Music

The brain, if nothing else, is a giant pattern detector. It looks for order in chaos. And those patterns matter: they can mean the difference between life and death. Music taps into that same machinery because it's so highly structured. When your brain says, I thought this path would lead here, but it actually took me somewhere new — you experience pleasure.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

The brain can be thought of as a blank slate, yet it comes with certain built-in constraints and proclivities. Every culture recognizes the octave, because it's grounded in physics, a simple 2:1 frequency ratio. Every culture also uses the perfect fifth, 3:2. And every culture divides the octave into a discrete set of steps for their scale, usually between five and eight.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

Music is often better than speech at conveying and understanding emotion, because music has a kind of openness and ambiguity to it. Words, on the other hand, tend to put things into boxes. If I say, I'm happy, but also a bit sad, nervous, winsome, and tired, those words are still boxes. But if I play you a passage of music — maybe something by Elgar — you might think, Yes, that's exactly how I feel.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners.

Acclaimed film composer known for scores like The Lion King and Inception

The inexpressible depth of music... easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all of the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.

Acclaimed film composer known for scores like The Lion King and Inception

Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated.

Acclaimed film composer known for scores like The Lion King and Inception

Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.

Acclaimed film composer known for scores like The Lion King and Inception

We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one. We integrate all of these and 'construct' music in our minds using many different parts of the brain. And to this largely unconscious structural appreciation of music is added an often intense and profound emotional reaction to music.

Acclaimed film composer known for scores like The Lion King and Inception

That thing of me being anonymous and just the music that's moving the person.

Legendary Guitarist & Producer: Chic Founder, Producer for David Bowie, Madonna

The only time I ever heard the song was in my head when I wrote it and when we recorded it that night. The next time I heard it was in a room full of strangers dancing to it.

Legendary Guitarist & Producer: Chic Founder, Producer for David Bowie, Madonna

You know how difficult that is in a nightclub in New York at 5 in the morning? Everybody just stopped and started listening.

Legendary Guitarist & Producer: Chic Founder, Producer for David Bowie, Madonna

Listen, I was so poor I couldn't even afford to get a copy of my own record. This is before cassette tapes, I couldn't even get an acetate made so I could go listen at home.

Legendary Guitarist & Producer: Chic Founder, Producer for David Bowie, Madonna

I walked in completely anonymous and meanwhile these people are responding to my work and have no idea who I am, and it was just 'this is the most incredible feeling in the world'.

Legendary Guitarist & Producer: Chic Founder, Producer for David Bowie, Madonna

There's something beautiful, open and present about using the human voice. We've lost the dynamics of audio over the last 30 years because of compressed music formats, radio and different genres of music.

Magician, Illusionist & Half of Penn & Teller Duo

Sometimes, rappers' lyrics really do offer gripping tales of loss, sorrow, exploitation, rage, confinement, hopelessness, and despair about conditions that are denied in the larger society.

Hip-hop scholar and cultural critic; author of "Black Noise

If you go to any rave, or any football event, you will find people chanting in a rhythm- human beings do that. We have this sense to participate and organise- Music lets you rediscover your humanity, and your connection to humanity. When you listen to Mozart with other people, you feel that somehow- we're all in this together.

Acclaimed film composer known for scores like The Lion King and Inception