music effects on the brain essay

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How Music Resonates in the Brain

Scientists tune in to the brain’s emotional response to music

• by Allison Eck
• 7 minute read

Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d'Hiver by John Singer Sargent The Hayden Collection—Charles Henry Hayden Fund

Watching a movie can be a mesmerizing experience, not just for our eyes — but also for our ears. From The Lord of the Rings series and Schindler’s List to Interstellar and animated films like Mulan , movies can give rise to deep, complex emotions, thanks in large part to a key ingredient: music.

Take the Oscar-nominated film Maestro , about the life of American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, AB ’39. The most powerful scene in Maestro is arguably one in which there is no dialogue — only music.

Ensconced in a Gothic cathedral with an audience of extras, Bernstein, played by Bradley Cooper, directs a chorus of voices — the viewer’s entrée into the finale of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2. Two women’s voices emerge in a duet, lilting above a tapestry of strings. Trumpets pierce the air. A timpani rumbles as the chorus bursts into rapture. Finally, with church bells ringing, Bernstein brings the symphony to its epic conclusion. 

Patrick Whelan, a Harvard Medical School lecturer in pediatrics, part-time, at Massachusetts General Hospital and instructor of the Harvard Extension School course Music and the Mind, observes that sitting in the audience for this type of piece can be a profound, prosocial experience. 

“When you go into a church, the music takes over the mental faculties of all the people who are attending,” he says. “It puts everyone in the same emotional space.” 

Our chordal roots 

Why does music leave such an emotional impression on us in the first place? What is it about tones and timbres that, when organized in a precise manner, can make us swoon or sway? 

Whelan believes the answer lies partly in evolutionary biology. The earliest mammals, most of them likely nocturnal, had to rely on their hearing and sense of smell as defensive mechanisms — they were hyperfocused, hyperattentive. According to Whelan, the modern experience of listening to live music can be viewed as a vestige of that primeval adaptation. 

In a performance venue, “there's an incredible complex sound signature all around you,” Whelan says. “The brain has to sift through all the ambient noise in a concert hall. It’s a much more primitive form of listening compared to a focused conversation.” 

These acoustic cues — just like the crescendo of an approaching predator — travel through the ear and into the temporal lobe, which parses the soundscape, identifies sounds, and tags their components as familiar or unfamiliar. 

The salience of these sounds — whether a person responds to them emotionally and motivationally — influences the autonomic nervous system (ANS), a network that controls certain involuntary processes like breathing and heart rate. The valence of the music, which signals whether the music feels positive, negative, or somewhere in between, influences the ANS, too. These factors are among the reasons why our heart rate goes up when we hear the infamous music from Jaws , or why experimental music or heavy metal might make us feel uncomfortable if we’re not used to it. 

Music also lights up nearly all of the brain — including the hippocampus and amygdala , which activate emotional responses to music through memory; the limbic system, which governs pleasure, motivation, and reward; and the body’s motor system. This is why “it’s easy to tap your feet or clap your hands to musical rhythms,” says Andrew Budson, MD ’93, chief of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System. 

The brain’s elaborate receptivity to music means that “lots of different things are going on simultaneously,” Budson adds, so music “ends up being encoded as a rich experience.” 

The intensity of musical tension 

Brain activity in patients with certain disorders reveals unexpected connections with brain activity in people as they listen to music. Although models of obsessive-compulsive disorder pathophysiology are varied, evidence suggests that the condition is caused by faulty neural circuits in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), anterior cingulate cortex, caudate nucleus, and anterior thalamus. This dysfunctional neuronal “loop” has the OFC at its center. Sitting just above the eye sockets, the orbitofrontal cortex, involved in decision-making, is hyperactive both in people with OCD, and, intriguingly, in people as they listen to music. 

Why would that be? One key way that music — particularly Western tonal music — generates emotions in the listener is through patterns of tension and resolution. The way such patterns play out, together with the way the music fulfills or violates our expectations, manipulates and reveals how the brain handles complex cognitive processes like prediction and anticipation.

According to Whelan, OCD can be described as a maladaptive stress assessment problem. In addition to lecturing at Mass General, Whelan has directed the multidisciplinary care for patients with PANDAS syndrome as an associate clinical professor of pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Rheumatology at the University of California Los Angeles. PANDAS may be diagnosed when there is a strong association between Streptococcus infection, such as strep throat or scarlet fever, in children and the subsequent onset of OCD, tics, or other behavioral issues. 

Individuals who are diagnosed with OCD are “incapable of stratifying the risks of the cues that are coming from their environment,” Whelan says. They excessively anticipate bad things happening and engage in obsessive thoughts or behaviors as an attempt to resolve — or prevent — those fears from becoming reality. 

In other words, their orbitofrontal cortex runs on overdrive, just as it does when a person — with or without OCD — listens to music. But in the case of a person with OCD, hyperactivity in the OFC has a systemic, negative effect on the rest of the brain. Although the hyperactivity itself may not necessarily be the root cause of OCD symptoms, it’s certainly part of the OCD story, and the way music leverages buildup and release is a variation on that theme. 

Music and healing 

The effect of music on our brains has clinical implications as well. Growing evidence suggests, for example, that listening to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major can reduce the frequency of seizures in some people with epilepsy.

Other conditions and diseases, ranging from Parkinson’s to depression to Alzheimer’s, could someday have therapeutic solutions derived from an understanding of music. For instance, by identifying the exact type of music able to provoke a particular cognitive, motor, or emotional response, there could be progress toward healing, improving, or compensating for disrupted brain function in various diseases. An increased understanding of brain mechanisms can facilitate this. 

David Silbersweig, the Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry at HMS and chair emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is interested in uncovering answers to these questions. A leader in functional neuroimaging research in psychiatry, he investigates how brain regions and networks function when we perceive, think, feel, and act. 

We seem to be very much tuned for music.”

“It’s at the systems level with brain imaging that you can directly correlate mental states and brain states — and measure them.” Silbersweig says. “Neuroimaging provides a noninvasive way of correlating brain structural and functional abnormalities with specific aspects of music processing.”

For example, Silbersweig has seen people who survive stroke or tumors develop sensory amusia, a condition resulting from a lesion in the brain’s right superior temporal gyrus. Because this region is integral to recognizing disparate sounds as part of a cohesive work, patients with sensory amusia lose the ability to perceive or respond to music. While patients with this condition may not be able to revive damaged tissue, exposure to music itself can indirectly make up for the setback. 

That’s because music’s immediacy — it unfolds in real time and captures our attention in a way that cannot be negotiated — makes it an ideal vehicle for creating specific experiences in the brain. With both immediate and long-term exposure to music, a person’s neurons will fire in new ways, helping to shape communication pathways over time. 

Indeed, music is a potent tool for the future of precision medicine. As the scientific community continues to elucidate the emotional landscape of music, as well as how it differs from listener to listener, new methods for alleviating disease severity and improving overall well-being await both patients and otherwise healthy members of the general public. 

As for Silbersweig, he and other colleagues in the field hope to continue weaving together what is known about the neural underpinnings of music into a more unified model, which Silbersweig thinks is an important — and meaningful — step. 

“We seem to be very much tuned for music,” he says. “It resonates with us in some important way.”  

Allison Eck is the executive communications manager in the HMS Office of Communications and External Relations.

Images: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Sargent painting); Erica Hou (Whelan); BWH/Mainframe Photographics (Silbersweig)

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Influence of Music on The Human Brain

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Published: Apr 11, 2019

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Music and the Brain

Research shows that music affects brain functioning in many ways..

Updated June 29, 2023 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• Music not only affects our emotions but also may have a positive effect on our brain's cognitive functioning.
• Music can be helpful in treatment of neurological disorders.
• It does matter what kind of music we are listening to.

“Music is the medicine of the mind.” That is what American soldier and politician John A. Logan (1826–1886) once said. I kind of agree with it. Being a classically trained mezzosoprano, I know from experience that music has a positive effect on the mind. It can calm us down or cheer us up when we sing or hum our favorite musical pieces.

Brain Functioning

But does it affect our brain? The research finds that music can affect brain functioning in many ways. It can affect our cognitive functioning including learning, memory , and attention/ concentration (Guimaraes-Mendes, C et al. 2021). It also enhances cerebral plasticity in the brain and facilitates regeneration and repair of neurons (Fukui, H. & Toyoshima, K. 2008).

Listening to music activates various regions of the brain, mainly the auditory cortex (located in the temporal lobes), which is critical for processing incoming auditory information. It also activates the primary motor cortex, premotor cortex, and cerebellum. Just listening to music without performing it engages a large and complex network of many brain regions.

Listening to music may have a positive effect on verbal memory (remembering verbal information) and visual-spatial memory (recognizing shapes, patterns, and positions of objects). The results of a 1996 study indicated that music has a positive effect on recalling verbal material (McElhinney, M. & Annett, J.M.) In another study (Purnell-Webb, P. & Speelman, C.P. 2008), 100 undergraduate psychology students were learning a four-verse ballad while listening to familiar and unfamiliar melodies and rhythms. The results indicated that rhythm even without the musical accompaniment can facilitate recall of text. In a 2010 study (Angel, L.A. et al.), college students completed spatial processing and linguistic tasks while listening to excerpts from Mozart's symphonies. The results indicated an increase in the speed of spatial processing and accuracy in linguistic processing.

The “Mozart Effect”

There are several studies on Mozart’s music and its effect on cognition and emotions, but the results are mixed. There are some that indicate the positive effect of his music. (I can swear to it since Mozart is my favorite composer.) Some say that the “Mozart effect” does not really exist. A 2015 study (Verussio, W. et al.) investigated the influence of Mozart’s music on brain activity. The subjects were 10 healthy adults, 10 healthy elderly, and 10 elderly with diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The subjects were listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K448). The EEG was recorded during basal rest and during listening.

The results indicated that listening to Mozart increased brain wave activity linked to memory, cognition, and problem-solving in the healthy adults and elderly, but there were no changes in the participants with MCI. The researchers concluded that Mozart’s music can activate a network of interconnected brain regions related to attention and other cognitive functions. Also, the above-described 2010 research study suggested a positive effect of Mozart’s music on brain cognitive functioning.

Music can be helpful in the treatment of emotional and neurological disorders including stroke, Parkinson’s disease, brain injuries, and dementias (Speranza, L. et al. 2021). Research also suggests that playing a musical instrument can be a protective factor against cognitive impairments and dementia .

