This is part three of a four-part series about music and the brain. The first two parts can be found here and here.
Often in the car, my husband and I stream music from our phones instead of listening to the radio. A lot of what we listen to would be termed “our parents music,” but realistically, it has withstood the transition between generations because it is just good. One such day, we were listening to “My Generation,” performed by The Who, when my husband made a comment about Roger Daltry’s stutter.
“It’s a stylistic choice, Chris,” I replied. “People don’t stutter when they sing.”
This was something I had learned long ago, watching a movie with my mother as a child. The movie was about a woman who had a stutter so heavy she could barely speak. One day, someone heard singing coming from the music room and peeked in to see who it was. As you may have guessed based on context, it was indeed that very same woman.
So why don’t people stutter or stammer when they sing? Some believe it has to do with the fact that words are elongated, yet even when words are sung very fast, and even when someone is rapping, they do not stutter their words. Some surmise that singing is not conversational the way spoken language is. Conversations are unpredictable, and that could lead to increased stuttering. I would argue, however, that if that were the case, speeches given up in front of an audience would also lack stuttering and stammering since they, too, are not conversational. Others believe it is because you are reciting rather than coming up with something off the top of your head. I stammer sometimes when my thoughts start moving faster than my mouth can keep up with, and yet regardless of whether I’m singing something written by someone else or something that I improved myself, my stammer never emerges through song.
The best explanation that science can come up with is that singing comes from a different part of the brain than spoken word. Spoken word is controlled by the cerebellum and an area in the left frontal lobe of the brain called Broca’s area. When you sing, you still activate the language portion of the cerebellum, but you bypass Broca’s area because music is primarily controlled on the right side of the brain. Scientists are studying this phenomenon and its implications for helping people with language difficulties such as aphasia due to strokes or other brain damage. It’s true what they say, there is healing in music. What if all we had to do to fix our brains was sing?
