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This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession | 
 enlarge | Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Plume/Penguin
Category: Book
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Rating:  106 reviews
Sales Rank: 774
Media: Paperback
Pages: 322
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0452288525
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.11
EAN: 9780452288522
Publication Date: August 28, 2007
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Product Description
In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it and the human brain. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, Levitin reveals:
How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the world
Why we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. Dre
That practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertise
How those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our heads
And, taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin argues that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. This Is Your Brain on Music is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 101 more reviews...
 New Appreciation of Music and of Brains August 8, 2006
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
322 out of 350 found this review helpful
There are questions that are too big for science; are there gods, for instance, or what is love? And maybe we will never fully find out scientifically why music does what it does and why we care about it so. But for many reasons, music ought to be a profitable subject for scientific enquiry. It is, as Pythagoras knew, an activity strongly rooted in mathematics, and the physics of music is fairly well understood. It is as universal as language; all human cultures have some sort of music, indicating it does something indispensable. And we are increasingly able to figure out, with our sophisticated brain imaging gadgets, what brains do when they hear or think about music. The neuroscience of music is the area of expertise of Daniel J. Levitin, and he writes of it in _This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession_ (Dutton), a fascinating account of current music psychology. Levitin has produced a book wonderfully accessible to lay readers, since although he is an academic (he runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University), before he became a scientist, he had been a performing musician, sound engineer, and record producer, working with names like Steely Dan and Blue Oyster Cult. He does pull examples from Bach and Beethoven, but he is obviously more comfortable citing universally-known tunes like "Happy Birthday to You", "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", or "Stairway to Heaven". (Readers whose tastes range in previous epochs will possibly be surprised at the sophistication modern popular musicians have displayed.) Levitin has a good sense of humor and is a genial explainer.
He starts out with a forty page first chapter "What is Music?", which is as good a short explanation of key concepts as tone, scale, fifths, and timbre as anyone could want, and is a fine foundation for all that comes after, a collection of scientific lore and tidbits from all over. For instance, even if you are not a musician, you have a huge store of tunes in your memory. You may not have perfect pitch, the ability to know that an A flat is an A flat as soon as you hear it, but Levitin's own research has provided surprising evidence that your sense of pitch, even if you are not a musician, is really quite good. Subjects who were asked to sing a song from memory got the absolute pitch just right, or very close; they did the same with the song's tempo. There are differences in the brains of musicians and nonmusicians. The corpus callosum, the mass of fibers that connects the right brain hemisphere to the left, is larger in musicians, and is especially larger in those that started music training early. The overall lesson here, though, is that we are all musical, even if we are not musicians, and so non-expert musical brains are really very similar to expert ones. There are descriptions here of surprising research that makes clear how truly ready our brains are to incorporate musical experience. Fetuses in the last three months of gestation, for instance, can hear music within the womb, along with other outside and inside noises. Experiments have shown that if you repeatedly play a song into the womb, and then make sure the child does not hear it again after birth until it is one year old, and then play the music again, the infant will prefer hearing the womb-music rather than completely novel music. This was true whether the experimental music was Vivaldi or the Backstreet Boys.
Levitin certainly has connections; he tells of discussions with Francis Crick about themes in this book, as well as with Joni Mitchell. The final chapter, "The Music Instinct", is a response to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who spoke at a 1997 convention of researchers in music perception and cognition. Pinker took the dismissive stance that music was "auditory cheesecake", tickling the parts of the brain that were really for the important functions of language and (unlike language) useless as a force in human evolution. It is not surprising that Levitin and his fellow researchers disagree. Darwin himself felt that musical tones were used in conveying emotion and that those who were able to expend energy in singing or playing were demonstrating biological and sexual fitness. Musical success does make for high numbers of opportunities for spreading one's genes (just ask Mick Jagger). Interest in music peaks in adolescence, indicating a role in sexual selection. Music has been around longer than agriculture, and there is no evidence that language actually preceded music in our species. It may have promoted the cognitive development that was harnessed for speech. Only in the past few hundred years did music become a spectator activity, but in the eons when it could have shaped our social evolution, it was a group activity that may have promoted group togetherness and synchrony. It is an engaging final argument that serves to emphasize the importance of all that the book has presented before, a demonstration that looking at an important human activity in a scientific way only increases our wonder and delight in the activity itself.
Fascinating information on how our brain is involved in our perceptions of music September 21, 2006
Craig Matteson (Ann Arbor, MI)
231 out of 269 found this review helpful
The first thing is that this is a book expressing ideas about how the human mind processes music and how the brain is involved with that processing (not HOW the brain processes it, which no one knows), rather than a book on music. While I am not obsessed by the topic, I find the exploration of the mind and brain function fascinating. My interest was piqued when my father was taken by a brain tumor and I tried to find material on the subject. I read "Phantoms in the Brain" by V. S. Ramachandran and then some articles by others in the field who claimed the mind is simply an illusion created by brain function, that our sense of consciousness and choosing is simply false.
