With the advent of modern cognitive neuroscience and new tools of studying the human brain "live," music as a highly complex, temporally ordered and rule-based sensory language quickly became a fascinating topic of study. The question of "how" music moves us, stimulates our thoughts, feelings, and kinesthetic sense, and how it can reach the human experience in profound ways is now measured with the advent of modern cognitive neuroscience. The goal of Rhythm, Music and the Brain is an attempt to bring the knowledge of the arts and the sciences and review our current state of study about the brain and music, specifically rhythm. The author provides a thorough examination of the current state of research, including the biomedical applications of neurological music therapy in sensorimotor speech and cognitive rehabilitation. This book will be of interest for the lay and professional reader in the sciences and arts as well as the professionals in the fields of neuroscientific research, medicine, and rehabilitation.

This book studies the effects of repetitive musical rhythm on the brain and nervous system, and in doing so integrates diverse fields including ethnomusicology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, religious studies, music therapy, and human health. It presents aspects of musical rhythm and biological rhythms, and in particular rhythmic entrainment, in a way that considers cultural context alongside theoretical research and discussions of potential clinical and therapeutic implications. Considering the effects of drumming and other rhythmic music on mental and bodily functioning, the volume hypothesizes that rhythmic music can have a dramatic impact on mental states, sometimes catalyzing profound changes in arousal, mood, and emotional states via the stimulation of changes in physiological functions like the electrical activity in the brain. The experiments presented here make use of electroencephalography (EEG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and subjective measures to gain insight into how these mental states are evoked, what their relationship is to the music and context of the experience, and demonstrate that they are happening in a consistent and reproducible fashion, suggesting clinical applications. This comprehensive volume will appeal to scholars in cognition, ethnomusicology, and music perception who are interested in the therapeutic potential of music.

Music impinges upon the body and the brain. As such, it has significant inductive power which relies both on innate dispositions and acquired mechanisms and competencies. The processes are partly autonomous and partly deliberate, and interrelations between several levels of processing are becoming clearer with accumulating new evidence. For instance, recent developments in neuroimaging techniques, have broadened the field by encompassing the study of cortical and subcortical processing of the music. The domain of musical emotions is a typical example with a major focus on the pleasure that can be derived from listening to music. Pleasure, however, is not the only emotion to be induced and the mechanisms behind its elicitation are far from understood. There are also mechanisms related to arousal and activation that are both less differentiated and at the same time more complex than the assumed mechanisms that trigger basic emotions. It is imperative, therefore, to investigate what pleasurable and mood-modifying effects music can have on human beings in real-time listening situations. This e-book is an attempt to answer these questions. Revolving around the specificity of music experience in terms of perception, emotional reactions, and aesthetic assessment, it presents new hypotheses, theoretical claims as well as new empirical data which contribute to a better understanding of the functions of the brain as related to musical experience.

Music offers a unique opportunity to better understand the organization of the human brain. Like language, music exists in all human societies. Like language, music is a complex, rule-governed activity that seems specific to humans, and associated with a specific brain architecture. Yet unlike most other high-level functions of the human brain - and unlike language - music is a skill at which only a minority of people become proficient. The study of music as a major brain function has for some time been relatively neglected. Just recently, however, we have witnessed an explosion in research activities on music perception and performance and their correlates in the human brain. This volume brings together an outstanding collection of international authorities - from the fields of music, neuroscience, psychology, and neurology - to describe the amazing advances being made in understanding the complex relationship between music and the brain. Aimed at psychologists and neuroscientists, this is a book that will lay the foundations for a cognitive neuroscience of music.

Did you ever ask whether music makes people smart, why a Parkinson patient's gait is improved with marching tunes, and whether Robert Schumann was suffering from schizophrenia or Alzheimer's disease? This broad but comprehensive book deals with history and new discoveries about music and the brain. It provides a multi-disciplinary overview on music processing, its effects on brain plasticity, and the healing power of music in neurological and psychiatric disorders. In this context, the disorders the plagued famous musicians and how they affected both performance and composition are critically discussed, and music as medicine, as well as music as a potential health hazard are examined. Among the other topics covered are: how music fit into early conceptions of localization of function in the brain, the cultural roots of music in evolution, and the important roles played by music in societies and educational systems. Topic: Music is interesting to almost everybody Orientation: This book looks at music and the brain both historically and in the light of the latest research findings Comprehensiveness: This is the largest and most comprehensive volume on "music and neurology" ever written! Quality of authors: This volume is written by a unique group of real world experts representing a variety of fields, ranging from history of science and medicine to neurology and musicology

Human speech and music share a number of similarities and differences. One of the closest similarities is their temporal nature as both (i) develop over time, (ii) form sequences of temporal intervals, possibly differing in duration and acoustical marking by different spectral properties, which are perceived as a rhythm, and (iii) generate metrical expectations. Human brains are particularly efficient in perceiving, producing, and processing fine rhythmic information in music and speech. However a number of critical questions remain to be answered: Where does this human sensitivity for rhythm arise? How did rhythm cognition develop in human evolution? How did environmental rhythms affect the evolution of brain rhythms? Which rhythm-specific neural circuits are shared between speech and music, or even with other domains? Evolutionary processes’ long time scales often prevent direct observation: understanding the psychology of rhythm and its evolution requires a close-fitting integration of different perspectives. First, empirical observations of music and speech in the field are contrasted and generate testable hypotheses. Experiments exploring linguistic and musical rhythm are performed across sensory modalities, ages, and animal species to address questions about domain-specificity, development, and an evolutionary path of rhythm. Finally, experimental insights are integrated via synthetic modeling, generating testable predictions about brain oscillations underlying rhythm cognition and its evolution. Our understanding of the cognitive, neurobiological, and evolutionary bases of rhythm is rapidly increasing. However, researchers in different fields often work on parallel, potentially converging strands with little mutual awareness. This research topic builds a bridge across several disciplines, focusing on the cognitive neuroscience of rhythm as an evolutionary process. It includes contributions encompassing, although not limited to: (1) developmental and comparative studies of rhythm (e.g. critical acquisition periods, innateness); (2) evidence of rhythmic behavior in other species, both spontaneous and in controlled experiments; (3) comparisons of rhythm processing in music and speech (e.g. behavioral experiments, systems neuroscience perspectives on music-speech networks); (4) evidence on rhythm processing across modalities and domains; (5) studies on rhythm in interaction and context (social, affective, etc.); (6) mathematical and computational (e.g. connectionist, symbolic) models of “rhythmicity” as an evolved behavior.