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Dr. Daniel Levitin: For many people, music is a way of expressing, sharing, or experiencing emotions that we use as an alternative to language; music does things that language can't. As an art form, it allows us to express emotions and ideas over time, as opposed to painting, e.g., which does this over space.

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Dr. Daniel Levitin: The first 'music' was probably vocalizations; changes in pitch and rhythm made by voice. After that would have come beating, striking, drumming - mostly rhythmic expression. As the brain evolved to give us language, early humans added lyrics to their melodies. Music is constantly changing - the evolution of it may seem slow to us, as does biological evolution. But music continues to build on what was there before. Harmony (structured harmony) is relatively recent, maybe only in the last few thousand years. And it's important to keep in mind that the human brain is undergoing steady evolution as well. The brain changes a bit, our ability to conceive of and make music responds to that - advancing - the brain changes again and then music changes again.

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Dr. Daniel Levitin: Music activates every region of the brain that we've so far mapped. It causes neural activity in the most primitive parts of our brain (brain stem, pons) and the most advanced parts (frontal operculum). When we listen to music - even if we're lying perfectly still - that part of our brains that would coordinate muscle movement for dancing or finger snapping is active. This points to an ancient evolutionary connection between music and movement. Musical taste can vary greatly from one person to another. But this shouldn't be a surprise. Not everyone likes chocolate, not everyone likes spicy food . . . the biology of aesthetics and taste isn't clearly understood. One thing we do know is that people in general like music that has something familiar. If you were born listening to Chinese Opera, which uses a separate set of scales that are foreign to Western listeners, it's very unlikely you'll suddenly develop a liking for Rhianna. And vice versa - we learn to appreciate those tonal structures that we're surrounded by as children, just as we learn to speak the language we're brought up with. If you're exposed to Janis Joplin and The Doors as a child, it doesn't mean you'll necessarily develop a liking for psychedelic music. But you'll have been exposed to 'Western tonal music,' the major scale. . . these are the foundation for classical, jazz, hip-hop, metal . . . all these use the same 12 notes. You may find you prefer one of these genres to another, but it's unlikely that you'll be able to make sense out of, say Indian ragas or Pygmy music, which are just as nuanced, complex and interesting (if not more so) but which depend on forms and structures that most of us haven't developed the neural circuits to understand.

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Dr. Daniel Levitin: Beethoven was able to *continue* composing despite hearing loss because he remembered what instruments and notes sounded like. If he had never heard music, he would not have been able to compose. The British philosopher John Locke pointed out that we cannot imagine sensory events that we've never experienced at all. Dame Glennie, who has profound hearing loss, still experiences music through bone conduction, and so plays music using tactile (the sense of touch) feedback, sort of like the vibrations you feel on a train bumping up and down over unevenly laid tracks.

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Dr. Daniel Levitin: Because that is the JOB of music! It was MADE to do that. Music captures the dynamics of human emotion, their changing nature, the complexity of feeling happy and sad at the same time. When it's composed well, it can do this better than language, and that's probably the reason why we, as a species, still have both. Our brains evolved to give us certain cognitive abilities that made music, art and even science possible. I describe these 3 abilities in my new book, THE WORLD IN SIX SONGS. Essentially, evolution selected for music as a parallel form of communication, and as far as we know, it's been with our species all the way back to when homo sapiens first emerged.

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Dr. Daniel Levitin: The auditory system of the fetus is fully functional by 20 weeks. They can hear pitch and rhythm, and their developing brains are already beginning to wire themselves up to the form, structure and patterns they hear. One-year olds show a preference for music that they heard in the womb. Musical taste begins there. You can think of it as a 'womb with a view.' :)

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Dr. Daniel Levitin: 'Hearing impairment' encompasses a lot of different conditions, that arise from different causes, so there's no one answer. If the loss is due to a problem with the sensory receptor -- the ear, the cochlea -- then your body isn't registering the sound in the first place and so can't pass it on up to the brain. Such loss could be complete, it could affect one ear only, or only certain frequencies in one or both ears. Unfortunately, these losses tend to be permanent because the sensory receptors are not 'plastic,' meaning they don't recover or remap function. You're luckier if the loss is due to a problem in the cortex, say due to a lesion, stroke, tumor, or other organic brain trauma (doctors, euphemistically call these brain 'insult'). The brain turns out to be able to rewire itself. If the inputs are still coming in from the outer, middle or inner ear, the brain 'figures this out' and can often recover function. It's easier to do this for the young, but still possible for us old folks.

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