This has always seemed wrong to me, no matter how much of our brain function occurs without our "mind" or "consciousness" being involved in any way. Being a pianist, it has seemed to me that there is no biological necessity to play Chopin. And when I sit down at the piano, I choose what to play, how to play it, and whether to learn the piece in the first place. I was amused when I read articles by Pinker and others struggling in trying to come to terms with some evolutionary reason for music. Some simply dismiss it (I think because it is so inconvenient to their models), others try and find it a way to attract mates (as this author does), others find it an accidental use of some other evolutionarily advantageous trait even though they can't quite identify what it is or was.
So, I was glad to read this book because of my interest in the brain and mind along with my passion for music. It is indeed a very interesting book that I could not put down. Daniel Levitin is a scientist whose involves trying to understand how the mind perceives music and how that maps into the brain. It helps that he is also a musician. He worked in a commercial rock and roll band and as a record producer. Now, I am a classical musician and have a degree in music theory, so it is unsurprising that he and I view some aspects of music differently. In fact, I found some of his descriptions a bit sloppy and more simplistic than the simplification required in communicating to the general non-musician reading public. But then again, I know nothing about the technical terminology of brain function.
Just a few examples that stopped me cold. On page 31 Levitin asserts that the way we use sharps and flats is artificially complicated. He says, "there is no reason for the system to be so complicated, but it is what we are stuck with." Well, actually, there are several great reasons that have to do with the way our music system has evolved over the past eight centuries and more. There weren't keys or chords or even scales in the beginning. As soon as things would become settled in one generation a new generation would come along and stir things up because they wanted something a bit more this or a lot more that. So, the musical system adapted to accommodate the new music.
The idea of those keys and chords Levitin refers to as features of all music are really only a few hundred years old while the notions of modulation or "changing keys" is younger yet. And as he notes, non-Western music is organized more along "melodic" and "motivic" principles than our notions of functional harmony.
Some experimental music systems have been proposed over the past couple of hundred years and they have caught on about as well as Esperanto replaced English, French, or the hundreds and thousands of other natural languages and dialects. And for similar reasons. A complicated "natural" system, even with their inconvenient irregularities, will outlast a regular and tidy "artificial" system every time.
When he was discussing "keys" around page 36, he asserts that tonal prominence is given to the stated "key" through assertion by repetition. Actually, no. It is not a simple subject, but the tonal center of a major key is asserted by the combination of perfect fifths versus the one diminished fifth on the note a half step main keynote, plus the combination of major and minor thirds plus the combination of whole and half steps. When evaluated, there are a number of places in the scale that are ambiguous, but there are unique combinations that become pointers to the key center. And this is why the minor key, which the author asserts has purely cultural status (wrong), is used by composers to connote affects with more ambiguity.
C-major and a-minor (in its natural form) use exactly the same notes. When you play a-minor in its natural form you will eventually want to get to C-major (and that is why most classical piece in the minor mode modulate first to the relative major key rather than the dominant as is done in major keys). In order to make a-minor sound like a tonal center the harmonic form has a "raised" seventh scale degree (one of those pesky accidentals Levitin dislikes) so that it is a half-step below the key center (g-sharp in a-minor instead of the g-natural the key signature would call for) in order to provide a cadence as satisfying as the normal defining cadence in the major key. But this is getting too technical, and may be why the author avoided these discussions. After all, this is a book for the general reader and one must simplify things that are sometimes difficult to simplify.
Another time he uses the argot of commercial rock music in a way that would be confusing to people trained in traditional musical grammar (what is usually called music theory). At one point, he is writing fondly of the music of Joni Mitchell and her difficulty in finding a bass player who is sympathetic to and compatible with her approach to the sound of her music. Levitin recounts a conversation with Mitchell when they talked about most bass player wanting to play the roots of the chords of her music when she didn't want them to play roots, just play something that sounds good. OK. But bass lines don't always play the root note of every chord. That would be idiotic and boring. So, they do add passing tones and other "non-harmonic" tones. The problem wasn't that the bass players were so dim as to want to play only the fundamental notes of the chord (which would be boring indeed), but that they wanted defined harmonies at each moment in the piece, but Joni views her music more linearly. She can let harmonies from one chord linger into the sound of the next chord. Mitchell hears the music going from here to there and the stuff in between is a path between the departure and arrival points, but might not be a traditional triad. OK. That is fine. It is called voice leading or counterpoint. But pop musicians usually don't study that aspect of music.
It is important to note that much of music is not really analyzable without understanding voice leading. Not everything is just chord-chord-chord outside of the freshman four part chorale writing exercises. Believe me, there is no harmonic structure that Joni Mitchell is going to create that hasn't been done before, no matter how unique or personal her "sound" or timbre as Levitin likes to call it.