On personal experience, when I worked in the New Mexico state hospital, I was put in charge of the unit for senior patients with different forms and stages of dementia. Having many years of musical education , I knew perfectly well the therapeutic effects of music. One of the first things I did was to reorganize the daytime activities for my patients so music could be emphasized. I designed activities that included listening to uplifting music, singing together, and dancing time. All my patients, even those with advanced dementia, “lighted up” during the musical activities, which was really nice and uplifting to observe.

It needs to be emphasized that some studies indicate that some kinds of music can have a negative effect (i.e., make us sad or anxious ). Generally speaking, it does matter what kind of music we are listening to. So it is important to listen to music that will be uplifting, not something that will make us anxious or sad. Let’s listen to good and uplifting music that may improve our brain's cognitive functioning.

Guimaraes-Mendes, C et al. “Does Music listening Affects Attention? A Literature Review.” Developmental Neuropsychology Volume 46, Issue 3, 2021.

Fukui, H.& Toyoshima, K. “Music facilitate the neurogenesis, regeneration and repair of neurons.” Medical Hypotheses, Volume 71, Issue 5, 2008.

M. McElhinney & J.M. Annett. “Pattern of efficacy of a musical mnemonic on recall of familiar words over several presentations.” Percept Mot Skills. 1996 Apr: 82 (2).

Purnell-Webb, P. & Speelman, C.P. “Effects of music on memory for text.” Percept Mot Skills. 2008 Jun, 106 (3).

Angel, L.A. et al.” Background Music and Cognitive Performance.” Percept Mot Skills . 2010.

Verussio, W.et al. “The Mozart Effect: A quantitative EEG study.” Consciousness and Cognition . Volume 35, September 2015.

Speranza, L. et al. “ Music affects functional brain connectivity and is effective in the treatment of neurological disorders.” Reviews in the Neurosciences 2021-0135.

Barbara Koltuska-Haskin, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the author of How My Brain Works.

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• Review Article
• Published: 29 March 2022

Music in the brain

• Peter Vuust   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4908-735X 1 ,
• Ole A. Heggli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7461-0309 1 ,
• Karl J. Friston   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7984-8909 2 &
• Morten L. Kringelbach   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3908-6898 1 , 3 , 4  

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume  23 ,  pages 287–305 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Music is ubiquitous across human cultures — as a source of affective and pleasurable experience, moving us both physically and emotionally — and learning to play music shapes both brain structure and brain function. Music processing in the brain — namely, the perception of melody, harmony and rhythm — has traditionally been studied as an auditory phenomenon using passive listening paradigms. However, when listening to music, we actively generate predictions about what is likely to happen next. This enactive aspect has led to a more comprehensive understanding of music processing involving brain structures implicated in action, emotion and learning. Here we review the cognitive neuroscience literature of music perception. We show that music perception, action, emotion and learning all rest on the human brain’s fundamental capacity for prediction — as formulated by the predictive coding of music model. This Review elucidates how this formulation of music perception and expertise in individuals can be extended to account for the dynamics and underlying brain mechanisms of collective music making. This in turn has important implications for human creativity as evinced by music improvisation. These recent advances shed new light on what makes music meaningful from a neuroscientific perspective.

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by The Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF117). The authors thank E. Altenmüller and D. Huron for comments on early versions of the manuscript.

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Patterns of pitched sounds unfolding over time, in accordance with cultural conventions and constraints.

The combination of multiple, simultaneously pitched sounds to form a chord, and subsequent chord progressions, a fundamental building block of Western music. The rules of harmony are the hierarchically organized expectations for chord progressions.

The structured arrangement of successive sound events over time, a primary parameter of musical structure. Rhythm perception is based on the perception of duration and grouping of these events and can be achieved even if sounds are not discrete, such as amplitude-modulated sounds.

Mathematically, the expected values or means of random variables.

The ability to extract statistical regularities from the world to learn about the environment.

In Western music, the organization of melody and harmony in a hierarchy of relations, often pointing towards a referential pitch (the tonal centre or the tonic).

A predictive framework governing the interpretation of regularly recurring patterns and accents in rhythm.

The output of a model generating outcomes from their causes. In predictive coding, the prediction is generated from expected states of the world and compared with observed outcomes to form a prediction error.

The subjective experience accompanying a strong expectation that a particular event will occur.

An enactive generalization of predictive coding that casts both action and perception as minimizing surprise or prediction error (active inference is considered a corollary of the free-energy principle).

A quantity used in predictive coding to denote the difference between an observation or point estimate and its predicted value. Predictive coding uses precision-weighted prediction errors to update expectations that generate predictions.

Expectations of musical events based on prior knowledge of regularities and patterns in musical sequences, such as melodies and chords.

Expectations of specific events or patterns in a familiar musical sequence.

Short-lived expectations that dynamically shift owing to the ongoing musical context, such as when a repeated musical phrase causes the listener to expect similar phrases as the work continues.

The inverse variance or negative entropy of a random variable. It corresponds to a second-order statistic (for example, a second-order moment) of the variable’s probability distribution or density. This can be contrasted with the mean or expectation, which constitutes a first-order statistic (for example, a first-order moment).

(MMN). A component of the auditory event-related potential recorded with electroencephalography or magnetoencephalography related to a change in different sound features such as pitch, timbre, location of the sound source, intensity and rhythm. It peaks approximately 110–250 ms after change onset and is typically recorded while participants’ attention is distracted from the stimulus, usually by watching a silent film or reading a book. The amplitude and latency of the MMN depends on the deviation magnitude, such that larger deviations in the same context yield larger and faster MMN responses.

(fMRI). A neuroimaging technique that images rapid changes in blood oxygenation levels in the brain.

In the realm of contemporary music, a persistently repeated pattern played by the rhythm section (usually drums, percussion, bass, guitar and/or piano). In music psychology, the pleasurable sensation of wanting to move.

The perceptual correlate of periodicity in sounds that allows their ordering on a frequency-related musical scale.

Also known as tone colour or tone quality, the perceived sound quality of a sound, including its spectral composition and its additional noise characteristics.

The pitch class containing all pitches separated by an integer number of octaves. Humans perceive a similarity between notes having the same chroma.

The contextual unexpectedness or surprise associated with an event.

In the Shannon sense, the expected surprise or information content (self-information). In other words, it is the uncertainty or unpredictability of a random variable (for example, an event in the future).

(MEG). A neuroimaging technique that measures the magnetic fields produced by naturally occurring electrical activity in the brain.

A very small electrical voltage generated in the brain structures in response to specific events or stimuli.

Psychologically, consonance is when two or more notes sound together with an absence of perceived roughness. Dissonance is the antonym of consonance. Western listeners consider intervals produced by frequency ratios such as 1:2 (octave), 3:2 (fifth) or 4:3 (fourth) as consonant. Dissonances are intervals produced by frequency ratios formed from numbers greater than 4.

Stereotypical patterns consisting of two or more chords that conclude a phrase, section or piece of music. They are often used to establish a sense of tonality.

(EEG). An electrophysiological method that measures electrical activity of the brain.

A method of analysing steady-state evoked potentials arising from stimulation or aspects of stimulation repeated at a fixed rate. An example of frequency tagging analysis is shown in Fig.  1c .

A shift of rhythmic emphasis from metrically strong accents to weak accents, a characteristic of multiple musical genres, such as funk, jazz and hip hop.

In Aristotelian ethics, refers to a life well lived or human flourishing, and in affective neuroscience, it is often used to describe meaningful pleasure.

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Vuust, P., Heggli, O.A., Friston, K.J. et al. Music in the brain. Nat Rev Neurosci 23 , 287–305 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00578-5

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Gray Matter

Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing

By Robert J. Zatorre and Valorie N. Salimpoor

• June 7, 2013

MUSIC is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music — or well beyond prized, loved it.

In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts, download music files, play instruments and listen to our favorite artists whether we’re in a subway or salon. But even in Paleolithic times, people invested significant time and effort to create music, as the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest.

So why does this thingless “thing” — at its core, a mere sequence of sounds — hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value?

The quick and easy explanation is that music brings a unique pleasure to humans. Of course, that still leaves the question of why. But for that, neuroscience is starting to provide some answers.

More than a decade ago, our research team used brain imaging to show that music that people described as highly emotional engaged the reward system deep in their brains — activating subcortical nuclei known to be important in reward, motivation and emotion. Subsequently we found that listening to what might be called “peak emotional moments” in music — that moment when you feel a “chill” of pleasure to a musical passage — causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine , an essential signaling molecule in the brain.

When pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum — an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.

But what may be most interesting here is when this neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might call the anticipation phase.

The idea that reward is partly related to anticipation (or the prediction of a desired outcome) has a long history in neuroscience. Making good predictions about the outcome of one’s actions would seem to be essential in the context of survival, after all. And dopamine neurons, both in humans and other animals, play a role in recording which of our predictions turn out to be correct.

To dig deeper into how music engages the brain’s reward system, we designed a study to mimic online music purchasing. Our goal was to determine what goes on in the brain when someone hears a new piece of music and decides he likes it enough to buy it.

We used music-recommendation programs to customize the selections to our listeners’ preferences, which turned out to be indie and electronic music, matching Montreal’s hip music scene. And we found that neural activity within the striatum — the reward-related structure — was directly proportional to the amount of money people were willing to spend.

But more interesting still was the cross talk between this structure and the auditory cortex, which also increased for songs that were ultimately purchased compared with those that were not.

Why the auditory cortex? Some 50 years ago, Wilder Penfield, the famed neurosurgeon and the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute, reported that when neurosurgical patients received electrical stimulation to the auditory cortex while they were awake, they would sometimes report hearing music. Dr. Penfield’s observations, along with those of many others, suggest that musical information is likely to be represented in these brain regions.

The auditory cortex is also active when we imagine a tune: think of the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — your cortex is abuzz! This ability allows us not only to experience music even when it’s physically absent, but also to invent new compositions and to reimagine how a piece might sound with a different tempo or instrumentation.

We also know that these areas of the brain encode the abstract relationships between sounds — for instance, the particular sound pattern that makes a major chord major, regardless of the key or instrument. Other studies show distinctive neural responses from similar regions when there is an unexpected break in a repetitive pattern of sounds, or in a chord progression. This is akin to what happens if you hear someone play a wrong note — easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar piece of music.

These cortical circuits allow us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events. They are thought to accumulate musical information over our lifetime, creating templates of the statistical regularities that are present in the music of our culture and enabling us to understand the music we hear in relation to our stored mental representations of the music we’ve heard.

So each act of listening to music may be thought of as both recapitulating the past and predicting the future. When we listen to music, these brain networks actively create expectations based on our stored knowledge.

Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate these prediction mechanisms to give us what we want — or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better.

In the cross talk between our cortical systems, which analyze patterns and yield expectations, and our ancient reward and motivational systems, may lie the answer to the question: does a particular piece of music move us?

When that answer is yes, there is little — in those moments of listening, at least — that we value more.

Robert J. Zatorre is a professor of neuroscience at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University. Valorie N. Salimpoor is a postdoctoral neuroscientist at the Baycrest Health Sciences’ Rotman Research Institute in Toronto.

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How Do Music Activities Affect Health and Well-Being? A Scoping Review of Studies Examining Psychosocial Mechanisms

Genevieve a. dingle.

1 UQ Music, Dance and Health Research Group, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

2 School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

Leah S. Sharman

3 School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Emma Beckman

Mary broughton.

4 School of Music, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Emma Bunzli

Robert davidson, grace draper, sheranne fairley.

5 University of Queensland Business School, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Callyn Farrell

Libby maree flynn, sjaan gomersall.

6 School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

Mengxun Hong

Joel larwood, chiying lee, jennifer lee, lewis nitschinsk, natalie peluso, sarah elizabeth reedman.

7 Child Health Research Centre, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Dianna Vidas

Zoe c. walter, olivia renee louise wright, associated data.

Background: This scoping review analyzed research about how music activities may affect participants' health and well-being. Primary outcomes were measures of health (including symptoms and health behaviors) and well-being. Secondary measures included a range of psychosocial processes such as arousal, mood, social connection, physical activation or relaxation, cognitive functions, and identity. Diverse music activities were considered: receptive and intentional music listening; sharing music; instrument playing; group singing; lyrics and rapping; movement and dance; and songwriting, composition, and improvisation.

Methods: Nine databases were searched with terms related to the eight music activities and the psychosocial variables of interest. Sixty-three papers met selection criteria, representing 6,975 participants of all ages, nationalities, and contexts.

Results: Receptive and intentional music listening were found to reduce pain through changes in physiological arousal in some studies but not others. Shared music listening (e.g., concerts or radio programs) enhanced social connections and mood in older adults and in hospital patients. Music listening and carer singing decreased agitation and improved posture, movement, and well-being of people with dementia. Group singing supported cognitive health and well-being of older adults and those with mental health problems, lung disease, stroke, and dementia through its effects on cognitive functions, mood, and social connections. Playing a musical instrument was associated with improved cognitive health and well-being in school students, older adults, and people with mild brain injuries via effects on motor, cognitive and social processes. Dance and movement with music programs were associated with improved health and well-being in people with dementia, women with postnatal depression, and sedentary women with obesity through various cognitive, physical, and social processes. Rapping, songwriting, and composition helped the well-being of marginalized people through effects on social and cultural inclusion and connection, self-esteem and empowerment.

Discussion: Music activities offer a rich and underutilized resource for health and well-being to participants of diverse ages, backgrounds, and settings. The review provides preliminary evidence that particular music activities may be recommended for specific psychosocial purposes and for specific health conditions.

“ Music tells us things – social things, psychological things, physical things about how we feel and perceive our bodies – in a way that other art forms can't” – David Byrne (2012), How Music Works, p. 101.

The body of research on music, health and well-being has developed rapidly in the past decade, yielding dozens of empirical studies, reviews (Daykin et al., 2018 ; Sheppard and Broughton, 2020 ), books (MacDonald et al., 2012 ; Bonde and Theorell, 2018 ), and journals such as the Journal of Music, Health and Well-being, The Arts in Psychotherapy , and Arts and Health . This work has been summarized in ground-breaking reports such as the UK All Party Parliamentary report on creative health (Gordon-Nesbitt and Howarth, 2020 ) and the scoping review of the role of the arts in improving health and well-being published by the World Health Organization (Fancourt and Finn, 2019 ). Despite rapid advances in the field, however, there remain some limitations in the literature which this review seeks to address. First, the term “music” has been used to refer to a range of activities, which are at times poorly defined (Kreutz, 2015 ). Consider the following examples: personalized music listening for pain management in people with fibromyalgia (Linnemann et al., 2015 ); group singing for adults with chronic mental health conditions (Williams et al., 2019 ); a hip-hop project for sexual health promotion in Indigenous school students (McEwan et al., 2013 ); and dance for Parkinson's (Shanahan et al., 2015 ). All four are examples of music and health projects yet these activities clearly engage distinct physical, social, and psychological processes to achieve improvements in participants' health and well-being. We need to better articulate what type of music activity we are referring to in studies of “music,” and to examine the evidence in relation to the health and well-being effects of specific music activities.

Secondly, research in the music, health and well-being field is often prone to risks of bias arising from methodological issues such as convenience sampling, small sample sizes, lack of control or comparison conditions, and lack of independent assessment (Dingle et al., 2019 ; Clift, 2020 ). For these reasons, we will adopt a simple measure of research quality based on guidelines from the British Psychological Society QMiP Guidance for qualitative psychologists (Qualitative Methods in Psychology REF Working Group, 2018 ) and the Cochrane Risk of Bias 2.0 guidelines (Sterne et al., 2019 ) for quantitative methods (see Methods section) to ensure that research with a level of quality informs the conclusions of this review.

Third, it is largely unclear how such music activities affect health and well-being. That is, what are the processes through which these effects are achieved? It may be the case that different music activities exert their effects through distinct processes. For example, dance for Parkinson's may improve participants' well-being through its effects on gait and synchronized movement whereas music listening for pain management might exert its effect through dampening physiological arousal or providing a distraction. The answers to this important question will help health professionals to make recommendations to individuals and their loved ones about whether a music activity or intervention is likely to help them to manage their health symptoms. Research into the biological mechanisms linking music activities with health and well-being outcomes has been summarized recently. Finn and Fancourt ( 2018 ) reviewed 44 studies that involved adults listening to music in clinical and non-clinical settings reported that 13 of 33 biomarkers tested (such as cortisol, blood glucose and immune system measures) were reported to change in response to listening to music, indicating a stress-reducing effect (Finn and Fancourt, 2018 ). Group singing in low stress conditions such as rehearsals is associated with decreased cortisol while singing in high-stress conditions such as performances has been related to increased cortisol levels (Beck et al., 2000 ; Schladt et al., 2017 ). Similarly, group drumming has been associated with a modulation of immune response (Fancourt et al., 2016 ). Given this existing evidence regarding the biological mechanisms, in this scoping review we will focus instead on the psychological (e.g., emotional, cognitive, behavioral, motor) and social (e.g., bonding, inclusion, identity, cultural) processes that might explain the health and well-being effects of music activities.

In planning the scoping review, we searched for a comprehensive theoretical model that would account for a spectrum of musical activities and health and well-being outcomes, through a range of psychosocial processes. Unfortunately, the field of music, health and well-being lacks a widely established and comprehensive framework (Dingle et al., 2019 ). Our conceptualization is aligned with the contextual model by Kreutz ( 2015 ) showing the beneficial effects of musical activities on well-being and quality of life. According to this model, engagement in a musical activity provides individuals with a new context in which to interact and the combination of individual and contextual variables evoke self-regulatory processes at conscious and/or subconscious levels. Examples of such processes shown in the model include modifying cognitions, emotions, and actions by strengthened self-regulation. The consequences are often an improvement of psychological well-being and other positive outcomes (Kreutz, 2015 ). The boundaries of how this works (to what degree, for how long, and for whom) remain unclear and subject to ongoing hypothesis-driven research.

We also drew variables from three other models in developing search terms for the review. The first was the Therapeutic Music Capacities Model (Brancatisano et al., 2020 ) which links individual properties of music to “therapeutic mechanisms,” leading to cognitive, psychosocial, behavioral, and motor benefits. Some of the therapeutic mechanisms specified in the TMCM are conceptually relevant to populations with neurological disorders for whom the model was developed but are rarely assessed as part of music intervention research (e.g., neuroplasticity, mirror neuron systems, auditory motor coupling, and neural entrainment). We adopted other mechanisms that are more commonly assessed in music research as some of our search terms, such as arousal, mood, and memory. Another model that informed the review is the BRECVEMA model (Juslin et al., 2010 ) which describes eight mechanisms by which music listening influences emotional responses, in addition to cognitive appraisal. BRECVEMA is an acronym for Brain stem reflex, Rhythmic entrainment, Evaluative conditioning, Contagion, Visual imagery, Episodic memory, Musical expectancy, and Aesthetic judgement. This model is most suitable for experimental music listening research, however, it can be argued that some of these mechanisms apply to other music activities (e.g., rhythmic entrainment may occur as part of instrumental music playing, dance, and rapping). A third model that has been applied to health interventions in groups is the social identity approach (Tajfel and Turner, 1986 ; Turner et al., 1987 ; Jetten et al., 2014 ). According to this model, to the extent that participants identify with their group, they may access psychological resources from the group such as support, meaning, control and self-esteem. This model has been shown to explain the health and well-being effects of group singing (Williams et al., 2019 ; Dingle et al., 2020 ; Tarrant et al., 2021 ) and other music activities such as dance and instrumental music groups (Kyprianides and Easterbrook, 2020 ; Draper and Dingle, 2021 ). From this model, we drew social connection, self-esteem, and identity as processes.

The scoping review was conducted by an interdisciplinary group of academics and students from the Schools of Psychology, Music, Human Movements and Nutrition, Physiotherapy, Business, and hospital based Clinical Research Centers at the University of Queensland during February to December 2020. We formed into small working parties of two to four people, each focusing on one of the eight music activity categories. Reliability was established by two or more members of each working group screening the same 50 abstracts in their category and meeting to ensure that the selection criteria were applied consistently. Following this, the remainder of abstracts were divided up among group members for screening. This process resulted in too many papers for inclusion in the full review, so the authors agreed to re-screen the “included” abstracts by applying our quality criteria to exclude all but the best quality research in each category. Importantly, studies in which the intervention was clearly music therapy or a form of psychotherapy were not included, as these bodies of research have been reviewed elsewhere. The literature search was conducted using nine search engines: CINAHL, Embase, Music Periodicals, PsycInfo, PsycNET, PubMed, Scopus, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science. Search terms are available from the corresponding author on request. Inclusion criteria were that the papers report on empirical research (not reviews or theoretical papers), published in the English language, involving adult participants, and reporting on a health or well-being measure as well as one or more psychological or social process measures that we refer to as “mechanisms” (note that the authors of the studies did not necessarily regard their study design in this way). For quantitative studies, the following criteria were applied:

• a. The study used psychometrically validated measures of a health or well-being outcome and at least one process variable.
• b. The study had at least 20 participants per condition 1 .
• c. If a control or comparison condition was included, allocation of participants to conditions was randomized or a check was done to ensure that the two subgroups were comparable at the start of the study.
• d. Assessors were independent of the people delivering the music activity (to avoid demand characteristics on participants' responses).

