Music is processed by a surprisingly distributed set of brain regions

Levitin describes how listening to music, contrary to older assumptions locating it neatly in a single 'music center,' actually activates a wide network spanning auditory processing areas, regions involved in movement and timing, memory systems, and emotional and reward circuitry, often simultaneously. Different aspects of a single piece of music — pitch, rhythm, timbre, lyrics, emotional tone — get handled by at least partially distinct neural systems working in coordination.

This distributed processing helps explain why music can be so cognitively and emotionally rich compared to many other stimuli: a single song is engaging multiple specialized systems at once rather than one narrow channel. It also explains why damage to specific brain regions can selectively impair some musical abilities, like recognizing melody, while leaving others, like rhythm perception, relatively intact.

Levitin treats this distributed architecture as evidence that music isn't a single faculty bolted onto the brain, but rather an activity that recruits general-purpose cognitive machinery originally evolved for other purposes, repurposed and coordinated in service of musical experience. Music doesn't have one address in the brain — it has many, all firing together.