Music enriches our lives in many ways, be it through listening to it, dancing to it, creating it, playing musical instruments, and the list goes on – for many, one way or another, music is a fundamental part of daily life.
And there’s a reason for this that goes far beyond the enjoyment factor. Music has the power to create a myriad of effects on the human brain and body, triggering the release of various hormones, affecting our heart rate and breathing, stimulating our brain’s emotional centre, boosting our cognition, and so much more.
From feeling ecstatic, sad, motivated mentally, motivated to move, sway, tap our feet, dance, exercise, the reactions to music are so powerful and varied that music’s ability to affect our brain is far too significant to overlook.
Different sounds, tempos, melodies, and rhythms create different reactions, as can instrumental music versus tracks with lyrics. Our personally unique emotional reactions to music based on memories and experiences takes the wonder of music’s influence a step further still.
Bridging the gap between art and science
Music is one of the most well-known art forms that humans partake in; it is unquestionably, deeply creative, and both making it and engaging with it allow for an endless variety of artistic pursuit and expression.
Yet, fascinatingly, the fundamental nature of music is entrenched in scientific principles, and perhaps this connection is what causes it to bring about such transformative experiences and responses.
Is music just maths?
Essentially, the foundation of music is mathematical principles. Music theory works upon a clearly set-out structure of notes and the intervals between them, (countable) rhythms, ‘equations’ between notes that either work harmoniously or don’t, and so on.
The theory of music is very ‘left brain’ – handling calculations, reading, writing, and logic – yet the creation (or enjoyment of) a piece of music is arguably highly ‘right brain’ in nature (dealing in images, intuition, emotions, etc.).
This dichotomy is at the heart of the wonder of music, and may hold the key to unlocking why music has such a profound effect on our brain; ultimately, humans are a combination of explainable biology and the mysteries of consciousness, drawing a clear comparison to the merging of science and art that music represents.
The science of sound waves
As well as music theory itself, the sounds of music are also embedded in science, delivered to our ears and senses via sound waves. Sounds occur when an object (i.e. a guitar string, string instruments, vocal chords, etc.) vibrates, disturbing the air surrounding it and sending invisible sound waves outwards.
When you speak or sing a song, these vibrations travel throughout our head and chest, with our unique facial structure, mouths, nasal cavities and more being one of the primary causes of our voices sounding distinct from others. This is why different cultures can produce such wonderfully diverse music and musicians.
Sounds also have different wavelengths and therefore different frequencies, determining whether the note has a higher pitch or a lower pitch. Wavelengths are the distances between the sound waves’ high points, and the number of high points that occur per second determine the frequency.
Scientists can explain how sound is created, how it travels, how it is received by the human ear, and so much more; there is seemingly no end to how intrinsically related science is to the art of music – and it doesn’t end there.
Our very DNA as a song
For decades, scientists have been turning collections of scientific data into sound to explore new ways of spotting patterns.
In the early 1980s, U.S.-based biomolecular engineer and pianist David Deamer noticed that three out of four DNA bases corresponded to musical notes. By playing the notes of some DNA sequences, he discovered that they represented some musical scale chords, and went on to compose melodies including music based on bacterial DNA sequences and the human insulin gene.
More recently, medical molecular biologist Mark Temple, while conducting research for new cancer treatment drugs, developed a system of assigning notes to DNA elements in order to create a combination of both audio and visual display to aid his work.
These melodies proved helpful in assisting him to better identify favourable patterns in the sequences and make more informed choices in his experiment research.
As explained by Temple, ‘DNA is read in the cell by proteins that physically move along the DNA sequence in one direction, from start to end,’ he says. ‘This is like a play-head reading a cassette tape from start to end.’
Music unites humans across all cultures, and while science can theoretically explain it, only human intelligence, coupled with emotion and inspiration, can create it.
