The Musical Brain

Music is everywhere; it pumps through earbuds, elevators, commercials, arenas, and it’s even beamed out to space.  But – despite its rampant abundance in human experience, history, and culture – music has no clear adaptive function.   This begs the question: What are the origins of music, and why does it play such an enormous role in our lives? Did music arise from sexual selection, from the faculty of speech, as a group-oriented communication device, or is it merely a fortuitous side effect of various perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that serve other functions? In this multidisciplinary review of academic literature, Abel James incorporates research in neuroscience, linguistics, perception and challenges a wide range of eminent thinkers to uncover the origins of music and explore its profound effects on the human brain. “The Musical Brain is a technical review of extraordinary breadth. There are books that you read and there are books that you study. The Musical Brain falls into the latter category.”- Tony Federico