From Publishers Weekly
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Levitin's fascination with the mystery of music and the study of why it affects us so deeply is at the heart of this book. In a real sense, the author is a rock 'n' roll doctor, and in that guise dissects our relationship with music. He points out that bone flutes are among the oldest of human artifacts to have been found and takes readers on a tour of our bio-history. In this textbook for those who don't like textbooks, he discusses neurobiology, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, empirical philosophy, Gestalt psychology, memory theory, categorization theory, neurochemistry, and exemplar theory in relation to music theory and history in a manner that will draw in teens. A wonderful introduction to the science of one of the arts that make us human.–Will Marston, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
How the brain processes all aspects of music is the subject of this book rooted in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the evolution of the brain. Levitin starts with how the ear perceives sound vibrations--signals are processed in the brain's audio cortex--and proceeds to the perception of frequencies, scales, and timbre, coupled with rhythm and tempo, exploring them within cultural context. Music triggers emotional responses, which, in interaction with the perceptions, are transmitted throughout the brain, eliciting responses colored by the personal likes and dislikes that have developed as the brain has grown. Levitin, first a musician and recording producer, is now a neuroscientist teaching the psychology of electronic communications at McGill University, and he draws many examples of how the brain receives and processes various inputs, including visual and aural, from art and classical and popular music. His book introduces the inner workings of the brain insofar as scientists understand it and affords a good first look at the subject for armchair psychologists and neuroscientists. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
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)
-- Books in Canada --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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)
-- Books in Canada --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Book Description
Whether you load your iPod with Bach or Bono, music has a significant role in your life—even if you never realized it. Why does music evoke such powerful moods? The answers are at last be- coming clear, thanks to revolutionary neuroscience and the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. Both a cutting-edge study and a tribute to the beauty of music itself, This Is Your Brain on Music unravels a host of mysteries that affect everything from pop culture to our understanding of human nature, including:
• Are our musical preferences shaped in utero?
• Is there a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music?
• What do PET scans and MRIs reveal about the brain’s response to music?
• Is musical pleasure different from other kinds of pleasure?
This Is Your Brain on Music explores cultures in which singing is considered an essential human function, patients who have a rare disorder that prevents them from making sense of music, and scientists studying why two people may not have the same definition of pitch. At every turn, this provocative work unlocks deep secrets about how nature and nurture forge a uniquely human obsession.
• Are our musical preferences shaped in utero?
• Is there a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music?
• What do PET scans and MRIs reveal about the brain’s response to music?
• Is musical pleasure different from other kinds of pleasure?
This Is Your Brain on Music explores cultures in which singing is considered an essential human function, patients who have a rare disorder that prevents them from making sense of music, and scientists studying why two people may not have the same definition of pitch. At every turn, this provocative work unlocks deep secrets about how nature and nurture forge a uniquely human obsession.
About the Author
Daniel J. Levitin runs the Levitin Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University, where he holds the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communications. Before becoming a neuroscientist, he was a record producer with gold records to his credit and professional musician. He has published extensively in scientific journals and music trade magazines such as Grammy and Billboard.
