This Is Your Brain On Music
This Is Your Brain On Music, by Daniel J. Levitin, is the most exciting science book that I’ve read in a long time. It’s all about music: what is music, how do we perceive music, why do we care about music, and, primarily, what do we know about how the mind and brain react, process, and create music.
Some facts that I learned:
If I put electrodes in your visual cortext, and then I showed you a red tomato, there is no group of neurons and will cause my electrodes to turn red. But if I put electrodes in your auditory cortext and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at exactly that frequency, causing the electrode to emit electrical activity at 440 Hz — for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain! I find this amazing.
If you’re familiar with the phenomenon of restoration of the missing fundamental, in which you perceive the fundamental pitch if you are played only overtones of the pitch: it turns out that you can put in an electrode, play music with the fundamentals missing, and the electrode actually shows energy at the fundamental frequency! The very fact that we can know things like this is exciting.
Ordinary people, when asked to sing a song (of which there is one well-known canonical recording, such as most pop songs), will sing back the song at almost the exactly correct tempo! (They are accurate within 4%, which is as good as most people can perceive anyway.) They also often get the key right, even though few people have “perfect pitch” per se. I would never have guessed this.
The brain stem and the dorsal cochlear nucleus — structures so primitive that all vertebrates have them — can distinguish between [musical] consonance and dissonance; this distinction happens before the higher level, human brain region — the cortex — gets involved.
The book is extremely readable and fun. It teaches you all the music theory you need to know. In fact, his basic music theory section is the best quick introduction to music theory I’ve ever read. The author has been a professional producer, so he knows a lot about how modern music recordings are made. He currently runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill Unversity, and has published a lot in serious scientific journals. That’s a combination of expertise that may be unique. He knows several well-known musicians and quotes from them; what Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell have to say is quite interesting. The book is available in trade paperback for only $15 US.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
[...] Weinreb recently wrote a review of a book called “This is Your Brain on Music” that I haven’t read but am dying [...]
May 20th, 2008 at 4:01 am
The authors’ explanation of “perfect pitch” has the ring of truth from my personal experience. In my youth, I was in a very good choir. We had two week-long camps each summer where we learned music. At one of those camps, I realized I could consistently reproduce middle C — I’m almost certain that was from thinking about a particular piece we had learned. I knew all my intervals; I could sing any pitch by referencing middle C.
In her book “Writing Down the Bones,” Natalie Goldberg says that she knew herself as someone who was tone-deaf. She took a lesson from a Sufi singing master; he pointed out that singing was 90% listening and was a whole-body activity. That one lesson transformed the author’s experience of singing.
I like the short book “Harmonograph,” which is the name of a drawing device that is driven by 2 pendulums that are normal to each other. The drawings can be modified by altering the length of the two pendulums, the weight hung on them, and the timing (e.g., phase) of the release of the two pendulums..
The author uses harmonograph drawings as a mechanism to teach basic principles of music theory, including the relatively recent musical invention of a well-tempered scale.
Apparently, the Harmonograph was a focal point for small parties and gatherings around 120 years ago. It made me think about how rarely we actually explore physical devices today. Simple harmonic motion is a mystery to most of us; concepts like resonance and damping are understood by fewer still. These concepts are crucial to understand how the structure of the human body works.
Did the authors speculate about why such elaborate mechanisms exist in homo sapiens to both recognize and repeat melodies? The first thought is the example from “March of the Penguins” where infants need to recognize their parents after long separation. Do humans ever need to do that? Are there other places these skills would be useful for our survival?
May 21st, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Hi, Phil! Yes, he certainly does speculate about that. Chapter 9, “The Music Instinct”, is all about the question of why music abilities might have evolved. I think that, like much evolutionary psychology, it’s a lot of speculation without a lot of actual scientific method, but it’s quite interesting anyway. I can’t summarize it (too many ideas); check out the book.
By the way, if anyone has read “Musicophilia” by Oliver Sachs: was it good? I actually learned about “This is Your Brain On Music” while reading a review of “Musicophilia”. I think the reviewer preferred Levitin to Sachs. I have read a lot of Sachs’s books, and most have been very worthwhile, but some others were only so-so.
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:44 pm
As a music major in college, I find that this does not surprise me.
A fellow music major who was in Jazz band with me had perfect pitch. I recall him having horrible headaches during marching season because the whole band was tuned about 15cents sharp. He was in a horrible mood during those times.
I asked him to explain his sense of perfect pitch to me. He described it using color. He said Pitches, when perfectly in tune, have a ‘color’ – not tone color (aka timbre), but an actual visual color. He said Concert F looked like the color Blue. So I asked him about flat tones and semitones. He said those tend to have both colors and usually end up a sort of grey with hues.
Fascinating for sure. =)
June 19th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Somehow i missed the point. Probably lost in translation
Anyway … nice blog to visit.
cheers, Interestingly!!
July 29th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
There is so much great stuff happening in the field now.
It was a an Oliver Sacks NPR interview, where he talked about the effect of music on formation of brain structures.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200711094 has the interview
As I recall, composers end up with fMRI-visible structural changes.
So music is good for your brain. We’re just not sure exactly what KIND of music is best.