This Is Your Brain On Music (Paperback)

You are an expert in music, whether you know it or not. You can identify hundreds, possibly thousands of songs from just fractions of a second of audio; you can anticipate and identify minute changes tempo and rhythm; you have a built-in framework for identifying standard popular music chord structures, and you know when a song returns to the root (which you find pleasing, even if you don’t know what “root” means); you can recognise a familiar tune-even, say, a Led Zeppelin classic sung as opera, or as an Australian outback ditty. You are attuned to slight changes in pitch, timbre, volume, and location. In fact, when it comes to many of the finer details of music, your mind is far more powerful than any existing computer. It’s all because you have honed your skills with thousands and thousands of hours of training-by listening to music.
Unless you’ve studied music theory, or possibly cognitive neuroscience, you probably had no idea just what an expert you are. This Is Your Brain on Music explains exactly why you are such an expert, appealing to the latest brain imaging research, evolutionary biology, behavioural psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. It’s a primer on music theory, and a fascinating study in the evolving field of brain science.
Yet this is no stuffy academic text. In addition to an informal and engaging style, its writer, Daniel Levitin, has a pedigree uniquely suited to his task: he is a former punk guitarist in the short-lived San Francisco band, The Mortals, a Berklee School of Music drop-out, a one-time professional session musician, and a top-selling record producer and sound engineer who has worked with the likes of the Blue Öyster Cult, Grateful Dead, Santana and Stevie Wonder. He is a lover of music, with decades of experience in the business. He also happens to be an associate professor of psychology, behavioural neuroscience and music at Montreal’s McGill University, and on the cutting edge of brain science. And surely, he has the largest collection of gold and platinum albums (nine, in total) of anyone in McGill’s psychology department.
The text is peppered with anecdotes about music luminaries: Joni Mitchell, Jaco Pastorius, The Beatles, and many others. But not to be overshadowed, legendary scientists, like DNA discoverer Francis Crick, make cameo appearances as well.
With Joni and Jaco, Levitin explores the mind’s desire for certain chord structures (a desire born of culturally based musical traditions), to “resolve” or return to a particular chord. Mitchell tunes her guitars like no one else, so her chords don’t fit our musical expectations. This makes life difficult for all of Mitchell’s bassists, and, she claims, only the jazz virtuoso Jaco Pastorius could play with her properly. Levitin argues further that Mitchell’s idiosyncratic tuning leads to ambiguity in the music, making it more complex and rewarding to listeners, even if it causes headaches for her bassists.
Levitin has lunch with Francis Crick, and the two scientists discuss the evolutionary links between emotion and motivation. There’s a strong evolutionary advantage to emotions-for instance, feeling fear when seeing a lion, and running without thinking. Levitin’s brain imaging work was the first to show that the cerebellum-our ancient “reptile” brain structure, which governs our perception of time, and base emotions-is active when listening to music. There is some evidence that parts of what we hear as music bypasses our auditory cortex (the main part of the brain active in hearing) altogether, and connects directly to the cerebellum-our deepest emotional selves.
This partly explains why Jimmy Page’s guitar solos can send shivers up our spines, why Mozart makes us cheerful, and Beethoven inspires, and why James Brown makes us want to get up to dance.
The main character in this book is not Levitin, or any of the scientists or musicians he discusses, but the brain itself. And what a fascinating character it is.
Levitin describes the commonplace experience of sitting in a room and listening to several sounds at once: a purring cat, a humming refrigerator, and Debussy on the stereo. Vibrating air molecules hit the eardrum, and the mind interprets multiple sounds. And yet the physics, mechanics, and neurobiology that allow us to hear and identify sounds and their characteristics and location are astounding. Levitin supplies an analogy:

“Imagine that you stretch a pillowcase tightly across the opening of a bucket, and different people throw Ping-Pong balls from different distances. Each person can throw as many Ping-Pong balls as he likes, and as often as he likes. Your job is to figure out, just by looking at how the pillowcase moves up and down, how many people there are, who they are, and whether they are walking towards you, away from you, or are standing still.”

That we hear anything is already amazing. Listening to music is something more extraordinary.
It all starts with the auditory cortex, where sounds are first processed, but Levitin’s brain-scan research has shown many other parts of the brain busily at work: the motor cortex which guides our movements; the prefrontal cortex, where we anticipate notes, and respond variously depending on our expectations; our hippocampus, where musical memories help us interpret what we are hearing; and the cerebellum, our ancient “reptile” brain, which gives rise to various emotions and rhythm. This cocktail of brain activity guides our unique experience of music.
Our reaction to music has long been considered evidence of the divine. In exploring our brain on music, Levitin unravels some mysteries of the mind, and renders our minds, and music, more divinely mysterious as a result.
Hugh McGuire (Books in Canada)

Starred Review. Think of a song that resonates deep down in your being. Now imagine sitting down with someone who was there when the song was recorded and can tell you how that series of sounds was committed to tape, and who can also explain why that particular combination of rhythms, timbres and pitches has lodged in your memory, making your pulse race and your heart swell every time you hear it. Remarkably, Levitin does all this and more, interrogating the basic nature of hearing and of music making (this is likely the only book whose jacket sports blurbs from both Oliver Sacks and Stevie Wonder), without losing an affectionate appreciation for the songs he's reducing to neural impulses. Levitin is the ideal guide to this material: he enjoyed a successful career as a rock musician and studio producer before turning to cognitive neuroscience, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a top researcher into how our brains interpret music. Though the book starts off a little dryly (the first chapter is a crash course in music theory), Levitin's snappy prose and relaxed style quickly win one over and will leave readers thinking about the contents of their iPods in an entirely new way. (Aug.)
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