedicate months to the study of one genre- say Bossa Nova or Drum and bass- until I could predict the drop, the chord progression, the bass line, etc. Even disagreeable music that I could not wrap my head around (e.g. microtonal music) became more pleasurable to the degree I understood its internal logic and form.
In a 2021 paper published in Nature, researchers hypothesized that with repeated exposure, a listener implicitly learns the attributes and logic of a genre and therefore perceives the music as less complex and more agreeable. "Some theories propose that when individuals listen to music, they make predictions about how it is going to unfold based on both schematic expectations (i.e. implicit knowledge about the encultured rules of music) and veridical expectations (i.e. factual knowledge about concrete pieces of music). When these predictions are compared to the actual incoming information, reward signals are believed to be triggered as a function of the certainty of the predictions and the surprisal of the outcomes."
I found I could generalize this skill to other areas of life. I could train my palate to accept healthier foods that may not have tasted as good as the junk foods I was ingesting. I could train my mind to grasp complex ideas- from neuroscience to physics to finance- by mere repetition and practice and exposure. I trained the mind to weather the discomfort of not knowing, of sitting in ignorance, until what seemed chaotic and disorderly and unfamiliar began to make more sense. Once the brain could recognize patterns and make predictions, the joy of learning and growing became self-rewarding and intrinsic.
Music opens the door to wonder. Sound waves enter the ear and travel the auditory cortical networks to the mesolimbic reward networks generating what we call pleasure (Marco-Pallares, 2016). Listening to music affects each of the four major lobes of the brain — frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital — in different ways. There is no set “path,” per se, through which music travels around the brain; it’s more of ping-pong game of stimuli and reaction.
The auditory cortex is responsible for discerning pitch and volume, and the amygdala and the caudate (part of the striatum) both process emotional reactions. Selective neurons encode the temporal structure of music. The neural function that processes musical information helps process other natural and ambient sounds (Kim et al., 2024). Other parts of the brain that control movement, attention, planning, and memory also activate when you listen to music.
The area of the brain called the superior temporal gyrus helps store “templates” of music you’ve listened to previously — which is why a person who has listened to the entire discography of a particular artist is likely to have more of an appreciation for the music than someone hearing it for the first time.
Music touches something deep and primordial within us. The first sound we heard was the rhythmic thumbing of our mother's heart. It is no surprise that most music falls with 60 and 130 beats per minute (which approximates the lower and upper ranges of the human heartbeat).
New research has found that listening to certain types of music can even create the feeling of sensations in specific organs of the body. Chords progressions with low surprise and low uncertainty, elicited the strongest abdominal sensations and also brought out feelings of calmness, relief, satisfaction, nostalgia and empathy. Another sequence, where the first three chords were played with low surprise and low uncertainty, but the final fourth chord elicited high surprise and low uncertainty – produced sensations in the heart and were closely linked to aesthetic appreciation and feelings of pleasure when listening to music. Finally, sequences which generated strong sensations in the head were significantly associated with feelings of anxiety and confusion (Daikoku, Tanaka, Yamawaki, 2024).
Music opens the door to gratitude. When I play piano, each finger moves independently. I marvel at the dexterity of the hands. The brain zips and unzips information about the timing and order of movements ahead of the action being performed. Researchers discovered that the order and timing of movements in complex sequences are separated by the brain, before being zipped and transferred into specific movement commands, or ‘muscle memory’, as the person begins the action. After thousands of hours of practice, the wrist and fingers and musculature of the arm play harmony in harmony. Researchers found that high-level sequencing of movement (such as order and timing) can be stored across several motor areas of the brain, often across several days of training and memorizing action sequences, before being activated following a particular trigger such as a musical cue. (Rhys Yewbrey et al., 2023).
Music opens the door to other disciplines. Music is math in sound. Fractions and whole numbers make rhythm. And if you slow down rhythm you get pitch and melody as my favorite musician Jacob Collier demonstrates.
When I teach fractions to children, I introduce drum machines and have them create and listen to patterns. Mathematics can be heard, felt, and intuited. It becomes much more accessible than any worksheet. We divide measures into quarters, halves, eighths, sixteenths. More complex polyrhythmic patterns stack thirds over fourths, sixths over eighths, fifths over sevenths. African, Afro-Latin, and classical Indian Konnakol are beautifully complex examples. Children can feel complex mathematical rhythms in their body. We wiggle to it; we dance to it; we express through it.
When I was learning polyrhythms from master drummers CK Ladzepko and Yagbe Onilu, I saw them as math problems. I had to etch these rhythms in my brain. Then I had to switch hands. It was a wonderful exercise. Here's a challenge you can try. On one hand play a 2 against 3 against 4 against 5 against 6. Then switch hands. Your brain will get a workout.
