Article by Max Carlo Zevo Dobson, illustration by Deanna Zane for segments of sound

The way that Hip Hop interacts with your brain reads like a recipe for perfect rhythm.

The auditory complex of your brain discerns pitch and volume, the amygdala and caudate process emotional connotations and the superior temporal gyrus acts like a sponge, storing musical templates you’ve already heard for the sake of recognition and appreciation. By activating these alternative areas of the brain, offering simple, visual stimuli in lyrics, syrupy rises and falls in pitch/tone and sticking to structures that are known to work, Hip Hop appeases us at our very core. Discovering the very heart of what makes music a part of human nature, its relation to our own body clock and way of navigating the universe has given us the tools to keep audiences invested

for thousands of years. It’s not the fame, money or partying that makes music matter, as Aeneas and Snoop Dogg might have to admit, it’s the beating heart that we share with the melody. So the next time someone tells you to turn that racket down, tell them it’s no present day prattle, it’s an ode to our ancestors, a blueprint of what makes us human, what links us to the universe.…