The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

Edited by:
  • Isabelle Peretz &
  • Robert Zatorre
Oxford University Press: 2003. 466 pp. £75, $124.50 (hbk); £34.95, $59.50 (pbk)

From the soothing lyrical quality of lullabies to the driving pulse of techno, humans render sound patterns in myriad ways to serve diverse purposes. One category of human-generated sound patterns — speech — has the clear purpose of communication and has received considerable scientific attention. But the purpose of another immense range of sound patterns — those that underlie music — is manifold and mysterious. Compared with language, it has been difficult to ascribe to music a dominant role or specific survival value. Perhaps this is why there has been little effort to study the neural processes that underlie it.

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, a collection of chapters that originated from a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in May 2000, announces the arrival of music at the frontiers of neuroscience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it begins by addressing allegations that searching for a biological basis for music is futile because music has no apparent adaptive role in human evolution. However, beyond this opening salvo and two chapters explicitly devoted to comparing music and language, the cognitive neuroscience of music is explored on its own merits.

The major strength of this multiauthored volume is that it captures the breadth of the field and introduces a diverse array of behavioural and cognitive neuroscience techniques, providing several perspectives on what music is and how it might be studied. For example, many authors use a bottom-up approach to focus on the neural correlates of the perception and production of individual tones (and their various qualities such as pitch, timbre, loudness and duration), and ultimately on combinations or sequences of tones in various rhythmic patterns. Although they do not necessarily capture the essence of music, such studies of its building blocks are important because they help to identify how musical percepts arise and how they are ultimately differentiated from general multipurpose auditory perception.

Other approaches emphasize the importance of the higher-order structural relationships in music, such as scales, keys and musical phrases, to illustrate that even infants and non-musicians readily internalize such structures when they form memories and images of musical material. Yet other research programmes used expert musicians, with their highly specialized knowledge, in comparative studies of brain anatomy and functional organization, thereby examining an ethologically valid model of brain plasticity in humans.

Unfortunately, the benefits of these multiple viewpoints are diminished by the variation in presentation style. Some chapters, such as those that describe neurological disorders, musical imagery, the processing of expectations in music and language, and the evolutionary basis of music, are written for the lay reader and are a pleasure to read; other chapters have the density of conference proceedings aimed at the specialist. Although the chapters are grouped logically into several themes, the reader is left to stitch the information together across chapters and themes.

The heterogeneity that makes the reading difficult at times is akin to the free improvization of a jazz ensemble before it revisits the recognizable and coherent theme at the head of a piece. Just as a jazz guitarist's improvization follows a coherent path that may be different from the bass player's, the findings from the individual research programmes represented in this book are intriguing and internally consistent, even though their interrelationships may not be obvious. For instance, there is no conceptual framework that reconciles observations of anatomical specificity, or 'modularity', of musical function (arising from neuropsychological assessments of lesion patients) with the variability in the networks that are recruited during musical tasks (as observed in functional neuroimaging experiments).

There has been a doubling in the number of music-related cognitive-neuroscience citations in the Science Citation Index since the conference was held that gave rise to this book. As the themes laid out here are revisited and elaborated on by the numerous players joining in the scientific jam session, the glorious moment will certainly come when all the themes blend into a harmonious whole.