For studies using qualitative methods, the following quality checks were applied:

• e. A description and explanation for the type of analysis was given.
• f. There was independence between the facilitators of the music program and those collecting and analyzing the data (or involvement of an independent coder in the analysis).

Overview of the Studies

The number of papers at each stage of the scoping review are shown in Table 1 . Detailed descriptions of the participants, design and intervention, process measures, health or well-being outcomes, and a summary of the results of each study are presented in Supplementary Table 1 . As would be expected, the health and well-being outcomes varied across the musical activity categories. In the receptive music listening studies, pain and indicators of post-operative recovery were common outcomes. In the studies of intentional music listening, pain was again a common outcome, as well as health behaviors such as exercise, symptom checklists and measures of well-being, health related quality of life, and patient satisfaction. In the music sharing studies, outcomes included pain, fatigue, agitated and aggressive behavior, quality of life, and well-being. The instrument playing studies reported health outcomes including cognitive health in older adults, health behaviors, social determinants of health (housing stability and criminal behavior), and well-being. In studies of group singing, the outcomes included mental and physical health, cognitive health, well-being, and quality of life. Studies of movement and dance reported outcomes for cognitive health, healthy weight, mental health, and quality of life. Studies of lyrics and rapping reported outcomes such as mental health and cognitive health. Finally, the studies of music composition, songwriting and improvisation included outcomes such as well-being and cultural determinants of health.

Flow of decisions about papers through the abstract screening, quality screening, and full text review process.

Process measures included arousal, emotion or mood, cognitive measures (e.g., memory, attention), self-esteem/achievement, physical activation, social connection, and identity. Most of the studies in the receptive music listening category and some of the intentional music listening studies reported on psychophysiological measures of arousal, such as blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and skin conductance. Although these could be viewed as biological measures (which was not the focus of the review or search terms), they are also commonly used in experimental psychological research as indicators of emotional arousal. For this reason, we kept these studies in the review. A summary of the process variables supported by the literature in each musical activity category is presented in Table 2 and explored in further detail in the following sections.

Summary of available evidence about the psychosocial mechanisms by which music activities affect health and well-being.

Key: +, studies reviewed showed positive evidence; +/–, some studies reviewed showed positive evidence some studies found no evidence; –, studies reviewed found no evidence; blank means the studies reviewed did not measure this .

Receptive Music Listening

There is some conceptual overlap between receptive music listening and intentional music listening (next section). We divided studies into the two categories based on the idea that receptive music listening involved participants being in places where music is playing but they were not involved in the music selection process whereas intentional music listening involved some degree of participant engagement in the choice of music they listened to. Among the receptive listening studies, there were 1,922 abstracts screened, 78 selected for full-text review, of which 11 met the criteria for inclusion (see Table 1 ). Nine studies were conducted in a medical setting and investigated the effects of music listening before, during, or after a medical procedure. These included dental procedures, elective surgery, and breast biopsy. Two studies examined the impact of background music on patients with severe dementia (Götell et al., 2002 ; Gotell et al., 2009 ). Methods of receptive listening generally utilized assorted ‘background music’ that was played for participants. These were described as instrumental or classical (Calcaterra et al., 2014 ; Franzoi et al., 2016 ; Kipnis et al., 2016 ; Seinfeld et al., 2016 ; Çetinkaya et al., 2018 ), new age (Kipnis et al., 2016 ; Téllez et al., 2016 ), relaxing (Twiss et al., 2006 ; Nilsson, 2009 ), or participant selected music (Twiss et al., 2006 ).

Across the studies in medical settings, health outcomes primarily focused on pain, recovery from operations, and patient satisfaction. The mechanism of these effects appeared to be the reduced levels of anxiety, distress, and increased relaxation among patients listening to background music compared to the control groups, who were generally in silence. Reductions to pain were less clear among children in one study where there were some age-based differences in pain reports, where older children showed more pain amelioration (Calcaterra et al., 2014 ). This may also have been due to older children being better able to understand the pain scale. In the two studies of older adults with dementia, both publications reported from the same study observing nine patients and carers undertaking a morning routine over three conditions: usual morning care, morning care with familiar background music, and caregiver singing. Results found that background music was related to patient functioning, well-being and decreased aggressive behaviors through its effects on physical activation, increased bodily and on sensory awareness, and a strengthened ability to carry out daily living tasks. Patients showed more agency and playfulness in their interactions with their carers, demonstrating improved social connection and interactions.

Intentional Music Listening

Following screening of 1,226 abstracts, 12 studies met the inclusion criteria for the review of intentional music listening research (described in Table 1 ). Methods of intentional listening across all studies utilized either researcher provided music and/or participant preferred music during the music listening interventions. Intervention lengths varied for each study and ranged from a single session of music listening (e.g., Särkämö et al., 2008 ) to 6 months (e.g., Clark et al., 2016 ). The way in which music listening was applied as an intervention was also mixed with some research emphasizing music listening during periods where participants were undergoing treatment or experiencing symptoms (O'Callaghan et al., 2012 ; Mercadíe et al., 2015 ), during recovery from health procedures (Särkämö et al., 2008 ; Drzymalski et al., 2017 ), or during specific daily activities, such as walking or relaxing (Clark et al., 2016 ; Helsing et al., 2016 ).

Health outcomes included pain, fatigue, health behaviors such as exercise, symptom checklists and measures of well-being, health related quality of life, and patient satisfaction. Music listening appeared to produce such outcomes through its effect on emotions regulation where several studies reported a reduction in feelings of distress, including specific measures of depression, anxiety, stress (Särkämö et al., 2008 ; Helsing et al., 2016 ; Sorensen et al., 2019 ); greater feelings of relaxation and nostalgia (Clark et al., 2016 ; Helsing et al., 2016 ; Kulibert et al., 2019 ; Sorensen et al., 2019 ); improved mood and reduced agitation (Clark et al., 2016 ; Ihara et al., 2019 ) (see Supplementary Table 1 ). The duration of these effects is difficult to ascertain due to the varying lengths of follow up across measures and studies. However, one study found that reduced levels of anxiety and pain were sustained for at least 12 h after music listening (Fernando et al., 2019 ). Several of these studies reported positive emotional effects of music listening compared to a control (no music listening group). However, two studies compared music listening with other active sound or meditation conditions and neither found differences between active conditions (Mercadíe et al., 2015 ; Sorensen et al., 2019 ). These studies lacked a no-music control condition, making it difficult to form robust conclusions about the efficacy of intentional music listening in these studies. Similarly, a study of 169 young people with at least mild psychological distress using a music and emotion regulation mobile phone app showed no differences on emotion regulation, distress, or well-being between the music listening and the waitlist group at 1 month follow up (Hides et al., 2019 ).

Cognitive mechanisms measured in the intentional music listening studies included measures of attention and verbal memory among stroke patients, which were better amongst music listeners compared to those who listened to audiobooks or controls (Särkämö et al., 2008 ) (see Supplementary Table 1 ). Another study took behavioral observations of music recognition and ability to follow rhythm among people with dementia (Ihara et al., 2019 ). Evidence for physical activation was limited to two studies. One used behavioral observations of people with dementia (Ihara et al., 2019 ) and revealed that intentional music listening increased expressions of joy, eye contact, eye movement, engagement, talkativeness, and moving/dancing. Similarly, a study of participants with cardiac disease (Clark et al., 2016 ) reported that listening to music while walking made them feel more energized and the music tempo influenced them to walk faster or maintain an enhanced pace, motivated them to move and some found it helped them to walk for longer periods.

Sharing Music

1,478 abstracts were reviewed with only five studies about music sharing meeting the inclusion criteria for full review. Only one study did not use live music, instead utilizing scheduled Radio programs to initiate music sharing across people's homes (Travers and Bartlett, 2011 ). These studies tended to report outcomes on well-being, quality of life, pain and agitated behavior. The processes by which shared music listening appears to achieve these outcomes was through emotion, cognition (memory), physical activation (synchrony), social connection, and a sense of identity (see Table 2 ). The strongest results were for improved mood and/or emotions, which were found to improve for shared music listening across all studies. Improved social interaction and communication also appeared to show consistent effects, which were particularly marked among participants with dementia, though less so for those with more severe dementia (van der Vleuten et al., 2012 ; Clements-Cortés, 2017 ; Shibazaki and Marshall, 2017 ; Toccafondi et al., 2018 ). As part of this, sharing music stimulated participants' memories and facilitated reminiscing and storytelling that were shared with musicians, staff, and family members. In contrast, music sharing through community radio programming found no changes to loneliness among this shared listening group, likely indicating that less social interaction was facilitated (Travers and Bartlett, 2011 ). These results imply that there is something unique about sharing music when in the physical presence of others.

Synchronized movement and physical activation increased during live music sharing alongside the ability to remember, cognitively perceive, and anticipate auditory musical elements (Clements-Cortés, 2017 ; Shibazaki and Marshall, 2017 ). Participants were reported to be clapping, singing, and generally moving to the music. Shibazaki and Marshall ( 2017 ) noted that these physical responses were even evident for people with mobility issues and among those who had suffered strokes. Finally, for people with dementia, even when dementia was advanced, carers and researchers observed clear cognitive effects while sharing music, such as participants being able to predict, anticipate, and expect different musical patterns and changes (Shibazaki and Marshall, 2017 ).

Instrumental Music

From 1,701 abstracts screened, nine studies of instrumental learning and playing met selection criteria for full review. These focused on health and well-being outcomes from musical instrument playing, such as cognitive health in older adults, health behaviors, social determinants of health (housing stability and criminal behavior), and well-being. Instrument playing was associated with these outcomes via its effects on cognitive, mood, and/or social processes (see Supplementary Table 1 and Table 2 ). Collectively, the research found that playing an instrument resulted in several positive outcomes, including improved mental health and quality of life and well-being (Perkins and Williamon, 2014 ; Seinfeld et al., 2016 ). Music instrument learning also resulted in improved enthusiasm, happiness, relaxation, and tolerance of uncertainty among people with learning disabilities (Wilson and MacDonald, 2019 ). Being part of a band or music group improved perceptions of social support and actual participation in social activities, interpersonal communication, self-esteem, and self-confidence among long-term musicians (Knapp and Silva, 2019 ), new musicians (Perkins and Williamon, 2014 ) and people with learning difficulties (Wilson and MacDonald, 2019 ). This latter study found that people who were socially isolated were more difficult to engage in music groups, with participants reporting lower levels of confidence and self-esteem (Wilson and MacDonald, 2019 ). Self-efficacy scores among children learning a musical instrument were also higher among those learning compared to those not learning an instrument, with this effect higher for girls, compared to boys (Ritchie and Williamon, 2011 ). This self-efficacy was related to greater levels of well-being and higher pro-sociality, with self-efficacy heightened particularly for girls.

