Music to your ears is hard wired into your brain according to a study reported in Nature Science Update 23 Apr 2001. A group of scientists at Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany, recorded brain activity in subjects as they listened to sequences of musical chords. When a misfit chord was played there was an increase in activity in the same region of the brain that analyses sentences and detects out of place words. Carol Krumhansl, an expert in music perception at Cornell University, New York described the research as very exciting because it “might provide some basic insight about why we have music.”
Editorial Comment: Studying the brain will certainly help us understand how we perceive and understand music and how we can distinguish between music and noise. However, it will not explain why we have music any more than it can explain why we have speech. Why? is a religious or philosophical question, so the answer will be religious or philosophical. That is, we have both these faculties because we are made in the image of the creator God, who the Bible teaches rejoices over us with music and singing and has surrounded Himself with choirs of Angels and glorious music in the Heavens (Revelation 5: 9-13). He speaks and likes music and therefore so do we. During the first metal age (Genesis 4:21) one of earliest human technologies to be developed on earth was the making of musical instruments. (Ref. music, brain, speech)