Abstract
Language of Music and Its Psychophysical Foundations (Review)
Highlights
According to imaging studies, music can activate the biological reward system [1, 2] and cause goosebumps [3, 4]
Whereas pragmatic emotions [11, 12] have survival value and occur in response to specific signs and images, the emotional responsiveness to music is difficult to explain since music has neither cognitive constants [13] that are comparable to words and visible images nor specific somatosensory sensations such as the warmth of a fire or the wetness of rain
The understanding of the character of the main melodic elements of music is available to human beings in infancy
Summary
Music can activate the biological reward system [1, 2] and cause goosebumps (piloerection) [3, 4]. With regard to the basic melodic elements we are dealing with the “law of laziness” — when the processing of a complex auditory signal is facilitated by duplication of important information in overtone series of the constituent tones, this translates into pleasant sonic sensation. This resonates with Leibniz’s claim that music is “unconscious arithmetic”. The link between perceived tonal tension and real physical tension [47], as well as the discovery of the gradient of perceptual comfort for combinations of musical sound [51, 52], emphasize the importance of precognitive aspect of music perception. The intuitive understanding of the basic melodic elements explains the broad availability of music to different groups of people, including Alzheimer’s patients [56] and teenagers with autism [57]
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