Music and the brain: a heartland of psychiatry?

& Hesdorffer, that the influence of mind over matter has evolutionary importance. The human capacity to interpret and enjoy pitch and rhythm as well as harmony is rooted in cultural and evolutionary history – and passed on in infancy. We may have been lulled to sleep by the slow rhythm of a lullaby at the beginning of life (Friedman et al, 2010) and later consoled by memories of a loved one, heightened by the music of a requiem mass. Listening to music, as well as performing, are not isolated individual activities but part of a dyadic or group experience, during which empathic processes operate – and a wave of feelings may pass through an attentive audience. The conductor of an orchestra conveys a musical phrase and its attached emotion through gesture (kinaesthetic empathy) as well as by eliciting a particular quality of sound from the orchestra. It is likely that music, because of its meaning, pitch, rhythm and cadence, preceded speech as a more primal form of human communication. Yet knowledge of how the brain processes and communicates this musical language is in its infancy – and the answers are unlikely to be found in the neurosciences alone (Clarke & Clarke, 2011). What happens to the vocal apparatus (larynx, tongue, lips and resonating sinuses) when we use the voice provides vivid functional magnetic resonance images of moving body parts and of brain localisation (Carey & McGettigan, 2016) – but these visualisations alone do not answer the question ‘Why sing?’