A Secret Chord: Finding Meaning in Music, Science, and Faith

“The most important distinction, then, isn't in separating artists from scientists and doctors, but in separating formulaic thinkers from creative ones, separating those who can tolerate uncertainty from those who cannot. –Daniel Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord

“Then came the sound of a musical instrument, from behind it seemed, very sweet and very short, as if it were one plucking of a string or one note of a bell, and after it a full, clear voice—and it sounded so high and strange that he thought it was very far away, further than a star. The voice said, Come.” –C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress

Our culture’s current fascination with the thinking human mind and how well—or whether—it can be approximated artificially is an opportunity to reconsider if something like musical engagement, one of humankind’s most ubiquitous pursuits, can be reduced to ones and zeros. Drawing upon Daniel Levitin’s new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine (Norton, 2024), the following will describe what current science tells us about our biology at work when we listen to and play music. In the end, we’ll consider some reasons why music may be irreducibly important in our lives together.

The Science of Musical Perception

Dr. Levitin is a neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist—and a musician. Drawing upon his own research and his experiences as a collaborative player, he guides the reader through a substantive body of scholarship with helpful illustrations and anecdotes. He begins his book by describing current understandings about the complex processes initiated when we hear music.

Imagine you are seated in an auditorium, and a pianist begins playing at the front. In time, you might experience some measure of pleasure at the sounds. That pleasure may seem straightforward, but the mental process that produced it in your consciousness is not. After sound waves travel from the piano and enter your ear canal, the eardrum begins to vibrate sympathetically. These vibrations are then transferred to the cochlea, a fluid-filled canal in the inner ear. In the cochlea, tiny hair cells are bent by the vibrations, which in turn depolarizes their membranes and transmits a neural impulse along the auditory nerve to your brain.

As you listen, there is a fascinating interplay of various brain regions that work in a reciprocal fashion. The signals travel from the auditory nerve to the brain stem and then to the inferior colliculus, a midbrain relay station. From there, the signals proceed to the thalamus and then outward, to the primary auditory cortex. The auditory cortex is the main destination for this sound information.

However, your experience of music is more than just sound processing. As the signals travel the auditory pathway, they are simultaneously processed by deep-seated brain structures like the limbic system, which includes the hippocampus and the amygdala. The amygdala processes a preliminary emotional response, while the hippocampus accesses and relates the music to your past experiences. This is why we can have an almost instantaneous emotional connection to a song, as it triggers both new feelings and draws on a lifetime of stored memories. This reciprocal relationship between the auditory cortex and these deeper structures allows for a full, integrated response that includes both analytical thought and deep emotional connection. The rapid integration of these many details into your personal sensory map of the world around you allows you to experience music as a unified whole rather than a series of disparate sounds.

This intricate interplay is what explains phenomena like frisson, or "chills," when dopamine is released in the brain's reward system, producing a rush of pleasure. This emotional-mnemonic processing is so rapid that it often precedes the more analytical thought processes of the outer cortex, where we might consciously consider the formal structure of a musical composition or its harmonic complexity.

The Science of Musical Memory

When hearing a song or instrumental piece for the first time, some of the eighty billion neurons in our brain connect uniquely to represent that song, in that moment of time. This connection can include the auditory cortex (for sound perception), the hippocampus (for memory formation), and the amygdala (for emotional association). With repeated hearings (in different contexts, with different performers, at different volumes, etc.), other neural connections are made, and your memory of a song becomes stronger in a process called consolidation—like many strands of fiber woven into a resilient rope. Remarkably, as Levitin explains, brain scans reveal that these same neural circuits representing a piece of music are activated whether a person merely remembers it or hears it for the hundredth time.

Beyond simply hearing and remembering musical sounds, when we learn how to name discernable musical features, a binding of neurons across both hemispheres of the brain connects the memorized sound with its remembered name, so that our subjective, constructed perception of the music is enriched. Remarkably, these neuronal circuits combine different memory systems in the brain (e.g., motor, auditory, semantic, etc.) making music so enduring a part of one’s personality and our sense of self that, in some cases, musical memory can persist despite advanced dementia.

Part of what makes music a powerful therapeutic intervention is connected to the phenomenon called state-dependent memory retrieval: One’s physical, emotional, and cognitive state makes it easier to recall memories or information learned in that same state. For example, because we encode our emotional state along with the music we listen to, playing music associated with a joyful time of life can help raise a person out of a depressive slump.

In later chapters, Levitin details several prominent applications for music in maintaining our health and wellbeing. Whether considering Parkinson’s disease, movement disorders, trauma, Alzheimer’s disease, or chronic pain, music can, in many cases, offer some measure of relief and healing. Levitin’s book is, therefore, a helpful introduction for family members seeking creative ideas for helping loved ones to navigate some of life’s most challenging moments or for beginning a conversation with a licensed music therapist.

The Irreducible Importance of Music

After this summary of scientific understanding, after reading Levitin’s book, can one now see through music and find only perturbations in the air and firing neurons? May we assume that music is reducible to acoustics (the physics of sound) and the potentials of human biology?

In The Pilgrim’s Regress, C. S. Lewis explored some of the many dangers presented to modern people, for example, for those who “see though” everything, who paradoxically refine their understandings to the degree that they no longer perceive the world accurately. In this allegorical novel, the protagonist John is trapped by a giant, Spirit of The Age. In the giant’s prison, John is induced to see other prisoners as just so much fluid, glands, cancer, bone, and muscle, to think of milk as simply a secretion, and to assume that any truth statement is made because the speaker wishes it were so. John is made by the giant to see things merely as processes, not for what they are. Freedom arrives for John when he finally realizes that truer meanings are found in how we relate to things as they present themselves to us in life. Applying Lewis’s insight to our discussion thus far, music may have biological, physical, and quantitative aspects to it, but it is not reducible to them.

Nearing the end of his book, Levitin himself moves away from biological reductionism toward an integrated view, discussing how music is a means of emotional communication that fosters social integration for those who listen and for those who play. For Levitin, music is a subjective experience, and it is in sharing music together that we find its truest meaning.

Reducing musical meaning to something good like social connections, though, also falls short, because music ultimately points beyond us. The many things we can learn about how our brains engage music and how that knowledge can be leveraged to mitigate the pain of others is vital and important data. In that data, we learn how music works, but not why it matters. Through carefully researched and peer-reviewed findings, we can observe that music is for us, but we cannot conclude that it is finally about us. Musical meaning is neither simply self-referential nor social.

Rather, our human ability to investigate harmony and beauty in music is our response to and participation in a creational order that is already harmonious. While enjoying music appropriately ourselves and sharing its healing potentials with others are right uses for it, the joy and emotional release we may feel are not merely predictable biochemical processes. Through the harmony and beauty of music, we are resonating with the deeper harmony of creation and perceiving the Triune God who calls it good.

Remembering C. S. Lewis’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress: John was freed by the realization that truth and beauty are real things in the world, not just products of his mind—so too, careful works of scholarship like Levitin’s make plain the objective features of music and how we engage it. Moreover, framing the meaning we take from musical harmony within harmonious social connections sets us on a right path. In the end, though, as Lewis’s protagonist himself learns, through all his wanderings: by rightly engaging any good thing in the world, we better know the source of all goodness, truth, and beauty. Soli Deo Gloria.