ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on brain areas and networks as they relate to specific aspects of musical experience. Scientists and philosophers alike have long asked questions about the cerebral localization of the human faculties such as language and music. The cognitive neuroscience of music has been facilitated by the invention in the 1920s of encephalography from the recording of scalp electrical potentials, as well as the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which first enabled structural and then functional magnetic resonance imaging. Although much of the neuroimaging work in music and the brain focuses on the level of the auditory cortex and beyond, the pathway that sounds take from the air to the brain clearly includes many subcortical way stations. Beyond the auditory cortices, musical sounds activate distributed grey matter throughout the brain. Although language, music, and auditory processing are ostensibly different neural functions, their underlying brain networks all share many overlapping areas in the brain.
