''Well the remarkable thing about music is that it activates nearly every region of the brain we’ve mapped so far.
Music listening involves the auditory cortex, which is one of the first places in the brain that the music is processed but then it gets shuffled off and different parts of the brain extract pitch from rhythm from timbre and melody and harmony.
[..] the music listening experience involves the frontal lobes trying to figure out what notes are going to come next.
That’s how we get a sense of surprise and release in music: that Ahhhh feeling that the composer played a note that you really liked.
That experience could only happen if subconsciously your brain was trying to figure out what the composer might do. Often when people are listening to music we find visual cortex activation, either because they’re imagining movement, or imagining watching a performer.
[..] there is a certain network of structures in the brain, in the limbic system, that begin to fire when we have a variety of pleasurable experiences.
These include taking cocaine, or having an orgasm, or eating chocolate and it turns out that when people listen to music that same network of neurons starts to fire. These neurons help to modulate levels of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is one of the neurotransmitters that essentially makes you feel good.
So when you listen to music that you like, you get this actual change of chemical levels in your brain''.

Music and the Brain
Daniel Levitin, McGill University
foto:Hope Sandoval