 As the most intelligent living creature in the world, humans do many irrational and rational things; i.e. war, drug abuse, slavery, inventing electricity, developing medicine, love, music. One can still wonder why people fight over oil or money, but one can perfectly understand why people love music so much. Music helps us express ourselves and feel what we feel in a more intense way. Music is one of those things that will prove homo sapiens existed, cried (Justin Timberlake: Cry Me a River), loved (Whitney Houston: I will always love you, hated (Three Days Grace: I hate everything about you) and did many crazy things (Steppenwolf: Born to be Wild).
What lies beyond the expression of emotions? How do we react from different genres of music? Why do we feel upset or happy when we hear different kinds of music? How do we manage to remember some memories of our lives by listening to other people's thoughts and melodies? Research indicates that music increases brain activity. Researchers in Hong Kong have also worked out the relationship between musical training and verbal memories in youth. Their experiments proved that musical training increases verbal memories.
Wikipedia, which is the friendliest encyclopedia on the planet, explains the relationship between music and the human brain: “When unpleasant melodies are played, the posterior cingulate cortex activates, which indicates a sense of conflict or emotional pain” which defines my situation.
Basically when we hear certain melodies some place in our brain links the melodies with our emotional pain and memories. The right hemisphere has also been found to be correlated with emotion, which can also activate areas in the cingulate cortex in times of emotional pain, specifically social rejection (Eisenberger). This evidence, along with observations, has led many musical theorists, philosophers and neuroscientists to link emotion with tonality. This relation makes sense because the tones in music resemble the tones in human speech, which indicate emotional content. The vowels in the phonemes of a song are elongated for a dramatic effect, and it seems as though musical tones are simply exaggerations of normal verbal tonality.
Although we still do not know much about the human brain, we know a lot about its responses to music. Music helps us stand up against obstacles, gives us endurance, makes us cry, makes us fall in love and unites people. Hallelujah to the first man who made a noise with a tree branch and to the first neuron which went crazy with the rhythm!
By Nazlý Çelebi (ECON/IV)
n_celebi@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
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