Music is the art of arrangement of sounds in specific time within the components of harmony, melody, timing, and rhythm. It is profoundly important to communication and social behavior. General definitions of music refer to common musical elements like rhythm, melody, timbre, and harmonic qualities of texture and timbre. A music composition may be of visual or aural interest, may have a rhythmic or melodic pattern, or may use other rhythmic or melodic methods such as chromatic scales, alternative tunings, and fugue. Most modern music is produced for radio or television entertainment.
Music allows us to tell a story, express our feelings, make abstract connections, anticipate future events, remember things, anticipate actions, appreciate or teach others, and so on. Many of these and other purposes of music were discovered by neurologists who noted that our brains contain neurons which when stimulated produce various kinds of chemical and electrical signals. These connections are very broad and cover a large range of functions in the human brain. Neurologists who study the relationship between the brain and emotions began to see how music produces the emotional reaction they are asking; does Music cause an emotional response?
Researchers who studied the relationship between the brain and emotion found several areas of the cortex which receive direct stimulation from melodic, rhythmic, or tonal sources. They specifically observed areas of the cortex which are responsible for emotion. They found several areas of the cortex which are exclusively responsible for emotion. Areas in the brain which are only involved in hearing or rhythm are not involved in the creation of melody and emotion.
The study which brought these studies to light was done by James Thompson and Richard Solomon. Thompson and Solomon were interested in the effect of music on the central nervous system. They found that when a person hears a melody they have stronger responses than others who are not listening to a melody. It is this connection between the melody and emotion that is most interesting to musicians.
When you consider what the brain is doing while we execute an improvisation, it becomes clear that our brain is mainly responsible for the timbre or harmony. Our auditory cortex is responsible for identifying the rhythm and melody of the improvised piece. Our midline corticobasal cortex provides a link between rhythm and melody and helps us execute an improvisation.
The temporal cortex initiates actions such as the eye movement, head movements, eye fixation, facial expression, speech production, etc., all required for singing, dancing, playing an instrument, or listening to a musical track. All of these actions and thoughts are ultimately linked to emotion, which is the emotional state created by the melody/routine/timbre of a musical piece. In other words, the emotional response we feel while listening to a musical piece originates from the auditory cortex, the "what," "where," and "when" of a melody/routine/timbre, all of which combine to generate the emotion of music and, thus, music appreciation.
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