Does the brain process lyrics and melody separately or as one when we listen to music?

Well scientists and researchers claim to have finally found an answer to this interesting question.

A team at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany has found that the brain first deals with music and lyrics together and then, after passing through more complex processing, like understanding what lyrics mean, the two are treated separately.

The scientists studied a functional MRI brain scan of people listening to songs to make the discovery.

They reasoned that if they varied just the tune and kept the lyrics the same, areas showing a decline in activity must be processing lyrics.

And if they varied just the lyrics, areas showing a decline must be processing the tune, while any regions declining when both the tune and lyrics are repeated must be processing both. 

The people who conducted the experiment wrote four different sets of six songs and played these to 12 volunteers while scanning their brains.

In one set, all songs had different melodies and lyrics. In another, the melodies were different but lyrics were the same, while in the third set, the opposite was true. The fourth set were identical to each other.

Most of it honestly went over my head the first time I tried to understand this but it's amazing how our brain functions!

Isn't it facinating how our creater thought things out before He actually completed us? :-)

So the next time you're listening to music and trying to figure out a riff or two in a song, you know what your brain's upto...

Naresh

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Posted on March 11th, 2010 by Naresh Nathan