Physical activation was found to be related to self-efficacy among children, where self-efficacy for music learning was associated with less hyperactivity, emotional symptoms, and behavioral problems (Ritchie and Williamon, 2011 ). Among older adults with higher SES, those learning to play a musical instrument reported a greater increase in the frequency of behaviors promoting physical activity and spiritual growth than older adults in the comparison condition (a U3A shared learning project) (Perkins and Williamon, 2014 ). Cognitive mechanisms were measured across several studies and found that for older adults, playing instruments was related to improvements in cognitive processing speed and attention, verbal fluency, executive function, visual scanning, and motor ability (Bugos et al., 2007 ; Bugos and Kochar, 2017 ), as well as letter fluency, learning, and short-term memory (Mansens et al., 2018 ). One study used fMRI in people with mild traumatic brain injuries following 8 weeks of piano lessons and found that there was a change to activation of the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) (Vik et al., 2018 ). The OFC network regulates higher order cognitive processing, such as executive functions, including attention, decision-making, impulse control, and social behavior.

Group Singing

A total of 1,455 abstracts were identified in the initial search from which 14 studies met selection criteria for the full review, including six qualitative and eight quantitative studies (see Table 1 ). Prominent outcomes included mental health and well-being, cognitive health, and lung health. Group singing appeared to produce these health and well-being effects through the social, emotional and physical processes. Choral rehearsals have been found to increase feelings of social inclusion and connection over the duration of a singing rehearsal (see Supplementary Table 1 ). Studies involving both small and large group choirs of up to 232 members found that singing fosters social closeness, even in large contexts where individuals are not known to each other (Weinstein et al., 2016 ). Even after a single session of singing, a large group of unfamiliar individuals can become bonded to the same level as those who are familiar to each other within that group. These social inclusion effects are particularly important for various marginalized groups. For instance, 50 minority African Canadian women living in Nova Scotia identified choir singing and listening to spiritual music as spiritual activities that helped protect against the psychological effects of racism (Beagan and Etowa, 2011 ). The women described how singing supported their physical and mental health through a spiritual connection with the Lord and through their cultural connection with the African Christian community. In another study, women from nine different nationalities living in the UK who experienced postnatal depression participated in a 10-week singing group and reported that the sessions provided an authentic, social and multicultural creative experience (Perkins et al., 2018 ). Two Australian studies involving adults who were marginalized due to chronic mental and physical health problems described how choir singing helped them to develop social connections within the choir (Williams et al., 2019 ) and later with audiences (Dingle et al., 2013 ). Furthermore, a reduction in loneliness and an increased interest in life was reported by an ethnically and racially diverse group of seniors participating in a Community of Voices choir in San Francisco (Johnson et al., 2020 ).

Cognitive, social, and mood effects of group singing are prominent in older adult studies (Lamont et al., 2018 ). For example, in retirement village residents in Australia, those who attended an 8-session group music program called Live Wires showed significantly improved cognitive performance and identification with the retirement village compared with the control group (Dingle et al., 2020 ). Similarly, in the Singing for the Brain project in the UK, interviews with 20 people with dementia and their care givers indicated that important mechanisms were cognitive (accepting the diagnosis, positive impact on memory), social (a shared experience, feeling included and supported), and improved mood (Osman et al., 2016 ). Similarly a study in Finland assessed people with dementia and their caregivers before and after a 10-week program of either singing or music listening together, designed to coach the caregivers to incorporate music and singing into their dementia care (Särkämö et al., 2014 ). Music listening temporarily improved overall cognition, attention and executive function, and a longer-term improvement in orientation, while singing enhanced short-term and working memory. Music listening had a long-term positive effect on Quality of Life for both the patients and caregivers.

In terms of physical mechanisms, participants of the Sing for Lung Health choir described improvements in breathing, sputum clearance and exercise tolerance, as well as a general sense of improved well-being. Again, social connections and a shared purpose were key mechanisms, as well as physical activation (McNaughton et al., 2017 ). This 12-week program featured deep breathing, vocalization exercises and singing rounds of familiar songs.

A sense of achievement and a new identity as a member of a choir were mechanisms revealed in several studies (Dingle et al., 2013 ; Perkins et al., 2018 ; Williams et al., 2020 ), particularly during performances (McNaughton et al., 2017 ). Singing, however, is not necessarily better than other arts-based group activities in terms of health and well-being effects. A study 135 adults involved in seven different adult education classes in singing, creative writing and crafts found that mental and physical health, and satisfaction with life, improved in all groups (Pearce et al., 2016 ). In the study with marginalized adults, mental well-being improved for members of both a choir and a creative writing group as long as participants formed a sense of identity with their group (Williams et al., 2019 ).

Music, Movement, and Dance

This search retrieved 743 articles of which four studies met criteria for full review. The health outcomes measured differed widely across the four studies. These included improved measures of cognitive health in the participants with mild cognitive impairment (Doi et al., 2017 ); healthy weight measures (BMI and % body fat) of African American women (Murrock and Gary, 2010 ); improved cognitive health among stroke survivors (Jeong and Kim, 2007 ); and mental health of new mothers (Vlismas et al., 2013 ).

While social connection was acknowledged as an important process across most of these studies, only two measured types of social connection. Interventions were found to improve the quality of interpersonal relationships for stroke survivors compared to people who did not participate in movement interventions (Jeong and Kim, 2007 ), and to improve interactions between mothers and their infants (Vlismas et al., 2013 ). Specifically, mothers felt that they enjoyed interactions with their infants more and reported increases in dyadic reciprocity between them. Similarly, physical activation, while acknowledged as a driving mechanism, was only measured in two studies. For African American women, participating in a dance group meant that they were more physically active than those not participating in dance (Murrock and Gary, 2010 ). However, for adults with mild cognitive impairment, there was no difference in physical activity levels whether they were part of the dance group, playing instruments, or in a health education group. For one study, cultural identity was made salient for the participants, where African American women reported that the dance intervention and choreography incorporated the importance of their church, spirituality, values, and beliefs and provided a positive space for them to talk about their health concerns (Murrock and Gary, 2010 ).

Lyrics and Rapping

From 1978 abstracts reviewed, four articles focusing on rapping or other lyric-focused music activities met our inclusion criteria. The outcomes from these included mental health, well-being, and cognitive health. The effects of lyrics and rapping appeared to act on emotional and social processes, self-esteem and identity (see Supplementary Table 1 and Table 2 ). For instance, for children and adolescents, sung or spoken lyrics (including rap), resulted in improvements to measures of emotional well-being on the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (Uhlig et al., 2019 ) and teacher-rated emotional symptoms, empowerment, and fewer depressive symptoms (Travis and Bowman, 2012 ). Further, those least likely to report depressive symptoms were those who felt rap music inspired them to better connect with others, consider the experiences of others, and want to make a difference in their communities. Young people listening to rap and hip-hop showed that their sense of cultural identity was associated with music-based empowerment (Travis and Bowman, 2012 ), and physically engaging in rap and song among children influenced their levels of physical activation (Uhlig et al., 2019 ). This included reductions in hyperactivity and inattention, and improved goal-directed behavior (Uhlig et al., 2016 ). Sleep time also showed changes among this group those in the rap and sing group slept significantly more than children who did not participate in this program.

A study in university students found that exposure to lyrics related to suicide were associated with remembering more nihilistic lyrics than were present in the song (Peterson et al., 2008 ). However, after exposure to this music, many participants responded with stories that exhibited altruistic themes. Higher endorsement of lyrical messages around risk (e.g., violence, substance use, and derogatory treatment of women) was related to high self-esteem among young males (Travis and Bowman, 2012 ). For people with Alzheimer's disease and healthy older adults, memory was positively affected when they were exposed to lyrics that were spoken or sung (Simmons-Stern et al., 2012 ). For these older adults, both types of exposure to lyrics resulted in equal memory of a songs content.

Song Writing, Composition, and Improvisation

This search retrieved 1,280 articles, of which only three studies met the inclusion criteria for the review. Music composition was found to be an important tool for supporting healthy aging and well-being of older adults learning to compose music collaboratively with a string quartet and a professional composer. For these participants, composition also created more opportunities for creativity and feelings of control and self-efficacy (Habron et al., 2013 ) (see Supplementary Table 1 ). In the study by Bartleet et al. ( 2016 ), jamming and music making between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous musicians provided opportunities to develop deep, transformative, intercultural engagement and connection. For these groups, music making was a way to cross boundaries using music as a shared language and to understand and share in diverse experiences. Music students found that the simple act of jamming helped to build a strong rapport, sense of mutual respect, and life-long friendships. Identity making and relationships were very clear among the group-based song writing and composition studies. For example, older adults felt composition led to self and social identity making, and meaningful social engagement with other participants and musicians with some relationships enduring after the program ended (Habron et al., 2013 ).

In Fallon and colleagues' experimental study (2020), 105 university students were asked to complete a stressful task and were then randomly assigned to one of three recovery conditions: control, music listening, or music improvisation using a xylophone. The physiological measure (electrodermal activity) showed greater stress reduction during recovery for those in the music listening condition compared to the improvisation and control groups (Fallon et al., 2020 ). The improvisation group showed a significant improvement in self-reported levels of calmness, irritation (decrease), and satisfaction during the recovery phase.

This scoping review of 63 studies revealed that all eight categories of music activities demonstrated some benefits to health or well-being, although it is difficult to make generalized statements due to the diversity of study designs and measures across studies. An abundance of studies of music listening, group singing, and instrument playing met criteria for inclusion, but relatively few focused on music sharing, dance or movement to music, lyrics or rapping, or songwriting, improvisation and composition. As the descriptions in Table 1 indicate, some music activities featured in more than one category (e.g., music listening was involved to some extent in all eight types of activity, apart from some kinds of lyrics/rapping), while other activities were found in only one or two categories (e.g., movements to music were a key part of the movement and dance category, while movements to create music were characteristic of the instrument playing, group singing, and songwriting, composition, and improvisation category). The eight activities also represent a spectrum of engagement with the selection and creation of music, from very low levels in the case of receptive music listening through to very high levels in the case of songwriting, composition, and improvisation. The purpose of the music activity and the measures assessed in each study reflected this spectrum of engagement. By considering this full spectrum of music activities, the current review extends on previous reviews that had a narrower focus such as music listening (Finn and Fancourt, 2018 ), group singing (Williams et al., 2018 ), or instrument playing and dance (Sheppard and Broughton, 2020 ). It also highlights the need for future research in the field of music, health and well-being to clearly articulate the type of music activity under investigation (Kreutz, 2015 ).

