Variations on the musical brain

If intelligent extraterrestrials ever intercept Voyager, the first message they decode will be Glenn Gould playing Bachl. Music, an ancient and peculiarly human pastime, is valued by all cultures. For highly visual primates, we are surprisingly susceptible to these abstract acoustic stimuli with no obvious survival value2. Neurologists have long been fascinated by musical curiosities they occasionally meet in their clinical practice. With the advent of techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET) and transcranial magnetic brain stimulation (TMS) it has become possible to study the perception and production of music in detail. A brief set of variations may serve to outline the theme.