Music and language likely share the same ancient roots, emerging from early humans’ need to connect, communicate, and thrive as social beings.
When NASA launched Voyager 1, currently the farthest human-made object from Earth, they included a tribute to humanity— a Golden Record. This record features music, sounds of nature, greetings in multiple languages, and images of life on Earth, offering a snapshot of our diverse creativity and sensitivity.
Reflecting on the monumental effort, led by Carl Sagan to compile a record that captures the essence of human musical creation, it’s striking how the selection spans cultures and continents. The Golden Record features a diverse collection of music from countries such as Germany, Austria, Peru, Senegal, India, Australia, Georgia, Congo, Japan, China, Mexico, Bulgaria, Papua New Guinea, the United States, the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, Russia, and Melanesia.
I often find myself approving or challenging the choices from within the musical culture I know best: Western classical music. Sure, I get the inclusion of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5—but how could they possibly leave out Schubert in the conversation with aliens? Is there anything more profoundly human than his Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960?
Beyond these personal musings, I also reflect on what this selection reveals about us as humans, and how it might be perceived by other forms of intelligence.
WHAT DOES OUR MUSICAL EXPRESSION SAY ABOUT OUR IDENTITY, OUR VALUES, AND OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD?
To us, music is infinitely varied in its rhythm, melody, timbres, and harmonies—so much so that people dedicate thousands of hours to mastering the delicate intricacies of a single musical language. Yet, despite this vast diversity, I believe any human, when exposed to even the most unfamiliar or foreign music, can grasp its beauty and the emotions it seeks to convey with remarkable accuracy.
THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT MUSIC—SOMETHING SPECIAL AND MYSTERIOUS—THAT MAKES IT BOTH READILY ACCESSIBLE YET ENDLESSLY ELUSIVE.
Music is undoubtedly a language, displaying structures that parallel phonetics, syntax, and even semantics—the ability to refer to something beyond itself. Yet, unlike spoken languages, which remain incomprehensible without learning them as a first or second language, musical languages are always somewhat intelligible, regardless of our prior exposure.
Does it relate to music’s deeply interwoven connections with human emotions and their ubiquity and universality across time and space? Numerous studies suggest it does. Cross-cultural research has shown that individuals, regardless of their cultural background, exhibit similar physiological and emotional responses to music, supporting the idea that music taps into shared emotional processes.
More than any spoken language, which is shaped by idiosyncrasies and cultural artifacts, musical languages exhibit a direct connection to the human mind, reflecting its innate structures and universal capacity for rhythm, melody, and emotion.
MUSIC AND LANGUAGE LIKELY SHARE THE SAME ANCIENT ROOTS, EMERGING FROM EARLY HUMANS’ NEED TO CONNECT, COMMUNICATE, AND THRIVE AS SOCIAL BEINGS.
Echoing Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues, anthropologists believe that rhythmic movements and vocalizations— used to signal emotions or coordinate group activities—were essential tools for bonding and survival long before structured language emerged. Supporting this view, neuroscience studies reveal that the brain regions responsible for processing music and language—those governing rhythm, syntax, and emotion—are deeply interconnected, suggesting a shared evolutionary foundation.
The NYU-based research Center for Language, Music, and Emotion (CLaME) offers a unique program aimed at understanding how the human mind perceives, learns, and enjoys musical languages from around the world. The program combines cutting-edge methodologies from experimental psychology, neuroimaging, and computational modeling to uncover the cognitive principles behind both the universality and diversity of music.
Music crosses borders and speaks to what’s most universal to humankind.
Leveraging state-of-the-art imaging techniques, such as fMRI and EEG, which capture brain activity and neural responses with high spatial and temporal resolution, alongside advances in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, this research provides invaluable insights into these timeless questions.
By applying language models to music scores, neuroscientists identify recurrent structures across cultures, quantify differences between musical styles, and define the key parameters that distinguish musical languages.
This quantitative characterization is then used to explore the properties and functions of the mind that shape these musical patterns. Volunteers participate in laboratory studies, where their brains are monitored with hundreds of electrodes as they listen to various kinds of music, both familiar and unfamiliar. The resulting images help us understand how the brain processes and learns music. Beyond this physiological measures and fMRI—a neuroimaging technique that tracks blood flow linked to neuronal activity with high precision—provide insights into the emotions evoked by different types of music and how these emotional responses interact with an individual’s musical and cultural background, state of mind, or even specific clinical conditions.
