Music and brain

How do music appreciation and emotions emerge in the human brain?

Infants show sophisticated abilities to acquire knowledge about musical syntax. This strongly supports the notion that musicality is a natural ability of the human brain. There is a natural connection between music and speech and the neural resources for music and language processing in both adults and children seem to be partly overlapping. We intend to find out how very young infants process violations of language-related and musical principles. Children react differentially to music, as they do to everything they encounter. These differences in the styles of reactivity may be due to 1) temperament, the permanent physiology-based property of all humans, 2) learning in the early years – mimicking the reactions of other people lead the child to react in similar ways, 3) possibly to differences in the brain processes related to the processing of auditory input. The detection accuracy of the auditory system to changes of different types (for example, changes in melody, compared to changes in rhythm) differ greatly between individuals. We will address the importance of this detection profile to the reaction styles of children towards music.