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Nature 453, 598-599 (29 May 2008) | doi:10.1038/453598a; Published online 28 May 2008

Science & Music: The neural roots of music

Laurel Trainor1

  1. Laurel Trainor is director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, and the Auditory Development Lab at McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario L854L8, Canada.

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Laurel Trainor explains how the emotional power of music depends on the structure of the ear, and on our basic encoding of information.

In search of an original voice, the dominant composers of the mid-twentieth century — Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez and their disciples — rejected the tonal and rhythmic forms of the past. They adhered to rigorous compositional techniques such as the serial tone-row method — in which all notes of the chromatic scale occur equally often in a repeating row — banishing tonality.

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