Levitin is a musician and neuroscientist who runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University. He starts off by giving a primer on musical terms such as pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key and melody.
Levitin catalogues the multiple parts of the brain that are involved in processing sound in general, music specifically and playing music. Part of music involves the expectation that it will follow an expected pattern although in order for us to be interested the composer has to break the pattern - but only to a degree. We find the pattern to be boring but if strays to far from the pattern then we can lose interest as well. He discusses the possible mechanisms behind our amazing ability to remember tunes. He describes why music is able to cause changes in our moods. He explores what makes an expert musician. He answers the question of why we like what music we like. A study found that music that is heard while we are in the womb can influence what we like a year after being born. There are no definitive answers but he provides possible reasons that humans evolved the ability to make music.
This book was published in 2006 so this could have changed since but I found this fact about our ability to process sound to be interesting: "Grouping principles - by timbre, spatial location, loudness, and so on - help to segregate them, but there is still a lot we don't know about this process; no one has yet designed a computer that can perform this task of sound source separation."
Levitin catalogues the multiple parts of the brain that are involved in processing sound in general, music specifically and playing music. Part of music involves the expectation that it will follow an expected pattern although in order for us to be interested the composer has to break the pattern - but only to a degree. We find the pattern to be boring but if strays to far from the pattern then we can lose interest as well. He discusses the possible mechanisms behind our amazing ability to remember tunes. He describes why music is able to cause changes in our moods. He explores what makes an expert musician. He answers the question of why we like what music we like. A study found that music that is heard while we are in the womb can influence what we like a year after being born. There are no definitive answers but he provides possible reasons that humans evolved the ability to make music.
This book was published in 2006 so this could have changed since but I found this fact about our ability to process sound to be interesting: "Grouping principles - by timbre, spatial location, loudness, and so on - help to segregate them, but there is still a lot we don't know about this process; no one has yet designed a computer that can perform this task of sound source separation."
I found this to be a fascinating read and would recommend it to anyone that is interested in music whether the person is a musician or not. It may also interest those who like science, the brain or psychology. While he is a scientist, he writes in an accessible manner. There are some times when he names drops scientists he has met such as Watson and Crick and musicians such as Joni Mitchell but he does it in a way that doesn't come off as annoying.
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