Musicians are impressively able to interpret a vast sea of information from internal and external cues, and then weave it into an experience for others to enjoy. But how is this possible?
Have you ever stopped to wonder how musicians get their ideas? The ability of the brain to make sense out of nonsense is truly an art form.
Every great musician possesses the ability to read or understand underlying musical harmonics, the inflection and structure of sound. Most musicians start with the basics, the known building blocks, applied on a conscious or subconscious level. A rather tactful example of this is Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, where he successfully integrates two distinct genres of music, present-day hip-hop artist Jay Z’s The Black Album with select sounds bites from The Beatles’ White Album. 
Danger Mouse sampled pieces of music, speeding up tempos and overlapping patterns from an existing medium in a quite ingenious manner. One of the reasons why Danger Mouse pulled off the task so elegantly was through the use harmonic structures from each respective album, relying upon a basic backbone comprised of complementing sounds and rhythms.
Songs stylishly fashioned upon elementary construction require an acutely perceptive artist, one who knows the codes of musical composition. This knowledge can be based upon different abilities derived from circumstances such as hours upon hours of piano practice; a collection of alphabetized LPs that continue to earworm in and out of your head; or an exceptional innate talent, such as Beethoven.
Either way, musicians possess the ability to prepare, interpret, and understand these basic construction tools. So when musicians get together, this universal structure for communication literally allows them to speak another language, conveying thought and emotion, predicting and playing off each others patterns. It’s like a conversation between people, only words are not used, rather instruments and notes are the medium of dialogue.
Turns out, the structured aspects of music, such as octaves and harmonics, are akin to our language skills in the brain. Neuroscientists, or people who study the brain, are particularly enchanted by the musical muse and are actively refining and defining how musicians create new material. The unlikely pair has teamed up in the laboratory setting using fancy, hi-tech machinery in order to uncover how the brain is able to cut through the noise and chaos to create a song, and well… do it with style.
Neuroscientist Dr. Charles Limb reports that the areas of the brain, which become active for improvisational jazz pianists, are the same areas that light up when complex language is used. This area of the brain is known as the prefrontal cortex and is located just behind your forehead. Despite the excitement from the scientific spectrum, this rather bland description does not adequately give full justice to the experience of musical perception and participation. For me, a blip on a brain map seems somewhat after the fact… the ‘how and where is music downloaded?’… is the other half of the equation that remains to be solved.
Legendary music contains a creative edge that digs deep into our souls and goes beyond just playing the same old song. A lot of passion gets put into music, perhaps it’s the exploration of the unknown, pushing past the usual tones and the status quo. 
The creation of music also has a great deal to do with building off the old, adding improvisation into the medium, in essence adding different perspectives on top of or inspired by previous musical renditions. Not to mention the ability for a musician (or any artist for that matter) to be in the moment acting as a conduit or an interpreter for that exact derivation of time. The whole equation– if you really think about it– is pretty profound.
Visionaries in the fertile fields of music are not afraid to tread upon new ground, define boundaries in the chaos of musical notes craftily designed to reshape our minds. According to James Lincoln Collier, author of “The Making of Jazz”, jazz is essentially a musical experiment, in search of the new and striking discoveries, adding and subtracting on top of existing permutations. An unspoken language that is created on-the-spot is described as improvisational, or spontaneously created without preparation.
Neuroscientists and musicians alike can see a similarity for the language of music, it is built upon two factors: structure and potential. Brain activity reflects just that, yet current research still does not adequately describe the illusive muse, and maybe none of it originates in the fatty tissues of the brain anyway, rather our brains are the mere records of our ethereal dances. Musicians are perhaps more akin to philosophers, taking the abstract and formulating auditory patterns from its chaos rather than volumes upon volumes of quizzical wordplay. Either way, it’s pretty interesting to think about how communication, be it language or music, can excite the same neurons and insight new parameters of thought and tempo.
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Limb CJ, Kemeny S, Ortigoza EB, Rouhani S, Braun, AR. Left hemispheric lateralization of brain activity during passive rhythm perception in musicians. The anatomical record. Volume 288A; Issue 4; p 382-389. 2006.
Limb CJ, Braun AR. Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: An fMRI study of Jazz improvisation. PLoS One. 3(2): e1679. 2008.
Neuhaus c, Knosche TR, Friederici AD. Effects of musical experience and boundary markers on phrase perception in music. J. Cognitive Neuroscience. 2006. March; 18(3): 472-93.
Robertson P. What is a Musical Genius? Clinical Medicine 8:178-81. 2008.
Sieborger FT, Ferstl EC, Cramon DY. Making sense of nonsense: An fMRI study of taks induced inference processes during discourse comprehension. Brain Research Vol 1166. 29 August 2007, p77-91.