These scientific endeavors have, for instance, characterized the inherent active cognitive processes involved in music listening. You may believe that music is a way to relax your mind, letting it drift away, rocked by its regular beat and soothing melodies. In reality, the brain is incredibly active, continuously predicting what notes will come next, based on the interplay between previously heard notes and all the music we’ve listened to throughout our lives.
With this in mind, researchers at CLaME explore how humans learn music they’ve never encountered before. Using complementary methods, they investigate which aspects of music are immediately understood and which require repeated exposure to a particular musical style.
Recent research focusing on Chinese and Western music has delineated what Western listeners can intuitively grasp from unfamiliar Chinese music and how their perception evolves with daily exposure over several weeks. This groundbreaking work uniquely combines advanced machine learning and neuroscience techniques to address one of the most enduring questions in music theory, composition, and ethnomusicology.
EVIDENTLY, HUMAN BRAINS ARE HIGHLY PROFICIENT COMPUTING TOOLS.
However, when it comes to music perception, this computing is seamlessly intertwined with complex emotional responses, making it a uniquely captivating and profound subject for neuroscientific exploration.
There is something about music—something special and mysterious—that makes it both readily accessible yet endlessly elusive.
Research conducted at CLaME also explores how emotional responses to music intertwine with memory and learning. Using fMRI, we observe how activations in the brain’s emotional and pleasure centers, such as the dopaminergic regions in the striatum (a deep, evolutionarily ancient structure), correlate with the speed at which people memorize and learn complex melodies. These findings have significant implications for the development of music-based clinical interventions.
MUSIC ALSO HAS IMMENSE BENEFITS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF YOUNG MINDS.
Recent research underscores the significant impact of music education on children’s brain development. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
found that piano lessons enhanced kindergartners’ ability to distinguish different pitches, which translated into improved word discrimination in language processing. Similarly, the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute reported that music instruction accelerates brain development in areas responsible for language development, sound processing, and reading skills. These findings highlight music education as a valuable tool for fostering cognitive growth and language proficiency in early childhood.
MUSIC, WHICH SO PROFOUNDLY IMPACTS OUR BRAINS, EXISTS WITHIN AN INTRICATE CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC ECOSYSTEM.
The music industry plays a pivotal role in shaping how music is produced, distributed, and consumed, acting as both a vessel for artistic expression and a driver of global cultural exchange. However, as music crosses borders and reaches broader audiences, it is often reframed to fit commercial frameworks that prioritize accessibility and profitability. This dynamic has given rise to both opportunities and challenges, particularly in the realm of “world music,” where the blending of traditions may raise questions about representation, authenticity, and cultural ownership.
The concept of “world music” emerged in the late 1980s as a term coined by Western industry professionals during a 1987 meeting in London, where it was formalized as a marketing category to promote non-Western musical traditions to global audiences. While traditional music had been studied and performed for centuries, the genre as we know it gained traction in the last decade of the 20th century, driven by the efforts of labels like Real World Records and festivals like WOMAD. It sought to spotlight the diversity of musical traditions from across the globe—African drumming, Indian ragas, and Andean panpipes, to name just a few—while sometimes blending them with contemporary styles to reach broader audiences. “World music,” while celebrated for fostering cross-cultural exchange and elevating global musical traditions, has been criticized for its Western-centric framing, which often homogenizes diverse cultures, perpetuates power imbalances, and risks veering into cultural appropriation when traditions are commercialized without proper recognition or compensation.
The criticism that “world music” globalizes music from diverse cultures, turning it into a consumer product shaped by Western commercial interests and stripping it of its cultural context and depth, is well-founded.
However, when it comes to accusations of “cultural appropriation,” I believe music presents a unique case, as it has always been the product of métissage—a dynamic blend of influences, exchanges, and borrowings across cultures. From the fusion of African rhythms and European harmonies that birthed jazz to the widespread adoption of the pentatonic scale, music transcends borders and evolves through shared human creativity.
As a universal language, music speaks to what is uniquely human: our capacity to connect, adapt, and innovate—creating a collective narrative that spans time and geography. Music, in its essence, originates from the connections within diversity and profound disruptions, showing how creativity thrives through the exchange and fusion of cultures across time. With the rise of generative AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, humanity faces an unprecedented existential challenge: redefining how music creation will blend with this groundbreaking technology to emerge as a new, uniquely human language.
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