Rock And Rationale: The Songs Behind The Scenes

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ples indicate that music plays many functions such as creating images, drawing emotion, and encouraging thought in the brain.
Music consists of lyric, rhythm, frequency and other components. These elements build the perception of music as a whole. Our brain processes each piece in different regions. For example, non-musical people will process rhythm in the left brain and pitch and melody in the right brain (Altenmuller 28). Therefore, each component of music has different effects to our brain because each region of the brain has different duties. Nevertheless, how much music affects the brain depends on each person. For example, “musicians’ brains devote more area toward motor control of the finger used to play an instrument” (Weinberger 89). Hence, this statement stresses the fact that “humans perceive music as more than just sound” (Altenmuller 31). However, by the fact that our mood may change when we hear music, music’s components should also play a role in creating emotion. For example, the ratio of frequencies between two tones is the main factor of musical appreciation. When people hear music in middle C (about 260 Hz) and middle G (about 390 Hz), its ration is 2:3 and forms pleasant sound. In contrast, when we hear middle C and C sharp (about 277 Hz) which have the ratio about 8:9, we consider them as unpleasant or rough sound (Weinberger 95). This fact explains us why when we hear the melody of a song, we feel sad, while listening to another song, we feel joyful.
In addition, music affects people since they were born. It is surprising that infants can “notice the changes in both tempo, the speed at which music is played, and rhythm” (Weinberger 94). Furthermore, Diana Deutsch shows an amazing discovery in The Psychology of Music that children in the preschool years learn to identify the emotional states in music. A four-year-old child can assign the mood of a song (such as happy, sad, angry, and afraid) in...