In regard to the mechanisms by which these music activities produce effects on health or well-being, Table 2 summarizes the evidence drawn from the 63 papers reviewed. Receptive music listening tended to be used in health or medical spaces for the purpose of decreasing perceptions of pain and anxiety and for acute post-operative recovery, or in aged care settings for increased activation and improved mood among older adults with dementia. Many of these studies showed that decreased physiological arousal was a key mechanism by which music listening was related to effects on pain and anxiety. The most consistent results were lowered blood pressure, increase in oxytocin, and decrease in cortisol during music listening. Interestingly, music listening was associated with increased arousal, activation , and social interaction in the studies of people with dementia and their carers (Götell et al., 2002 ; Gotell et al., 2009 ). Of the 13 studies in this category, four measured pain outcomes, and three of these reported lower pain in the music condition (Calcaterra et al., 2014 ; Téllez et al., 2016 ; Çetinkaya et al., 2018 ) while one study did not find any effect of music listening on pain (Chantawong and Charoenkwan, 2017 ). It is possible that in this study, the researchers' selection of Western or New Age instrumental music did not align with the Thai women's personal preferences during the cervical excision procedure. These findings align with an earlier review showing how music listening can enhance medical treatments and can be used as an adjunct to other pain-management programs (Bernatzky et al., 2011 ). This review concluded that musical pieces chosen by the patient are typically more effective for pain management than music chosen by a staff member. Interestingly, a recent study found that the music people chose to manage pain was commonly high energy, danceable music with lyrics (Howlin and Rooney, 2020 ) so it should not be assumed that people select soft, slow tempo, instrumental music when in pain.

Positive effects on mood or emotion regulation were reported in studies across all music activity categories ( Supplementary Table 1 ). In the music listening categories, reductions in anxiety were commonly reported. These positive effects on anxiety and pain were not confined to music listening since comparison conditions also produced benefits. For example, a comparison hypnosis condition was associated with decreased anxiety and increased optimism in women undergoing breast tissue biopsy in a hospital clinic (Téllez et al., 2016 ) while silent relaxation was as effective as music listening for lowering cortisol and pain in knee replacement surgery patients (Finlay et al., 2016 ). Similarly, the 14 studies on intentional music listening commonly focused on the role of music in reducing distress, particularly in preparation for, during, or recovery from, significant health events. These studies revealed that actively listening to music showed effects on cognition, emotion, physical activation, and physiological arousal . These findings are consistent with an established body of research on music listening and affective responses on the two dimensions of arousal and valence (e.g., Juslin et al., 2010 ; Eerola and Vuoskoski, 2013 ). The mood enhancing effects of group music activities such as singing, dancing and instrument playing is consistent with the findings of a systematic review of the effects of social group programs (music groups and others) on depression (Dingle et al., 2021 ) and an earlier longitudinal study of 5,055 UK older adults showing that more group memberships measured in the first wave was associated with a decreased likelihood of depression up to 4 years later (Cruwys et al., 2013 ).

Enhanced social bonding and connection was found in studies across many of the music activity categories. For example, shared music listening in the form of live music concerts enhanced social connections and mood in older adults and in hospital patients, yet was featured in few studies, which suggests this is an underutilized approach within aged care and hospital services. Group singing was associated with health and well-being of older adults and those with mental health problems, lung disease, stroke, and dementia through its effects on cognitive functions, mood, social connections, and identity. Both music listening and carer singing decreased agitation and improved posture, movement, and well-being of people with dementia. These findings indicate that singing is not only beneficial for the identified patients but also for their caregivers and loved ones (Forbes, 2020 ). Social and cultural identity was another mechanism highlighted in relation to some music activities. The finding that identification with a music group is associated with the satisfaction of various psychological needs has been noted in several recent studies (Williams et al., 2019 ; Kyprianides and Easterbrook, 2020 ; Draper and Dingle, 2021 ). Singing, dancing, and hip-hop can help ethnic minority group members to connect with their culture (Murrock and Gary, 2010 ; Beagan and Etowa, 2011 ; Travis and Bowman, 2012 ).

Cognitive mechanisms such as improved memory or attention were noted in several music activity categories. For instance, group singing was associated with improved cognitive health in older adults and those with dementia. Learning to play a musical instrument was associated with cognitive performance, self-esteem, and well-being in diverse populations including school students, older adults, and people with mild brain injuries. Dance and movement with music programs were associated with improved health and well-being in people with dementia, women with postnatal depression, and sedentary women with obesity through various cognitive, physical, and social processes. Clinicians and care workers planning to introduce a musical activity to enhance the cognitive health of their participants should consider the level of musical training and capability of new learners. It may be necessary to develop innovative ways for participants to engage with music that do not require an ability to read sheet music or to have a high level of fine motor skill. Group singing can be conducted using lyric sheets and a call-and-response style for learning the various vocal parts, as has been used successfully with marginalized adults (Dingle et al., 2013 ; Williams et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, innovative work is in progress adapting musical instruments so that they are simpler for older adults to create music with (MacRitchie and Milne, 2017 ).

Finally, self-esteem, empowerment, and sense of achievement were mechanisms by which rapping, choir singing, musical instrument playing, and composition, songwriting and improvisation produced positive effects on the health and well-being of participants. Rapping, songwriting and composition helped marginalized people to find their voice and increased social inclusion, intercultural connections, and empowerment.

Although the field of music, health and well-being requires further development, there is emerging evidence that specific music activities may be recommended for specific psychosocial purposes and for specific health conditions. Music activities offer a rich and underutilized resource for health and well-being to participants of diverse ages, backgrounds, and settings.

Author Contributions

GD designed the scoping review and led the write up. LS generated the search terms, conducted the library searches, assisted with the tabulation of results, and the write up. All authors contributed to the screening, reviewing, and summarizing of papers in their sections and contributed to the final manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

1 This was based on power calculations showing that a sample of 24 is required for a within subjects (pre-post design) ANOVA to find a small effect size with a power of 0.8; while a total sample of 34 (17–18 in each condition) is required for a two-group comparison ANOVA with two assessment points to find a small effect size with a power of 0.8. Our guideline of 20 per condition was chosen to balance the pragmatics of fitting groups of people into halls and spaces where music activities typically take place with the need to design studies with sufficient power to detect an effect if one existed.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.713818/full#supplementary-material

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How Music Affects the Brain? Case Study

Music affects the brain in various ways. Songs elicit different feelings, thoughts, and emotions in people depending on their tempo, pitch, and rhythm. “La Vie en rose” is one of the most famous classic songs written and performed by Edith Piaff. When translated from French to English, the title of the song reads “Life in Rosy Hues”. The following survey questions can be used to determine the effect of the song on the mind and mood of listeners as well as the overall effect of music on the mind of human beings.

Survey questions

Do you consider music to be an important part of your life? If yes, explain your answer. If no, give reasons for your response.

What are your three most favorite genres of music in their order of preference? If you list three, explain why you like the first genre more than the others. If you list only one, explain why you are not captivated by other music genres.

In your opinion, is the stereotype that people who listen to classical music are creative, love solitude, and have high levels of self-esteem true or false? Provide a detailed explanation for your answer.

After listening to the classical song “La Vie en rose” by Edith Piaf, what thoughts, feelings, or emotions did it evoke? Provide an explanation as to why you think the song evoked those outcomes.

What is your understanding regarding the effect of music on learning processes or music’s potential to change mood by eliciting certain emotions or feelings? Compare your understanding before and after listening to the song and cite any shift in your understanding.

After listening to the song, what type of feelings did t evoke in you? Examples of such feelings include happiness, sadness, melancholy, regret, remorse, joy, serenity, and uneasiness. If yes, describe why you think the song evoked the feeling as well as its intensity. If you experienced more than one feeling, describe their intensity.

Does listening to music in general affect your mood in any way? If you answer yes, explain in details the changes that you observed after listening to Piaff’s song. For instance, the song could have made you lively, excited, or dull. If you answer no, state why you think the song failed to affect your mood.

After listening to the song, what shifts in mood do you observe? Explain whether your mood changes or remains the same, and state whether the change is significant or negligible.

What is the effect of the song’s rhythm, tempo, pitch, and melody on your mood? If you observe any effect, describe it and its respective influence on your mood.

Did the song affect any of your brain faculties such as attention, comprehension, responsiveness, and alertness? If yes, state whether it was significant or negligible. If no, describe how the song altered your general state of mind.

After listening to La Vie en rose, what would you say is the difference between the classical genre of music to which the song belongs and other genres of music that you have enjoyed before?

Does the fact that the singer uses French influence your enjoyment of the song in any way? Provide an explanation for your answer.

What was your physical response to the song’s rhythm during the time of listening? Take into consideration that a song’s rhythm is an important musical aspect that elicits different responses in people. Examples of physical responses include head shaking, clapping, and tapping the ground with your foot. If you observed any of these responses, describe their intensity and duration as well as their effect on your physiology.

Did listening to the song irritate or vex you to an extent that you wanted to fast forward the song or stop it indefinitely? If you answer yes, provide reasons and cite the specific aspects of the song that elicited that response. If you answer no, describe specific aspects of the song that informed your decision.

Did you feel an urge to play the song a second time while doing an activity such as reading, dancing, reflecting, breathing deeply, or meditating?

If you listened to the song for a second time, how did it affect your level of attentiveness, focus, and learning while executing the activity? For example, you could have found learning more interesting, you could have retained more information during reading, or you could have found it easier to recall past experiences while meditating.

Were you able to differentiate between the different rhythm patterns and pitches? If yes, explain how you were able to make such distinctions.

Did the song elicit any physiological changes such as muscle tension, muscle relaxation, rise in body temperature, decrease in heart beat, increase in breathing rate, decrease in breathing rate, or increase in heart beat?

Did the song have any effect in your levels of psychological arousal when performing any activity after the session?

Do you think that the song had any effect on your mood and brain? If you answer yes, provide an explanation.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, July 11). How Music Affects the Brain? https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-music-affects-the-brain/

"How Music Affects the Brain?" IvyPanda , 11 July 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/how-music-affects-the-brain/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'How Music Affects the Brain'. 11 July.

