It's not so hard to guess the answer, if you use the new technique of fMRI to compare the levels of activity in various parts of the person's brain.

Very mild activity (blue to red areas) is recorded in certain regions of a volunteer's brain as he hears a series of sharp but meaningless clicks (see the white box on the left of the first picture.) The volunteer's head was placed inside an fMRI magnet at Massachusetts General Hospital for these tests.

When he listened to instrumental music, the same region of the man's brain became much more active (orange to yellow areas), as shown in the white box on the left of the second picture. But in addition, several new areas of his brain were activated (see the square white box on the right of the second picture.) This increase in activity reflected the richer meaning of the sounds.

— Jeff Goldberg

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Photo: Randall R. Benson and Thomas Talvage,
NMR Center, Massachusetts General Hospital