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.

cheers, Interestingly!!

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. =)

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.

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?