IvyPanda . 2020. "How Music Affects the Brain?" July 11, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-music-affects-the-brain/.

1. IvyPanda . "How Music Affects the Brain?" July 11, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-music-affects-the-brain/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "How Music Affects the Brain?" July 11, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/how-music-affects-the-brain/.

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2 Music, Brain, and Health: Exploring Biological Foundations of Music’s Health Effects

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The brain as a highly dynamically organized structure can change and adapt as a result of activities and demands imposed by the environment. Musical activity has proven to be a powerful stimulus for this kind of brain adaptation, or brain plasticity. This chapter suggests that music-induced brain plasticity may produce benefits for wellbeing in general and may influence neurohormonal status as well as cognitive and emotional processes in healthy and diseased individuals, helping to improve various sensory, motor, coordinative, or emotional disabilities. It first reviews mechanisms of music-induced brain plasticity. It then clarifies the impact of music on emotion and neurohormones. It demonstrates the transfer effects of music exposure and making music to other cognitive and emotional domains, and shows examples of the potential of music to serve as a supportive and facilitative therapy in rehabilitation from motor impairment and aphasia following brain injury.

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Essay on Effects Of Music On The Brain

Students are often asked to write an essay on Effects Of Music On The Brain in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Effects Of Music On The Brain

Introduction.

Music is a universal language that touches everyone’s life. It has a profound impact on our brain and emotions. This essay will discuss the effects of music on the brain.

Memory Improvement

Music can boost memory. When you listen to a song, your brain works to remember the lyrics and melody. This process helps improve your memory skills. This is why teachers use songs to teach children new topics.

Boosting Mood

Music can make you feel happy, sad, excited, or calm. It has a strong effect on our emotions. When you listen to upbeat music, your brain releases a chemical called dopamine, which makes you feel good.

Stress Reduction

Listening to slow, quiet music can help reduce stress. It slows down your heart rate and lowers blood pressure. This calming effect helps your brain relax and reduces anxiety.

Music has a powerful impact on our brains. It can improve memory, boost mood, and reduce stress. Therefore, incorporating music into our daily lives can have positive effects on our mental well-being.

250 Words Essay on Effects Of Music On The Brain

Music is a universal language that touches us all. It can make us feel happy, sad, excited, or calm. But did you know it also has a powerful effect on our brains?

Music and Emotions

Music has a direct link to our emotions. It can make us feel a wide range of feelings, from joy to sadness, from fear to courage. This is because certain parts of the brain that control our emotions are activated when we listen to music. For example, a fast-paced song can make us feel excited, while a slow song can make us feel calm.

Music and Memory

Music can also help us remember things. When we listen to a song, our brain links the song to a specific memory or event. This is why we often remember things when we hear a certain song. This is also why music is often used in learning and education.

Music and Focus

Listening to music can also help us focus. When we listen to music, it can help block out other noises and distractions. This can help us stay focused on a task or activity. This is why many people listen to music while studying or working.

Music and Health

Music can also have positive effects on our health. It can help reduce stress, improve sleep, and even help with pain management. This is because listening to music can trigger the release of chemicals in our brain that make us feel good.

In conclusion, music has a powerful effect on our brains. It can affect our emotions, help us remember things, improve our focus, and even have positive effects on our health. So next time you listen to your favorite song, remember that it’s not just a song, it’s a tool for your brain!

500 Words Essay on Effects Of Music On The Brain

Music is a universal language that can touch our hearts and minds. It’s not just a source of entertainment, but it also has a deep impact on our brain. Scientists have found that music can change our mood, help us focus, and even improve our memory.

Music and Mood

Music has a strong link with our emotions. When we listen to a happy song, we often feel happier. When we listen to a sad song, we might feel a bit down. That’s because music can trigger the release of chemicals in our brain. For example, upbeat music can cause the brain to release dopamine, a chemical that makes us feel good. On the other hand, slow, sad music can make us feel calm or even a bit sad.

Do you like to listen to music while you study or do your homework? There’s a good reason for that. Music can help us focus on our work. This is especially true for music without words. Such music can block out background noise and help us concentrate on the task at hand. This effect of music on focus is so strong that some people even use music to help them sleep.

Music can also play a big role in our ability to remember things. Have you ever noticed how you can remember the words to your favorite song without even trying? That’s because music can boost our memory. When we listen to music, it activates parts of our brain that are involved in memory. This can help us remember things better. For example, some people find that listening to music while studying helps them remember the material better.

Music and Learning

Music is not just for fun. It can also help us learn. Studies have shown that music can improve our ability to learn new things. This is because music can stimulate our brain in ways that make it more receptive to learning. For example, learning to play a musical instrument can improve our ability to understand and remember complex ideas.

In conclusion, music has a profound effect on our brain. It can influence our mood, help us focus, improve our memory, and even enhance our learning. So, the next time you listen to your favorite song, remember that it’s not just music to your ears, but also food for your brain.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Since 2006, two UCF professors — neuroscientist Kiminobu Sugaya and world-renowned violinist Ayako Yonetani — have been teaching one of the most popular courses in The Burnett Honors College. “Music and the Brain” explores how music impacts brain function and human behavior, including by reducing stress, pain and symptoms of depression as well as improving cognitive and motor skills, spatial-temporal learning and neurogenesis, which is the brain’s ability to produce neurons. Sugaya and Yonetani teach how people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s also respond positively to music.

“Usually in the late stages, Alzheimer’s patients are unresponsive,” Sugaya says. “But once you put in the headphones that play [their favorite] music, their eyes light up. They start moving and sometimes singing. The effect lasts maybe 10 minutes or so even after you turn off the music.”

This can be seen on an MRI, where “lots of different parts of the brain light up,” he says. We sat down with the professors, who are also husband and wife, and asked them to explain which parts of the brain are activated by music.

How the Brain Responds to Music

Click on the region of the brain to the right to learn more about how it effects your perception of music.

• Frontal Lobe

Used in thinking, decision-making and planning

“The frontal lobe is the most important to being a human. We have a big frontal lobe compared to other animals. By listening to music, we can enhance its functions,” Sugaya says.

• Temporal Lobe

Processes what we hear

“We use the language center to appreciate music, which spans both sides of the brain, though language and words are interpreted in the left hemisphere while music and sounds are inerpreted in the right hemisphere,” Yonetani says.

• Broca’s Area

Enables us to produce speech

“We use this part of the brain to express music,” Yonetani says. “Playing an instrument may improve your ability to communicate better.”

• Wernicke’s Area

Comprehends written and spoken language

“We use this part of the brain to analyze and enjoy music,” Yonetani says.

• Occipital Lobe

Processes what we see

“Professional musicians use the occipital cortex, which is the visual cortex, when they listen to music, while laypersons, like me, use the temporal lobe — the auditory and language center. This suggests that [musicians] might visualize a music score when they are listening to music,” Sugaya says.

Coordinates movement and stores physical memory

“An Alzheimer’s patient, even if he doesn’t recognize his wife, could still play the piano if he learned it when he was young because playing has become a muscle memory. Those memories in the cerebellum never fade out,” Sugaya says.

• Nucleus Accumbens

Seeks pleasure and reward and plays a big role in addiction, as it releases the neurotransmitter dopamine

“Music can be a drug — a very addictive drug because it’s also acting on the same part of the brain as illegal drugs,” Sugaya says. “Music increases dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, similar to cocaine.”

Processes and triggers emotions

“Music can control your fear, make you ready to fight and increase pleasure,” Yonetani says. “When you feel shivers go down your spine, the amygdala is activated.”

• Hippocampus

Produces and retrieves memories, regulates emotional responses and helps us navigate. Considered the central processing unit of the brain, it’s one of the first regions of the brain to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease, leading to confusion and memory loss.

“Music may increase neurogenesis in the hippocampus, allowing production of new neurons and improving memory,” Yonetani says.

• Hypothalamus

Maintains the body’s status quo, links the endocrine and nervous systems, and produces and releases essential hormones and chemicals that regulate thirst, appetite, sleep, mood, heart rate, body temperature, metabolism, growth and sex drive — to name just a few

If you play Mozart, for example, “heart rate and blood pressure reduce,” Sugaya says.

• Corpus Callosum

Enables the left and right hemispheres to communicate, allowing for coordinated body movement as well as complex thoughts that require logic (left side) and intuition (right side)

“As a musician, you want to have the right-hand side and the left-hand side of the brain in coordination, so they talk to each other,” Sugaya says. This allows pianists, for example, to translate notes on a sheet to the keys their fingers hit to produce music.

Processes rhythm and regulates body movement and coordination

“Music can increase dopamine in this area, and music increases our response to rhythm,” Yonetani says. “By doing this, music temporarily stops the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Rhythmic music, for example, has been used to help Parkinson’s patients function, such as getting up and down and even walking because Parkinson’s patients need assistance in moving, and music can help them kind of like a cane. Unfortunately, after the music stops, the pathology comes back.”

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Exposure to different kinds of music influences how the brain interprets rhythm

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When listening to music, the human brain appears to be biased toward 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).

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. The study included 39 groups of participants, many of whom came from societies whose traditional music contains distinctive patterns of rhythm not found in Western music.

“Our study provides the clearest evidence yet for some degree of universality in music perception and cognition, in the sense that every single group of participants that was tested exhibits biases for integer ratios. It also provides a glimpse of the variation that can occur across cultures, which can be quite substantial,” says Nori Jacoby, the study’s lead author and a former MIT postdoc, who is now a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.

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.

“When people produce music, they often make small mistakes. Our results are consistent with the idea that our mental representation is somewhat robust to those mistakes, but it is robust in a way that pushes us toward our preexisting ideas of the structures that should be found in music,” says Josh McDermott, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.

McDermott is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Human Behaviour. The research team also included scientists from more than two dozen institutions around the world.

A global approach

The new study grew out of a smaller analysis that Jacoby and McDermott published in 2017. In that paper , the researchers compared rhythm perception in groups of listeners from the United States and the Tsimane’, an Indigenous society located in the Bolivian Amazon rainforest.

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,” McDermott says. “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.”

When the researchers first did this experiment, with American college students as the test subjects, they found that people tended to produce time intervals that are related by simple integer ratios. Furthermore, most of the rhythms they produced, such as those with ratios of 1:1:2 and 2:3:3, are commonly found in Western music.

The researchers then went to Bolivia and asked members of the Tsimane’ society to perform the same task. They found that Tsimane’ also produced rhythms with simple integer ratios, but their preferred ratios were different and appeared to be consistent with those that have been documented in the few existing records of Tsimane’ music.

