The New York Academy of Sciences conference titled The Neurobiology of Music will examine the increase in scientific work motivated by the idea that music offers a unique opportunity to better understand the human brain. Like language, music exists in all human societies. Like language, music is a complex, rule-governed activity that is specific to humans. Similarly, music appears associated with specific brain architecture. However, unlike most other high-level functions of the human brain, only a minority of individuals become proficient musicians through explicit tutoring, although sensitivity to musical structure develops early in life without conscious effort in the large majority of the population. The goal of this conference is to bring together leading scientists who are working on music and who are using a wide range of different methodologies from the cognitive sciences and the neuroscience. The originality of the conference will be to favor integration across disciplines and methodologies, by grouping presentations under seven major themes:
I. The Origins of Music All societies have music. It was not invented by some groups and spread to others, like the alphabet writing system. Instead, music seems to have emerged spontaneously in all forms of human societies. Moreover, this emergence is not recent in human evolution. Music emerged as early as 40,000 to 80,000 years ago. Music competence is exhibited in infancy, as early as four to six months of age, when infants may show a predisposition for processing aspects of auditory patterns that are specific to music.
I. The Neurons of Music The neural hardware of the brain allows all musical processes to take place, but also constrains perceptual and motor functions relevant for music. In turn, musical behavior also changes neural pattering. The specific ways in which neural architecture determines and interacts with musical structure is the subject of debate.
II. The Musical Mind Music is not a monolithic function that one has or has not; it involves multiple processing systems that are, to a large extent, shared by non-musicians and musicians alike. To map these abilities onto the human brain, we must know what abilities are essential, and how they are functionally organized.
III. The Musical Brain First steps in understanding auditory processes occurred in the late 19th Century. There is abundant evidence that music perception fractionates along several processing components, each of which may be differentially localized in the brain. To properly map musical functions within the brain, scientists are now using a wide range of technologies, such as brain imaging (MRI and PET) to visualize functional aspects of the normal musical brain.
IV. Music as an Emotional Language The majority of experimental studies have been devoted to the study of musical structure as a nonverbal language, but only rarely as an emotional language. Recent work has shown that some emotions elicited by music are both amenable to study experimentally, and relatively consistent across individuals. Moreover, emotions are associated with cerebral and physiological responses that may be specific to the domain.
V. Musical Expertise/Brain Plasticity Music provides the opportunity to study the effects of early versus late learning on brain plasticity. It has been shown that the primary motor cortex and cerebellum can be modified by early practice of music, and that the shape or size of receptive areas traditionally associated with language may correlate with specific musical skills. The key question is to specify to what extent these brain changes confer qualitative gains to the musician, and hence help us to understand the nature of musical talent.
VI. Modularity for Music We have treated music as if it were an autonomous system, having its own operational rules. This modularity position is not universally shared. For others, music has neither specific brain sites nor computational specificity. Key proponents of these opposite positions will defend their views.