Music opens the door to physics. Sound travels through air as waves. High pressure as compressions and low pressure as rarefactions carry the wave forward. A sound's pitch is dependent on the frequency of the sound wave. Our ears capture disturbances in air pressure as sound. Double the frequency and you get octaves. Frequencies with simple whole number ratios create harmony. A 2:3 ratio creates a perfect fifth. A 4:5 ratio creates a third. Put them together and we get a major chord. When I teach physics, I use digital audio workstations (DAWs) and Sonic Pi (a coding language). With a DAW, children can manipulate the physics of sound and engineer new sounds or instruments. With Sonic Pi, children code music sound by sound. Through exploration and play, they learn about the physics of sound. They can explore different waves types, for example: the sine, saw, triangle, and square; learn about wave properties (e.g. frequency, amplitude, period, length, velocity) and learn to manipulate other properties of sound. As they change parameters, they can hear the changes in output. Equations on paper do not provide the same immediate feedback or intuitive grasp that music provides.
Music opens the door to engineering. Sound engineering is one domain; building instruments is another. My first build project was an Afro-Peruvian cajon. My second was a 3D printed Native American flute in a minor pentatonic scale with a second octave range. The length of the flute, the spacing and diameter of the holes as well as the 3D printers limitations and functions all had to be worked out. Mike Prairie explains the physics of the Native American flute here.
Music plays well with technology. I used microcontrollers (Makey Makeys, Raspberry Pis and Arduinos) to invent and program new instruments. Today, I am integrating movement, dance, tech, and music. Music and dance are siblings. The circuitry of the motor neurons are intimately related to the neural circuitry of sound. The body responds to rhythm and certain frequencies of sound.
Using motion sensors as MIDI controllers, we can make music with movement. The x, y, z axes as well as the accelerometer and gyroscope can all be used to control parameters like pitch, cutoffs, low or high frequency oscillation, volume, or anything else. Many disciplines come together (dance, music, technology, mathematics, and physics).
At a recent event celebrating 50 years of hip hop, all the b-boys (breakdancers) lined up to try the sensors. It was very interesting to see how they interacted and improvised with the technology. Musicians and dancers have a symbiotic relationship- add technology and new possibilities for creative expression emerge. For this performance, for example, I had to create a drum loop that b-boys could dance to. I also knew what kinds of dances they would likely perform: top rocking, popping, boogaloo, breaking (floor routines, gymnastics). However, the sensors imposed constraints. Ideally, what the artists were seeking to create would be worked out beforehand. But this would be a live set, so I tried to anticipate the movements (e.g. direct, strong, sudden, and bound movements, aggressive, punchy, etc.) the axes (spatial geometry), and the soundscapes that would best fit with the genre.
With technology, the brain can become an instrument. Recently, I figured out how to pair data from an electroencephalogram (EEG) and use brain wave activity to create and control soundscapes. To play this instrument takes a degree of cognitive control. I can make music with the ultimate instrument- my own mind.
Finally, music integrates with meditation. I breathe out long into the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese bamboo flute. I take about 5 breaths per minute, transforming breath into melody, bending each note, adding tone and color. This is suizen, or breathing meditation. Suizen was practiced by the Komuso, Zen Buddhist monks of ancient Japan. I use the flute to practice breathwork. Breathing affects heart rate. Vigorous inhales increase heart rate, and long, vigorous exhalations slow down the heart rate in a process known as respiratory sinus arrhythmia. This practice improves heart rate variability- a biomarker for heart health.
I play other wood and bamboo flutes: the bansuri of India, Andean pan flutes, the Peruvian quena, and traditional Native American flutes (an Andean moseño, ocarina, Cuban flauta charanga, Vietnamese sau diu and ala, Armenian duduk, Australian didgeridoo, Persian ney interdental flute, the Western flute & sax, Chinese cucurbit, and Slovakian dvojačka are on my wish list). I would also be interested in using the Hawaiian ohe hano lhu and the Malaysian pensol to practice breathwork. These flutes are played through the nose. The Balinese suling deserves special mention as it requires circular breathing to play. This is an advanced technique which allows players to produce continuous tones without interruption.
But my favorite wind instrument is the body itself.
I use the breath to modulate my physical and mental state as countless meditators have done for millennia before me. There are many variations you might add to your practice from suizen to pranayama, chanting to humming, or polyphonic singing.
Polyphonic chanting is another way to sustain a breath. Harmonic overtones are sung over a fundamental note. The singer changes the shape of the tongue, lips, larynx and pharynx to produce complex, multilayered sounds. These are some preliminary practices designed to settle the mind prior to meditation.
