Music and Neuro-expectations

"Music has a grammar, which, like language, consists of rules that specify which notes can follow which other notes in a piece of music. According to Pearce: "the question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others."




Read the rest of the piece from ScienceDaily on the brain's processing of music and expectations here:


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100115204704.htm

Musical Minds

PBS's "Nova" and neurologist/writer Oliver Sacks explore music and the human brain here:


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/musicminds/

Music Toys With Our Emotions

"Although it probably seems obvious that music can evoke emotions, it is to this day not clear why." So says a Scientific American article that approaches the subject:

http://tinyurl.com/owjtpe

Music and Language

I usually focus here on "popular" science writing, but today I'll link to a more academic blog post.
In college (back around Civil War times, as it seems to me), psycholinguistics was one of my major interests, and I always believed the intertwining of language, music, and mathematics was a largely untapped (and complex) area of study. 40 years later it remains unchartered ground in many ways, but this study finds certain synchronicities or connections between the patterns of musical notes and the vowels in language. The reading is somewhat technical, and the study somewhat preliminary, but strikes me as an interesting and possibly fruitful approach.