Biological Principles for Music and Health

Abstract

Efforts to integrate music into healthcare systems and wellness practices are accelerating but the biological foundations that support this endeavor are not widely understood. As a result, music-based treatments remain on the fringe of medicine. In this review, I integrate progress in music research from neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry to create a framework for translating between music’s specific foundations in human biology and its specific applications in mental health. This framework organizes the neurophysiological effects and clinical applications of music around four core elements of human musicality: tonality, rhythm, reward, and social connection. For each element, I review essential concepts, biological foundations, and evidence of clinical benefits. Working within this framework, I chart a path towards increasing the impact of music on health by quantifying individual differences in sensitivity to core elements of musicality and using them as a basis for increasing the precision with which musical treatments are applied. As such, I argue that biological insight into the origins, functions, and neural bases of music has an essential role to play in advancing the use music to improve human health and wellness.

Vocal similarity theory and the biology of musical tonality

“…The vocal similarity hypothesis of consonance exists within a broader theoretical framework called vocal similarity theory (VST). The central tenet of VST is that we perceive tones in music according to their biological significance in vocal communication (Bowling, 2021(Bowling, , 2023Bowling et al, 2018;Bowling & Purves, 2015;Gill & Purves, 2009;Schwartz et al, 2003). It is based on the fact that human experience with tones, on phylogenetic and developmental time scales, is dominated by the voice.…”

“…More generally, the explanatory power of VST extends beyond consonance to other aspects of musical tonality, and potentially to rhythm as well (Bowling, 2023;Di Stefano et al, 2022;Doelling et al, 2019;Giraud & Poeppel, 2012). Staying with tonality, VST provides a basis for understanding melody and timbre, especially in the domain of affect expression.…”

“…For melody, VST predicts that the affect associated with a given tone sequence can be estimated by determining its resemblance to affectively-parallel f0 contours in vocal expression. Similarly, for timbre, VST provides a basis for understanding why particular instruments and ways of sounding them are systematically associated with different types of affect (e.g., see Eerola et al, 2012), again predicting that timbral affect can be estimated by determining resemblance with parallel vocal affect (Bowling, 2023). Thus, although VST originated in studies of consonance and dissonance (Schwartz et al, 2003;Terhardt, 1984), the underlying theoretical framework provides a biological basis for a much broader array of topics in musical tonality (Bowling, 2023; see also Juslin & Laukka, 2003).…”

“…While such musical forms are undoubtedly possible, failure to exploit the biological appeal of vocal similarity can be expected to limit their popularity. Finally, as the science of music pushes into the 21 st century, there is a demand for applications of music that leverage its profound neurophysiological effects against an increasing variety of social and physiological ills (Bowling, 2023). Whereas VST offers a clear path forward, the notion that consonance is an arbitrary cultural convention represents an intellectual dead end.…”