Entrainment is yet another way to train the mind. In a pilot study, researchers found that a frequency of binaural beats set to 40Hz can increase gamma waves. My own informal research has confirmed this. In a previous post, I shared the different EEG signatures associated with different meditative techniques. Gamma-band oscillations support multiple cognitive processes and improve cognitive functioning (Lopez, 2020; Wang, Zhang, and Yang, 2022). Gamma oscillations are associated with improved memory and recall and faster reaction times. I was able to achieve a degree of concentration and cognitive control using binaural rhythms at 40Hz.
I use pink noise for sleep. “There are all different colors of noise,” explains sleep medicine expert Michelle Drerup, PsyD, DBSM of the Cleveland Clinic. Both pink and white noise contain all of the frequencies that humans can hear (ranging from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz). With pink noise, the lower frequencies are more prominent and the higher frequencies are turned down. Pink noise sounds like the roar of a waterfall and researchers found that it can improve the quality of deep sleep (Lustenberger, et al., 2023) and further found that deep sleep improves cardiovascular health- which, for the athletic, translates to faster recovery times. My own experiments validate the findings- which is good enough for me (placebo or not).
Music is an art that sculpts the mind and gives expression to emotions. Sadly, music has been profaned; much of it is toxic. Most of the urban music I grew up listening to (hip hop, R&B, etc) promoted vice, glorified violence and criminal behavior, celebrated victimhood, and normalized promiscuity, alcohol and drug abuse. In most of the popular songs, there was little contrition for the ignorance being promoted or recognition of the pain one would suffer as a consequence. I likened the music to fast food. I knew it wasn't the healthiest fare for the mind, but the rhythms were addictive and I consumed it anyway. Apologists excused the content as art, arguing that the creators were being scapegoated and blamed for systemic and structural failures they were merely reporting- not influencing. But I knew the genre had a profound influence on culture, values, fashion, language, perceptions, politics, art, and the zeitgeist of the times. The music signaled moral decline absent in the music my parents enjoyed when they were teens.
I also knew that music had much more power than the pundits or creators realized and that music was deserving of much more respect from those gifted with talent. Neuroscience confirms this. Different music activates different neural circuits in ways that influence behaviors, thoughts, and actions for good and bad.
Findings suggest that aggressive music can make listeners more aggressive emotionally compared to other types of music. Mast and McAndrew (2011) hypothesized that high arousal from music stimulation mixed with aggressive verbal lyrics could induce actual aggressive behaviors for avid listeners of more “hardcore” genres. They conducting a study involving the potential relationship between the violent lyrics of heavy metal rock and behavioral aggression and found that violent lyrics played a significant role in encouraging aggressive behaviors in the participants. This study suggests a likely link between aggressive genres and aggressive behaviors, possibly due to negative lyrical perceptions and language depicting anger and hostility. Similar areas of the brain that are activated during comprehension of emotions and language in the temporal lobe are also activated when listening to music (Besson, Chobert, and Marie, 2011). Regions of the brain involved in processing language are also involved in processing music such that brain networks that are damaged as a result of injury or disease give rise to same symptoms. Amusia, for example, is also associated with aprosodia. Amusia is a severe musical disorder affecting both the perception and production of music. Aprosodia is a disorder in interpreting language prosody or ranges of rhythm and melody, which results in an inability to interpret and convey emotions in speech. The neural network behind amusia focuses on the right hemisphere. Its key node was the superior temporal gyrus.
Other musical attributes, such as the type of chord, tempo, or volume may influence emotions and behavior as well- just as language does. Songs played in a minor key harmonic have a tendency give listeners perceptions of unsettling emotions such as sadness or anger (Levitin, 2006).
I was conflicted- I loved the music, but detested the messaging. Lyrics capture moral values. In a recent study, researchers found a link between a person's musical preferences and their moral values, shedding new light on the profound influence that music can have on our moral compass (Preniqi, Kalimeri & Saitis, 2023).
I ended up sampling and layering my own content on top of hip hop instrumentals, creating my own private collection of music that nurtured the heart and satisfied the longings of the soul.
Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder. -John Ruskin
For me, music is ethereal and sacred. For the ancient Indians, it was a path to enlightenment. In Ancient Greece, music was seen as a gift of the gods. They believed that music could have a positive effect on both body and mind of the listener. I feel uplifted when I listen to the music of Jacob Collier, Mozart, Cory Henry, Fela Kuti, Herbie Hancock, Chopin, Tito Puente, Jay Dilla, Umm Kulthum, Beethoven, Pedrito Martinez, Joao Gilberto, Sinatra, Ravi Shankar, Michael Jackson, Bobby MsFerrin, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Whitney, Tribe Called Quest, Bob Marley, Ray Charles, Vicente Hernandez, Richard Smallwood, the Beatles, Stromae, the music of Quincy Jones, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, the Doors, Zakir Hussein, Mos Def, Luther Vandross, James Brown, Ruben Blades, Caetano Veloso and many many others.