Proof That Music IS a Language

You may have heard someone say that music is a language all its own. Well, here's proof.

Wynton Marsalis and others describe jazz as a form of "musical conversation," in which players trade ideas back and forth. Some researchers at Johns Hopkins tested this idea. The researchers ran functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on jazz musicians while they "traded fours." For those who aren't familiar with the term, "trading fours" is a practice in jazz performances where musicians improvise four bar (four measure) solos while others play in support behind them. After the end of four measures, another player takes his or her turn, and so on.

The Johns Hopkins researchers found something amazing. When they saw the brains of the musicians lit up by fMRI, they found that the same areas of the brain that process language were also working while the players were improvising! Not only that, but according to one of the Johns Hopkins researchers, Dr. Charles Limb, M. D.:

"When two jazz musicians seem lost in thought while trading fours, they aren’t simply waiting for their turn to play,. Instead, they are using the syntactic areas of their brain to process what they are hearing so they can respond by playing a new series of notes that hasn’t previously been composed or practiced.”

In other words, they're listening to each other and thinking about what they're going to say. They're having a true musical conversation.

POSTSCRIPT: A Reuters story on the passing of the great flamenco guitar master Paco de Lucia includes this quote: "I learned the guitar like a child learns to speak."