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CBC News In Depth: Science: Music and the brain
Why does music sometimes give us goose bumps?
At one level, that's the job of the musician. If they didn't do that, at least once in a while, you'd lose interest.
What we do know about the brain side of it, is that there's a network of neural structures associated with the release and uptake of dopamine, including the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. They regulate dopamine and they're involved with our subjective internal feelings of reward and punishment — fear, reward, pleasure, these primal emotions.
We know that when people listen to music that gives them chills or goose bumps, that these structures are coming online and they're firing and they're recruiting other neurons in the vicinity, actually changing your brain chemistry.
Now why it is that vibrating molecules in the air set in motion by someone blowing into a piece of wood with holes in it, that we don't know.
Why is it that when a new song comes out, we tend to hear it over and over again?
When a song is successful, it has a certain number of surprises in it, not necessarily explicit ones, but implicit, subconscious surprises.
When you're listening to music, what your brain is doing — whether you know it or not and whether you're a musician or not — is constantly trying to figure out what's going to happen next.
With music that has a steady beat, like pop, R&B and hip-hop, your brain doesn't have to work very hard to figure out when the next event is going to happen — that's pretty predictable — but it doesn't know exactly what's going to happen.
The skilful composer manipulates this sense of expectation. Your brain's trying to predict what's coming next, it makes a prediction and the skillful composer will meet those predictions a certain percentage of the time and violate them a certain percentage of the time.
If those violations are done in a clever way and in an interesting way, your brain gets really excited because it's now learned something new. It's learned a new pattern. It incorporates that knowledge, but it's still surprising relative to the thousands of songs that you've heard before that don't do that. And you want to hear it over and over again because it was surprising that first time.
Take the song Yesterday by the Beatles. It's got a seven-bar phrase, and almost every other pop song is either four bars or eight bars. Even if I tell you this and even if you've known this for years, the song still is rewarding because, although it's not violating your expectation for that song, it's still violating your expectation for pop songs in general.