This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Book Review: what a mess
Summary: 1 Stars
This is possibly the most sloppily written and edited book I have ever come across. Individually, the inaccuracies, poorly framed arguments, and misstatements probably don't seem to amount to much, but the cumulative effect is at the least disconcerting.
Some slightly random examples:
On page 30, the distance between "do" and "re" (as in "Doe a deer...") is identified as a whole step or a tone. Levitin explains that since "tone" has other meanings in music, he will use "whole step" "to avoid ambiguity." But there's a smaller division in our scale, that "cuts a whole step perceptually in half." So of course he calls it.... a semitone. Not a half-step? He goes on to talk about scales made up of whole steps and semitones, which seems twice as ambiguous.
Some slips may be typos, but I suspect they aren't. On page 29, doubling or halving the frequency of a sound wave ("2:1 or 1:2") is correctly identified as producing an octave relationship. That's repeated correctly on page 72, but later on the same page he says that "a ration of 3:1 is a simple integer ratio, and that defines two octaves." It's a simple integer ration, but it isn't two octaves; if 2:1 defines one octave, you double the 2 to get the second octave, so a ration of 4:1 defines two octaves. The frequencies of the A's in the vicinity of middle C on your piano are 220, 440, and 880.
On page 62, Levitin quotes the opening of "That'll Be the Day" to illustrate a pickup -- a note or gesture that precedes the first strong beat of a musical phrase -- but the text he gives leaves out a word: the initial "Well" -- the upbeat he is supposedly illustrating. On the next page he continues his assault on the song, using it to misinterpret "syncopation." It isn't the beat (the foot-tap) that shifts, it's the accent (the stress) that is displaced to a weak part of the beat.
The illustration of "Ba Ba Black Sheep" immediately above this example is supposed to show the temporal relation of syllables in two lines of the song; Levitin assures us that he has "kept the spacing between syllables proportional to how much time is spent on them." But the spacing is completely off; none of the temporal units line up properly, so is at best useless. Unfortunately, since it's there, it's also misleading.
The discussion of "Jailhouse Rock" on page 61 is rendered literally meaningless by his use of "note" instead of "beat." And on and on it probably goes.
I realize these may seem like a series of carefully picked nits, but the cumulative effect is annoying, and for an unsuspecting novice, could be pretty baffling. The only way to get through this text is to read it as carelessly as it was written, and that has begun to look like a waste of time.
Book Review: Your Brain on Music Rocks!
Summary: 5 Stars
Love music, science. iconoclastic humor, and hate pretension? - - then this is the book for you! One suggestion: As I was reading the first two chapters, several times I thought to myself: "This is terrific, but it would be even better if it was on tape and that when in his discussion he explained a musical concept and made reference to a familiar musical work you would quickly hear a portion of it as an illustrative example!" Well, that is exactly what you can find at the following website:
www.YourBrainOnMusic.com
I highly recommend that one have this site up on their computer screen as they read the book.
Book Review: This is Your Brain On Music
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a sensitive and comprehensive exploration of how we listen to and process music. Dr. Levitin's writing style makes complex concepts easy to grasp, using fun and familiar examples to explore the intricate workings of our brain.
Having read a number of other books on the physics of music and the basics of hearing, this book ties up the "music package" beautifully.
A fast, fascinating and fully accessible, great read!
Book Review: NPR interview of Dan Levitin by Tom Ashbrook, "On Point"
Summary: 5 Stars
I haven't read this book yet but the Author was interviewed on the NPR program "On Point" by On Point's host, Tom Ashbrook.
It aired in Buffalo NY (WNED-AM) 10:00am on Friday August 18.
It can be downloaded via PodCast software.
The interview was spellbinding, just fascinating. I have found that most discussions of music are superficial because nobody knows what's going on in the brain so this analysis by a Neurologist (Levitin) was something new and something that you can sink your intellectual teeth into. I can't wait for this book to arrive.
Book Review: New Appreciation of Music and of Brains
Summary: 5 Stars
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.