Music and the Brain

Here are an amazing number of stories that deal with the notion of music and language. Diana Deutch from UCSD discusses her studies how infants that are raised in different language context will have differing abilities to acquire perfect pitch. She demonstrates that children that have a tonal language (such as Chinese) will develop a much keener sense of pitch than those that have a “flat” language as their first tongue.

Conversely, despite more than 4000 languages still extant on Earth, there are some common sounds or tones that are pervasive across all languages from Hindi to Finnish. These include tones that denote approval, prohibition, attention. These tones are a form of universal language that denote touch.
Even further, there is a story about the (in)famous 1913 debut of Stravinski’s ‘Rite of Spring’ which actually led to rioting. The music actually induced behaviours outside the realm of the reasonable. This leads to a fascinating series of neurological studies of the affect that dissonant sounds have on the auditory cortex.

This is a series of clips of the famed neurologist V.S. Ramachandran that cover the idea of left and right body awareness in the brain. He also has a fun 23 minute TED Talk that covers similar ideas.

Other clips:
Part 2
Part 3