Anyway, it is clear that Levitin approaches music from the point of view of pleasure and the joy of sound rather than the idea of meaning because that is much harder to define let alone map in the brain. When the author is talking about the parts of the brain that are activated when listening to music, it is all quite interesting and I enjoyed it very much. He is very enamored of the idea of schema and taps into the Chomsky model of generative grammar, a model that has had tremendous descriptive power, but has been quite lacking in explanatory power.
The author uses the idea of the subtle rhythmic and pitch changes that a Frank Sinatra or other master musician uses as creating their effects because they violate some sort of schema built into our brains. It is true that we do try to impose order on anything. We want things to fit together and will stick purposes in where there isn't one. However, the kind of subtle changes Levitin describes are called expression by musicians for a reason. Just as we emphasize words and meanings in our speech or movement by stressing something by making it earlier or later than its peers, or louder or softer, or part of a pattern that is somehow different than what one would normally expect, we also do that in music. But it is noticing a difference in relation to what is around it rather than something universal. We don't feel that a piece that is 60 beats a minute is somehow fast or slow because of our brains, we hear what is IN the piece and decide if the tempo is appropriate, too fast (dense) or too slow (not much happening). We want a certain amount of activity based on our human experience of reality. If there is a lot happening in the piece we perceive it as we would perceive an activity in real life with a lot of things happening and would feel similar emotions. But again, this is too technical.
I was also fascinated when he discussed the redundant structures in the nerves going from our ears to our brain. He talks about it having a part to play in our startle reflex. However, I also wonder if loud sounds don't cause strong enough pressure waves on our skin to cause those nerves to become involved as well and from there to the spinal column. But I don't know anything about this except from my own experience at being startled.
Just one of the many interesting observations the author makes concerns the role of talent in success. He describes a study done in which young people are rated by experts as to their talent in a given field. A longitudinal study is done and an analysis of who ended up successful shows that there is a factor much more powerful than native talent. The author points out that the most important factor in success is 10,000 hours of work in that field. This corresponds deeply to my own experience.
When young people ask me what they can do to learn to play the piano, I tell them to play five million notes. I don't care which ones. After the first million they will get bored of playing with their fists, knees, nose, or whatever and by the third million they will be taking it seriously. And I suppose it would take about 10,000 hours to play that many notes. I have also taught my children that talent is a multiplier of work. So a talent of 10 that multiplies a work effort of 1 loses out to a talent of 5 that multiplies a work effort of 100 and loses by a lot.
In any case, this is a fascinating book regardless of my slight disagreements and likely misunderstandings of what the author is saying. I am sure you will find a lot to enjoy and I recommend it with enthusiasm.
The Big Bang Big Band Harmonic Convergence December 20, 2006
My Uncle Stu (Boston)
99 out of 106 found this review helpful
Half-whispered in the background, it's hard to get too far away from suspicion. The question remains: Does analyzing music scientifically take away from the aesthetic appreciation?
I had once thought of music as the ultimate proof of the glorious irrelevancy of science. But it's really no different than any other pleasure. Does learning cosmology detract from the beauty of a star filled night? Can a couple of physics lessons dull the gaping excitement of seeing a massive rainbow absorb the sky? I conquered this ambivalence personally, while lying in the sun, on a hot day, at altitude, following a final in a physics class. Everything clicked together in my head, the nuclear reaction I watch sizzling eight minutes and eighteen seconds ago, the light as waves, the heat as energy, the energy as mass, the waves as particles. It all clicked, and it was fine. We were all vibrating together in the same rich meaninglessness, and a good feeling felt good whether I purposefully conquered every little detail or it blindsided me and left my head spinning.
That's the day I got it. That science is not a static pool of knowledge. It is not a religion. It is not a method. It is a process, and a spiritual one at that. That was the day, lying there, absorbing photons and resonating passively in the hum, the Ohmmmmm. Science is as much a quest as any other system of belief. And nothing is off limits. Nothing is reduced by knowing that another layer of explanation can be sought out.
And what better subject to tackle scientifically than the beauty of music. Like consciousness, like science, music too is an arbitrary punctuation around organically transmitted, unconsciously determined, preferred patterns of influenced interactions.
So, how's the book?
Not bad. He does a nice job of illustrating the importance of music in our lives and the emotional impact music can convey. He has a nice introductory section where he defines the basic terms of music such as pitch, rhythm, tempo. It's the kind of stuff you get the first week in a music appreciation class, and Levitin does a nice job with it. He never takes his eye off the bigger questions though, for example, he opens his definition of pitch with the disclaimer: "Pitch is a purely psychological construct." He then needs an introduction to neuroscience before he can connect the two streams, discussing the hotter than ever topics of mind, brain, and consciousness. Of course, he has to throw in a little introduction to evolutionary theory as well.
