Our brains are made for music

A news release from NIH/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke:

In the eternal search for understanding what makes us human, scientists found that our brains are more sensitive to pitch, the harmonic sounds we hear when listening to music, than our evolutionary relative the macaque monkey. The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, highlights the promise of Sound Health, a joint project between the NIH and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that aims to understand the role of music in health.

"We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains," said Bevil Conway, Ph.D., investigator in the NIH's Intramural Research Program and a senior author of the study published in Nature Neuroscience. "The results raise the possibility that these sounds, which are embedded in speech and music, may have shaped the basic organization of the human brain."

The original research:

Norman-Haignere et al., fMRI Responses to Harmonic Tones and Noises Reveal Divergence in the Functional Organization of Human and Macaque Auditory Cortex. Nature Neuroscience, June 10, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41593-019-0410-7