“music contains an enormous amount of information of unique content” and that “there’s more information than speech,” and further, “ it conveys emotional information that’s very nuanced, and we’re sensitive to that,” and especially “it’s much better …. than language is; It’s much better at communicating the dynamics of human emotion.”

I think music was not just an early form of emotional communication between humans, but –especially in its form we know today– a very highly developed form of communication. As a vehicle for emotional communication the music “language” is universal, capable of traversing the boundaries between ethnicities and cultures, well beyond the capability of language.

The experiment you showed in your TV presentation demonstrates that most elementary forms of human emotion (happy, sad and scared) can be unmistakably understood even by isolated tribe in Africa that has never been exposed to western music in their whole live. My scientific instinct tells me, this fact might be scientifically extrapolated to conclude that well-developed western music as played by symphony orchestras and opera performers conveys a lot more emotional information, compared to primitive music or pop music, judged by a higher complexity of structure and a larger variety of nuances, in the same manner as language is evaluated.

This fact is already shown by your fractional CAT scan images of human brain taken while listening to certain types of music (of course it must be presumed that the test person is enjoying the music being played, so his brain would not respond indifferently, or even become annoyed). I am quite impressed to see that your CAT scan images showed how the entire human brain is excited or stimulated upon listening to Richard Strauss’s song cycle “The Four Last Songs” (September?). This agrees with my own personal intuition; I shed my tears especially when listening to the last song “Im Abendrot” (In the Red of Sunset). It also agrees with Franco Zeffirelli, Director of Met Opera in the Movie, who said in his introduction to the 2008 production of Puccini’s La Boheme, it is completely okay for the audience to cry, because “Puccini wants you to cry”.

In this regard it might be quite interesting to expand the experiment to test the validity of the “Mozart effect”, thus providing a scientific foundation to the hitherto controversial hypothesis. It might be even more interesting if the result would further show that different parts of the brain would be dynamically excited or stimulated by different movements of a symphony or concerto, thus giving a solid reason, why a classical symphony or concerto needs a multiple of movements to form a complete, dynamic and self-contained work of art.

If these prove to be objectively true –by evidence of experimental results, as always demanded by science– we may then have strong reasons to challenge the relative concept of cultural value, i.e., that we can not say whether one particular culture is more developed than the other, as presently claimed by some liberal scholars, allegedly for lack of standard. The scientific evidence would then be the standard, a very strong and solid standard.

Bernard S., physicist and violinist, Herndon, VA