For a majority of people, music is a huge part of their everyday life. Whether a person listens to classical, country, reggae, pop or rock, music can have an emotional attachment to it. Why is it that music consumes people and makes a person feel so good? Music can be associated with emotional feeling because it is something that can often times relate to an individual on a personal level. However big the emotional connection is, there lies an intricate, scientific explanation as to why a person feels these emotions. Listening to music deals with how sound is perceived in a human, the chemical explanation of how one feels while listening to a song, along with the emotional explanation of where everything takes place in the brain.
Without going into explicit detail about how the brain comprehends music, let's talk about the basics. First off, music is the result of many sounds clashing together in the ear resulting in one single sound. Sound is vibrations traveling throughout the air until it reaches an individual's ear. The ear drums picks up on these vibrations and disciples them so that the cochlea can interpret and sort them into different frequency ranges for receptor cells to pick up on. Once they are obtained by the cells, they are then transformed into electrical nerve impulses that will contribute to being comprehended by the brain in a language it knows. The auditory nervous system sends the electrical nerve impulses to the brain to be processed, identified and stored in memory. By being stored, it helps an individual recognize the musical sounds for future use (Roederer 2). The way a person's ears processes waves of sound, is much like the way the eyes processes light except the waves of sounds can provoke excitement, pleasure or pain in your brain.
Excitement, pain or pleasure can come from various things. Excitement can be the anticipation building inside a person while waiting for a loved one to come home or having their first concert...