Phenomenology of the Beat: Neuroscience of Music

Fascinating article by Virginia Hughes at NGO's Phenomena details the research gathered by Dartmouth student Beau Sievers for his Master's thesis in Electroacoustic Music regarding the curious fact that the same regions of the brain activate while perceiving motion and perceiving music.

Sievers' thesis, which is available on his portfolio website, sourced its fundamental data from a program Sievers coded which would procedurally generate 16 seconds of musical tones or video of bouncing, shivering egg given certain adjustable parameters: tempo of tones or the egg's motion (beats per minute), variance from the set tempo (jitter), dissonance of scale or shivery wrinkling of the egg's skin (consonance), the harmonic distance from the current tone to the next tone or height of the egg's bounces (big/small interval probability), and the probability that the next tone will be higher or lower than the current, expressed by the egg as a lean forward or backward (up/down probability).