Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound

Researchers at Harvard University’s Music Lab have discovered that babies will calm down to lullabies in any language, from Hopi to Polynesian. The soothing doesn’t come from hearing a parent’s voice or a familiar musical style. Babies are wired for rhythm and song.

The renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie, profoundly deaf since age twelve, performs shoeless to allow her feet to feel the vibrations from the floor. The human body, she told The Globe and Mail, is “like a huge ear.”

Brain scanning has confirmed that contrary to Pinker’s “cheesecake” theory, we don’t need our language system to process music.

The inability to enjoy music of any kind is so rare that brain specialists consider it a neurological condition: “Musical anhedonia” affects roughly 3 to 5 percent of us. People with this abnormality have glitches in the auditory-processing and reward systems of the brain.

our brains process words differently when they are spoken versus sung.

contours of melodies and, after birth, can distinguish between

Only at six months old do infants use their pitch and beat perception to recognize components of language. In infant development, wrote Honing, the Dutch music-cognition specialist, “musicality precedes both music and language.”

Some African and Indigenous languages don’t have a specific word for “singer” or “musician”; it’s a given that anyone who breathes can dance, drum, or sing. Music not only sprang from the human brain—it has the capacity to alter the structure and functioning of the brain itself. Aniruddh Patel, a music-cognition expert at Tufts University in Medfor

at a neurological level, we all have rhythm. This means even those with “two left feet” on the dance floor have a hope of learning a few moves if they put in the time (just like Willard, the dance-deprived teenager in the movie Footloose). Our brains attune to rhythms through entrainment, the tendency for vibrating objects to lock into phase. Chris