This is Your Brain on Music

This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin, Paperback book: 322 pages

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."

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.

Afterparty

Afterparty, by Daryl Gregory, 304 pages

In the not-so-distant future, there has been a "smart drug" revolution- people can create recipes for drugs and print them on chem jet printers.  When a girl is brought into the psych ward and starts going through terrible withdrawal from a drug that made her "see God," a fellow patient becomes personally involved.  Lyda Rose watches the withdrawal and knows that the drug she took is one Lyda swore would never come to light again.  She sets out on a trip that takes her across Canada, into the U.S., and crosses paths with cigarette-smuggling First Nations, dangerous drug dealing immigrants, her girlfriend from the psych ward who goes off-medication in an effort to help, and the scariest of all: her past.  This book offers a great deal to think about regarding faith, God, drugs, and the brain.  It also has a bit of a mystery to it, so there's a little bit of everything in it.

Buzzed

Buzzed by Cynthia Kuhn, 385 pages

Buzzed is a nonfiction book that details the effects and history of various types of drugs. These range from caffeine to nicotine to heroine to inhalants. Buzzed not only tells you what they are and what effects they cause but goes into the science behind why people abuse them and how they effect the brain. All the information is presented in a mostly unbiased way that is sorted into useful chapters. However, they also use a lot of chemical names that as they put it "look like alphabet soup". These near unpronounceable names popping up and being referred to frequently can make it difficult to read at times.

Overall it was a very informative and for a nonfiction, scientific book was not too painful to get through.