Throughout history, music has had a profound effect on a person's mind, body, and consciousness. A song or piece of music can trigger vivid memories and induce emotions ranging from deep sorrow to unabashed joy. Music can move listeners to patriotic fervor or religious frenzy, or it can calm the wild beast we call human. There have been many advances in technology that have allowed us to study how music affects the brain. Music causes all kinds of activity in the brain, especially during musical improvisation. Music can greatly help people suffering from certain mental illnesses and in some cases it can have negative effects. What is music? For some, music is only that of masters like Beethoven, Debussy and Mozart. For some it's Busta Rhymes, Dr. Dre or bands like Moby. For jazz enthusiasts, anything before 1940 or after 1960 is not music at all. So, to examine how music affects our mind, thoughts, and spirit, it would be helpful to examine what music is made of. What are the fundamental building blocks of music and how, through organization, do they come together to create music? For every sound there are basic elements; volume, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), timbre, spatial position, tempo and reverberation. Just as a painter organizes lines into shapes, our brain organizes these attributes into higher-level concepts like meter, harmony, and melody. So when we listen to music, we actually perceive multiple dimensions or attributes. For cognitive scientists and psychologists, the mind is that part of each of us that embodies our memories, thoughts, hopes, desires, beliefs and experiences. On the other hand, the brain is an organ of the body. It is a collection of chemicals and blood vessels, cells and water in the center of the paper, expanding, etc. But some types of music, those that have offensive or immoral lyrics, can be harmful to a person's mind. Aaron Smuts asks the question, “Do moral defects in works of art constitute aesthetic defects?” Smuts asked this question after listening to a rap song with violent, sexist, racist, rapist and murderous lyrics. When so many people listen to and sing music like this it's as if they're reveling in imaginary suffering and that's inherently bad. As time passes and technological capabilities increase, knowledge of how music affects our brains will also increase. Scientists will be able to discover the full power of music's effects on our psyche and how improvisation and creativity in music affect the brain along with immoral lyrics in certain music. Understanding this topic is important to becoming a better musician, student, and teacher.