Music: When Sound Becomes Feeling and Movement

How do we like the music that we like? The answer involves more than our brain—it also involves our body.

Understanding this process is a focus of Rebecca Lepping, Ph.D., a music neuroscientist at the University of Kansas. Dr. Lepping grew up in rural Kansas and first connected with music through playing instruments. She began college as a piano and flute performance major. After being exposed to psychology courses, she became fascinated by how music and the mind interact. The potential to meld music and psychology took hold of her imagination. She switched her major and earned a BA in Psychology. Because the United States had no formal degree in the psychology of music at that time, she spent a year in England to earn a master’s degree in that field. She later completed a master’s degree in piano performance at the University of Missouri. She then earned her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at the University of Kansas, where she now directs the Power of Music (PROMUS) Laboratory.

Dr. Lepping’s research highlights that liking music is not just a brain activity—it’s a whole-body experience. In one study, she and her team compared people’s reactions to emotional music (specifically, Western classical music) with their reactions to emotional environmental sounds, such as a baby crying. They found that music activates regions of the brain related to movement and bodily sensations,¹ while environmental sounds mainly activate brain areas linked to language. The researchers concluded that we interpret emotional environmental sounds by identifying their source, but we respond to emotional music by tuning into the feelings and movements it creates in our bodies.²

Movement and feelings are inseparable from music

Source: John Zook / Pexels

Put another way, music is an embodied experience. It involves both our outward responses—like tapping our feet—and our inward physical and emotional reactions. This combination helps explain why music feels so powerful and personal.

Illness can impact our response to music

Dr. Lepping also studies how illness affects the way the brain processes music. For example, she and her colleagues have shown that people with major depression respond differently to music than people without depression. In one study, they examined activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC), a part of the brain involved in emotion.³ They found that people with depression showed less ACC activity when listening to music. Their study also showed that depressed individuals respond more to negative stimuli in general. These findings suggest that music might help to retrain how the ACC works, potentially opening the door to more favorable and personalized treatments.⁴

The value of music as therapy

This potential connects directly to the field of music therapy. Dr. Lepping works closely with music therapists, such as Amy Wilson, Ph.D. Dr. Wilson hails from Oklahoma and describes her musical upbringing as a combination of country and classical music. Her wide professional experience includes working with patients recovering from strokes, people in hospice care, and individuals with chronic breathing problems. Recently completing her doctorate in music therapy, Dr. Wilson’s research focuses on the close connection between music and hope.⁵ She says, “Music can provide hope. Music therapy can provide hope at a time of loss, such as following a stroke.”

Both researchers share an interest in helping people with dementia. Numerous studies show that music can benefit individuals with dementia, improving mood, memory, or engagement. However, these studies often use different methods, making the results difficult to compare or reproduce. This lack of standardization is a major barrier to proving the full value of music therapy for dementia.

To address this problem, Dr. Lepping recently published a paper calling for more consistent reporting and clearer standards for music-based interventions.⁶ Improving the quality and comparability of research studies should help move the field forward—and support one of Dr. Lepping’s broader goals: that society will value music more and that music will be more valuable to society.