Brain cells sensitive to music found

BALTIMORE, Aug 25, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Johns Hopkins University researchers in Baltimore have discovered a group of cells in the brain that are sensitive to music.

The researchers say they think studying these neurons will reveal how our minds grasp songs and speech, reports Nature.

Daniel Bendor and Xiaoqin Wang identified the neurons by recording the response of monkeys' brain cells while the animals heard various notes from a computer. They found individual cells consistently got excited by sounds at specific frequencies, or multiples of that frequency.

Most people can hear that two instruments are playing the same note, even if they sound as different as a trumpet and a piano, the report in Nature said.

Our perception of fundamental sound frequency or "pitch" remains constant despite differences in an instrument's acoustical traits, the report said, adding this phenomenon has puzzled scholars for centuries.

Commenting on the findings, Josh McDermott, a music psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: "This is the first evidence that there are individual neurons in the brain that are encoding for pitch."