Negative Effects Of Music

Music has always been an important part of our identity as human beings; it’s existed for millennia, transcending generations, languages, and cultures all around the world and affects each individual person differently – yet its effect is often profound. It has been proven through numerous tests and studies utilizing technologies like MRI that when exposed to music, certain areas of the brain are stimulated much more intensely than while not being exposed or doing other things. The auditory cortex is the specific region for processing sounds, but music actually stimulates other regions including those associated with emotions, movement, and memory; it is believed that music will activate these areas of the brain in everyone, regardless of musical

The appreciation of music is tied to the ability to process its underlying structure, that is, the ability to predict what will occur next in the song (whether those predictions be how a melody or chords will progress and resolve, a drum rhythm will repeat, a verse will lead into the chorus, and so on); however, the structure has to involve some level of the unexpected, or it becomes monotonous and devoid of emotion. Controlling when these expectations are and aren 't met is how skilled composers are able to manipulate the emotion experienced by the listener in different ways to achieve the effect of a moving song. Although music appears to be similar to features of language, it is more rooted in the primitive brain structures that are involved in motivation, reward, and emotion. The brain will synchronize neural oscillators with the pulse of the music through cerebellum activation and predict when the next strong beat will occur. The expectation of elements in the song to follow this timing (or even elements which intentionally fall outside of the rigid structure or change the structure altogether) builds anticipation, which results in the reward reaction when that anticipation is met. The response the brain elicits may also depend on the type or genre of music a person is subjected to; in one study computer algorithms were used to identify specific aspects of the music, which the researchers were able to match with specific activated brain areas (seen using fMRI). Their findings demonstrated that vocal and instrumental music get treated differently – while both hemispheres of the brain deal with musical features, the presence of lyrics shifts the processing of musical features to the left auditory cortex, which suggests that the brain’s