“At that point, it provided some evidence that there might be very widespread tendencies to favor these small integer ratios, and that there might be some degree of cross-cultural variation. But because we had just looked at this one other culture, it really wasn’t clear how this was going to look at a broader scale,” Jacoby says.

To try to get that broader picture, the MIT team began seeking collaborators around the world who could help them gather data on a more diverse set of populations. They ended up studying listeners from 39 groups, representing 15 countries on five continents — North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

“This is really the first study of its kind in the sense that we did the same experiment in all these different places, with people who are on the ground in those locations,” McDermott says. “That hasn’t really been done before at anything close to this scale, and it gave us an opportunity to see the degree of variation that might exist around the world.”

Cultural comparisons

Just as they had in their original 2017 study, 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.

“There are certain cultures where there are particular rhythms that are prominent in their music, and those end up showing up in the mental representation of rhythm,” Jacoby says.

The researchers believe their findings reveal a mechanism that the brain uses to aid in the perception and production of music.

“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,” McDermott says. “If you didn’t have something like this, and you just faithfully represented what you heard, these errors might propagate and make it much harder to maintain a musical system.”

Among the groups that they studied, the researchers took care to include not only college students, who are easy to study in large numbers, but also people living in traditional societies, who are more difficult to reach. Participants from those more traditional groups showed significant differences from college students living in the same countries, and from people who live in those countries but performed the test online.

“What’s very clear from the paper is that if you just look at the results from undergraduate students around the world, you vastly underestimate the diversity that you see otherwise,” Jacoby says. “And the same was true of experiments where we tested groups of people online in Brazil and India, because you’re dealing with people who have internet access and presumably have more exposure to Western music.”

The researchers now hope to run additional studies of different aspects of music perception, taking this global approach.

“If you’re just testing college students around the world or people online, things look a lot more homogenous. I think it’s very important for the field to realize that you actually need to go out into communities and run experiments there, as opposed to taking the low-hanging fruit of running studies with people in a university or on the internet,” McDermott says.

The research was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Council, the South African National Research Foundation, the United States National Science Foundation, the Chilean National Research and Development Agency, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Keio Global Research Institute, the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Swedish Research Council, and the John Fell Fund.

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How Music Affects The Brain Essay

Do people ever stop and think that a certain song has changed their mood completely? One minute they were mad and the next they are sad. Or that music can help people with illnesses and disabilities. How music can affect the brain, emotions, memory and so much more. Music plays a key part in today’s society. It really has an impact on just about everyone. So how does music affect everyone in its own way? In a scientific point of view researchers have wondered about the possible therapeutic and mood boosting benefits that music has on someone. All types of music affects people. Sad music can bring most listeners comfort and pleasure, according to research from Durham University. In that research, it was also found that sad music can have negative feelings and profound grief. …show more content…

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Music scientists find the connection between music and emotion: ‘Our neurons dance to the same rhythm’

Three independent scientific studies analyze how the human brain transforms notes into feelings, a mystery that has intrigued psychologists and musicologists for decades.

There is always music. In almost every religion the rituals are underscored with songs, and so too are the life stages of millions of people from birth to death. Sports teams and entire countries condense their identity into a song, which they turn into their official anthem. Music features in every part of our lives, from the most public to the most intimate. Lovers have “our song.” Separations are marked with songs about bitterness, survival, or melancholy . Festivals are eternally linked to singing and dancing. Then there are birthdays, and the holidays. There are whole albums that we associate with feelings and that have the power to take us to a time, a place, or a person. Music is one of the elements that moves us the most — and knows best how to move us. What we don’t really know is why.

For decades, psychologists and neurologists have been trying to understand how the brain perceives music, observing which cells and circuits come into play. Is it an exclusively human trait, or are other animals, such as birds and some dogs, equally musical? Are there such things as universal rhythms, or why does live music excite us more than recorded music? This month, three independent studies have attempted to shed more light on the issue.

Sascha Frühholz , a professor at the Neuroscience Unit at the University of Zurich, is the lead author of one of them. He has spent years studying how emotion is transmitted through sound. He admits that the topic has been widely explored, but it is one in which he has found certain gaps. “There are hardly any studies that analyze live music, and I think that something that we all know on a personal level is that we feel the music more intensely at a concert,” he explains in a telephone conversation.

To scientifically demonstrate this intuition, Frühholz had an audience of 19 volunteers listen to two pianists. The concerts were not particularly comfortable. The audience (only one person per recital) was not sitting, but lying on a stretcher, and this was brought into a huge magnetic resonance scanner to read how their brain reacted to the music. “Yes, it was quite strange,” the expert confesses with a laugh.

Sometimes a recorded song would be played. In other experiments, the musician started playing a song and could see the listener’s brain scan live. “We asked the pianist to try to change the way he played to adapt to brain activity,” explains Frühholz. “One of the reasons why live music has a stronger effect on the listener is the musician’s ability to change something in the performance, and if the change happens in the same direction in the audience and with the same intensity, we think that there is a synchronicity.” Synchrony is a kind of musical empathy. It is a communion between the performer and the listener that does not occur with recorded music. The study confirmed this idea , and the brain activity detected while listening to recorded songs was considerably less than when listening live.

Connection with the audience

“Artists usually look for connection with the audience,” psychologist Rosana Corbacho, who has specialized in treating musicians and other professionals in the sector for several years, explains via audio message. “You have to know how to surf those emotional waves to be present and open to connecting with the audience. Feeling the same emotions or evoking certain emotions at a concert is described as one of the most intense experiences in the life of an artist,” she reflects.

This feeling of belonging, of being part of something, serves as an emotional amplifier, magnifying the effects of music on an audience that reacts in unison to the same stimulus. It is something that is appreciated in present-day concerts or performances, but it worked in the same way in prehistoric rites with music and dancing in front of the fire. “There are studies where it has been observed that the rhythm of the heartbeat is synchronized in some way to the audience that is dancing to a DJ session in a club,” says Corbacho. “It’s as if our neurons dance to the same beat.”

This musical communion partly explains how in recent years, when recorded music can be reproduced at a much higher quality than in the past, concerts and festivals have grown in importance to become one of the pillars of the music industry. In 2017, live music revenues in the world amounted to $18.1 billion, according to the Statista portal. In 2023, they topped $30.1 billion. The figures seem to come as no surprise to Frühholz. “If you think about it, music was born to be heard live. Only in the last hundred or so years — thanks to technology — have we started to listen to recorded music,” he argues.

Frühholz’s study supports these ideas, but the expert recognizes certain limitations, such as the lack of emotional contagion, as there was only one listener, and the greater potential that the pianist had to adapt to his audience, not only because it was small, but for his ability to almost literally read their mind. It is difficult to think that at a Taylor Swift concert , which brings together an average of 70,000 listeners, the artist can adapt to each and every member of the audience’s feelings. “It’s true,” the expert acknowledges, “but with pop singers like her the connection is easier because the public knows the lyrics of the songs. And you must also take emotional contagion into consideration.” The audience in a massive concert tends to harmonize feelings and behave almost as a single listener.

The tribe that danced to the rhythm of ‘Jingle Bells’

The following study did not take place in a Swiss laboratory, but in the Bolivian jungle. There, after days sailing through the Amazon, a group of scientists arrived to ask the Tsimane tribe about rhythms, sounds, and musicality. Nori Jacoby, a psychologist at MIT, led the experiment, which has recently been published in Nature . “It would have been more comfortable to do it from the couch,” he admits sarcastically, “but it wasn’t like that. We did on-site testing with more than 900 people from 15 countries.” Many came from societies whose traditional music contains distinctive rhythmic patterns not found in Western music. And an extra effort was made to look for profiles with little internet access to prevent their musical tastes from being too homogeneous, explains Jacoby, who currently works at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt.

The idea was to expose these people to certain musical patterns and ask them to replicate the rhythm with taps of their fingers to see how wrong they were when imitating standardized rhythms they had heard before. “It was similar to the game of broken telephone,” says the expert. “As the game progressed, participants became more and more inclined to act out what they thought they heard rather than what they were actually hearing. This iterative process thus revealed the expectations and natural tendencies that each listener has.”

This is the first large-scale cross-cultural study of musical rhythm. “It provides the clearest evidence to date that there is some degree of universality in musical perception and cognition,” the expert says. All the groups that were analyzed showed biases towards simple integer proportions. “We know that the human brain contains mechanisms that favor these types of constant rhythms,” says Jacoby. That would explain the universality of the 1:1:2 ratio that we hear in Jingle Bells , but also in traditional songs in almost all cultures, even the most isolated ones. “Evidently, these preferences may come from a natural tendency to have constant or isochronous pulsations,” the expert concludes.

From tribal music to electronic music. The last study to be reviewed analyzed how the latter can cause listeners to dissociate and alter their states of consciousness. It was led by Raquel Aparicio Terrés, a psychologist at the University of Barcelona. To carry out the research, he recruited 19 people aged between 18 and 22 and made them listen to six excerpts of electronic music at tempos of 99 beats per minute (bpm), 135 bpm, and 171 bpm. The researchers used electroencephalography, which measures electrical activity in the brain, to measure participants’ neural synchronization with music.

The synchronization between brain activity and the rhythm of the music occurred at all three tempos, but was most pronounced at 99 bpm, a rhythm which can be heard in this song (and which is similar to that of commercial hits such as Hello, Goodbye by The Beatles or Crazy in Love by Beyoncé).

Aparicio Terrés explains in the study that the results may have two medical implications. On the one hand, the understanding of the brain mechanisms that underlie altered states of consciousness, such as a coma or the vegetative state. And on the other hand, the knowledge and use of “non-invasive external techniques that facilitate desirable states of distancing from reality, especially in clinical environments such as intensive care units.”

“Using the science of music to relieve stress, anxiety, or alter states of consciousness is something that has been studied for a long time,” says Corbacho, who gives examples such as the Moonai application that uses sounds and music with which it promises to reduce menstrual pain. “We have used music to alter our emotional reactions throughout our evolution. As [psychologist] Guillermo Dalia says, before we could communicate with words, we used rhythms.”

However, until now we did not understand the mechanisms that translate these notes into emotions. What makes a song move us to dance, convey anguish, or make us cry. We do not completely understand it now either. The studies above, and many others, are beginning to shed light on the enigmatic black box that is our brain. And they promise to reveal if there is a certain universality in these feelings, if the most famous songs in history are nothing more than mathematical formulas capable of hitting the right keys not only musically, but also neurologically speaking.

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