In 1874 Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist, made a similar observation about another brain area, and was similarly immortalised. People whose language-processing centres are damaged do not, however, automatically lose their musical abilities. Conversely, there are one or two cases of people whose musical abilities have been destroyed without detriment to their speech. This shows that music and language are processed independently. That not only allowed the researchers to study whether music, like language, is processed predominantly on only one side of the brain, but also permitted them to investigate which bits of the temporal lobe are doing what.
Researchers divide melodies into at least six components.
The first set of experiments looked at the perception of key and contour. Each melody was played twice. Subjects had to judge whether the first and second playings were the same. It also suggests that if one hemisphere of the brain deserves to be called dominant for music, it is the right-hand one the opposite of the case for language in most people. The part of the lobe involved in the case of contour is a region known as the first temporal gyrus, though the site of the key-processor was not identified.