The mistake armchair Anthropologists frequently fall into is taking a complicated concept, music in this case, or intelligence in other infamous cases, and reify it as if it were a single discrete thing. So let's come up with theories of selection for musicality as if it were the scientific equivalent of Mendel's wrinkled garden peas. But Levitin does a nice job of showing how different parts of the brain process different aspects of music. He gives a nice sense of the complexity involved and the parallel processing necessary between different realms of music. If you think about it, this should come as no surprise to anyone who has listened to a one-year old discover language. They can babble with the rhythms, intonations, and prosody of fluent speech well before they have the actual words. It should come as no surprise to any musician, anyone who has experienced that moment when the execution shifts from working memory to procedural memory. My favorite part of playing the piano is reaching the point where my cerebellum and basal ganglia are doing the heavy lifting. Then I can sit back and enjoy the music, like some kind of twisted grandiose self-sycophantic fan, without thinking about what I'm doing.
So formulating the question as "What evolutionary advantages were conferred on individuals who exhibit musical behaviors?" is a mental exercise. A fun and pleasantly meaningless one. Musical sensibility is much more likely an offshoot of multiple smaller functions of the brain, such as language processing, mother-infant interactions, the novelty seeking and cognitive flexibility behind creativity, or empathy, all of which individually may respond over time to certain selective forces. This does not mean, as Steven Pinker and the Blank Slaters would assert, that music is a meaningless accident. It is a part of all the systems that contribute to it, an echo of numerous other functions that comprise our humanity.
When a music lover hypothesizes that musical instincts may have been the prime factor in promoting the cognitive development of the species, it is no more a sophisticated argument than when a drug enthusiast, such as Terrance McKenna, proposes that psychedelics were the primary force behind the expansion of the human cranium. Isn't it funny? No matter how far we come, we're still story tellers creating creation myths in our own image. So my personal hypothesis: The primary force behind the evolution of human intelligence is the drive to drink Tanqueray and play backgammon while listening to Gabby La La. You heard it hear first. Evidence pending.
It is an ambitious book in its scope, especially when the conversation also needs to be liberally peppered with references to Philip Glass and John Cage, Bernstein and Bach, Sinatra and Parker. Well, you know musicians love showing off their chops. Anyway, thumbs up for a solid, thought-provoking read. You've just got to appreciate anyone who uses "mirror neurons" and "iPods" in the same sentence.
you will learn a lot if you pay attention February 16, 2008
Wyote
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
I'm very surprised by how many negative reviews this book is getting. I just finished it, and I love it.
Are you considering reading it? Then, do!
I think the problem many people have is essentially that the book isn't written only for them. In other words, let's say you don't give a fig about jazz--say you couldn't tell the Bird from Benny Goodman. That's no problem: every time he uses an example from jazz to illustrate a point, he uses a famous rock example as well. If you don't get the jazz one, you'll probably get the Rolling Stones reference. I would think everyone could live with that.
Or, let's say you are not at all interested in knowing why Joni Mitchell prefers a certain bass player. You only want to read about the neurology. Or vice-versa: all that neurology stuff is boring; you want to know more about what Neil Young thinks about music.
Unfortunately, there's a little of everything in here. Good solid multi-disciplinary science (neurology, genetics, evolutionary biology); a nice thorough introduction to music theory (explaining terms like pitch, octave, scale, dissonance, beat, timbre); anecdotes from his personal musical experience (what Joni Mitchell told him about her favorite bass player, why he didn't get to take guitar lessons when he was a kid).
UN - fortunately?
Well, I loved this book. I learned a lot about music (in general, as well as specific genres), a little about neurology and evolution, a little about various musicians. I couldn't have been more pleased.
The only reason I can find that anyone didn't enjoy the book is that they didn't want to read about all that other stuff (whatever was not the thing they did want to read about). If you can overlook that, of if you look forward to all of it, I guarantee this book will prove an entertaining, enlightening experience.
The one caveat I have is that, if you really do not know anything about music, pay good attention in the opening chapters when he introduces concepts like chord and scale. Or, be prepared to go back and reference those chapters. I do not see how a detailed book about music could avoid this situation (he cannot talk about music without talking about rythyms, melodies and harmonies). But he does a very good job of introducing and explaining them.
So, enjoy!
Words have rarely done as much for music August 4, 2006
Ejames LIEBERMAN (Potomac, Maryland United States)
43 out of 49 found this review helpful
A good writer with a unique background, Levitin presents facts and ideas useful for musicians, ordinary music lovers, and everyone who cares about brains. His interview on NPR (Diane Rehm, Aug. 3) includes musical examples. The first chapters may be scanned by trained musicians and by those who have little interest in music theory to get to the unique material in the book.
--EJL (psychiatrist and amateur cellist)
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