Auditory Cheesecake

There is an article in Discover magazine's  December 2010 issue in the section "The Brain": "Older than civilization, music fosters communication, wellness, and bonding across all cultures -- but where does it come from?"  The online version is found at the following link:

Is Music Auditory Cheesecake?

There are three schools of thought - that music is a primordial love song, that music also provides soothing to ease the consequences of love (such as a mother cooing to her newborn), and that music is an avenue of social cohesion.

"Dunbar and his colleagues studies people who played music or danced together in church groups, samba classes, drumming circles, and the like.  After the performances, the scientists made an indirect measure of the endorphin levels in the performers' bodies, putting blood pressure cuffs on people's arms and inflating them until the subjects complained of pain.  (Since endorphins kill pain, a higher pain threshold indicates elevated levels of the compounds.)  The researchers then repeated the procedure with employees of a musical instrument store who listened passively to constant background music.  People who actively moved their bodies to music -- dancers, drummers, and so on -- had elevated pain thresholds, but no such effect showed up among those who merely listened."

This indicates to me that music is not a spectator sport.  Other studies mentioned in the article show that  even listening to music can release endorphins in the brain as much as typical primate grooming, and that music may serve the same function.  But participating in music directly -- playing it, creating it, combining as a group to perform it -- has different effects on the brain chemistry than merely passively absorbing it.

As a musician (among other things), I have always said that "Music is my drug of choice."  Playing the piano for the recent production of "Fiddler on the Roof" gave me such a chemical high.  I interpreted the feeling as a spiritual surge, but obviously there was a neurochemical response to creating the music that involved interesting and really groovy chemical reactions.  I've never done recreational drugs -- I don't even know what marijuana smells like (unfortunately?), but I do know that music performance and composition creates a concrete, verifiable, and very pleasant "high."  There isn't even the inevitable drug crash after the initial euphoria wears off.  The memory of performance and music composition remains unaltered, and I regain those same feelings by accessing those memories, though to a lesser extent than the original performance.

It's not dissimilar to writing poetry, or stories -- I've also said that poetry is music transformed into language, and the wedding of music and poetry into song is so blatantly ideal that my saying that much like an idiot looking up and musing, "My! that sky looks a little blue to me!"

It would have been interesting if the article had gone a step further (and maybe it will in a future article) and explored the neurochemistry of all artistic creation.