Music and the Mind

Harvard hosted three Norton lecturers in the twentieth century who all addressed the same question: What is the meaning of music? Igor Stravinsky (1939), Aaron Copland (1952), and Leonard Bernstein (1973) contemplated from whence the power of music derives.

This course takes their inquiry several steps further, exploring the evolutionary origins of our musicality, the relationship between music and speech, and the unique emotional impact of music.

We explore the neuroanatomy of hearing and music perception, its relationship to sound perception in other species, the extraordinary capacity for musical memory, the relationship between music and emotion, the role of involuntary music (that is, ear worms), and alterations in music perception experienced by patients with autism, Williams syndrome, stroke, and dementia.

Students can anticipate gaining an improved appreciation of musical form and variety across cultures and a sense of the experimental progress the past thirty years in the neuroscience of music perception.