Smokey Maverick

Book: This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
by Daniel J. Levitin

It’s no secret that I love music – I have an entire Beats section dedicated to music I’m currently into, push blip.fm at every chance I get, and randomly displaying some of my favorite lyrics on every page load on this site. And I’m not the only one – a majority of us turn to our music to relieve everyday stress. So it was a no-brainer when I walked into the non-fiction section and found this book, blending music and science together. Author Daniel Levitin dives into the science of our brain interacting with music, but does it by remaining at the layman level (both scientifically and musically).

Levitin begins by stepping through the basics of music (meter, timbre, pitch, etc), setting the stage to delve deeper into how these concepts are played out and interpreted by our brain. He also makes connections between music and attempted efforts at having A.I. decipher the music (which hasn’t really been done with much success yet – breath easy all you Luddites, you can still beat a computer at something).

One interesting concept that is supported, is that our brains can easily pick up a beat, and derives some level of satisfaction in being able to predict when the next beat will occur. In addition to that, our brains enjoy being ‘tricked’ at times, when the beat changes unexpectedly or irrationally – as long as the brain can pick up on the more complex pattern now created. But, after enough listens to the same beat (or song), our brain tends to tire of the song, as there are no more changes. This helps to explain the never ending churn that kept Casey Kasem employed for so long.

Where the book really starts to pick up is near the end, when Levitin starts to hypothesize that music has played an integral part of the human evolution – both in the development of our cognitive brain, as well as in the seducing of mates within a species.

Final Take: Recommended to anyone who enjoys both science and music, and are looking for an interesting, relatively easy read. This book helps to unveil some of the mystery as to why music is such a powerful and, most times, passionate driving force in our lives.

Other interesting points from This Is Your Brain On Music:

• Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs. [pg 7]
• The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God. The Church also banned the musical interval of an augmented forth, the distance between C and F-sharp and also known as a tritone (the interval in Bernstein’s West Side Story when Tony sings the name “Maria”). This interval was considered so dissonant that it must have been the work of Lucifer. [pg 13]
• We can change the arrangement (of a songs sound) – from bluegrass to rock, or heavy metal to classical – and the song remains the same. With such dramatic changes, the song is still recognizable as the same song. It seem, then, that our memory system extracts out some formula or computational description that allows us to recognize songs in spite of these transformations [pg 149]. Also, it appears that computers still cannot pick up on these transformations and still recognize the song as the same song. [pg 134]
• Peter Desain and Henkjan Honing of the Netherlands developed a computer model that could extract the beat from any piece of music. They hooked the program up to a mechanical arm, with a shoe on the bottom, and seconds after the program “listened” to the music, the foot would start to stomp to the beat of the music. Interestingly, the program sometimes incorrectly tapped it’s foot in double time or half time, just as humans sometimes mistakenly do. [pg 173]
• Levitin cites the ‘10,000 hour practice = expert’ concept, long before it was made popular by Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers. [pg 197]
• Making a point between being technically sound, versus infusing passion into the music: “But as one critic wrote, ‘(Arthur) Rubinstein makes mistakes on some of this records, but I’ll take those interpretations that are filled with passion over the twenty-two-year-old technical wizard who can play the notes but can’t convey the meaning.” [pg 208] (Amen brother!)
• As internet radio and personal music players are becoming more popular, I think that we will be seeing personalized music stations in the next few years, in which everyone can have his or her own personal radio station, controlled by computer algorithms that play us of a mixture of music we already know and like and a mixture of music we don’t know but we are likely to enjoy. [pg 245] (Good prediction, considering when this book was written)
• Might music play a role in sexual selection? Darwin though so. In Descent of Man he wrote, “I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex. Thus musical tones became firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling, and are consequently used instinctively….” In seeking mates, our innate drive is to find – either consciously or unconsciously – someone who is biologically and sexually fit, someone who will provide us with children who are likely to be healthy and able to attract mates of their own. Music may indicate biological and sexual fitness, serving to attract mates. Darwin believed that music preceded speech as a means of courtship. [pg 251]
• Music as sexual fitness display is not so farfetched an idea when we realize the form that hunting took in some hunter-gather societies. Some protohumans would rely on persistence hunting – hurling spears, rocks, and other projectiles at their prey, then chasing the prey for hours until the animal dropped from injury and exhaustion. If dancing in past hunter-gatherer societies was anything like what we observe in contemporary ones, it typically extended for many hours, requiring great aerobic effort. As a display of a male’s fitness to take part in or lead a hunt, such tribal dancing would be an excellent indicator. Most tribal dancing includes repeated high-stepping, stomping, and jumping using the largest, most energy-hungry muscles of the body. [pg 253]
• Rhythm stirs our bodies. Tonality and melody stir our brains. The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum (the motor control, primitive little brain) and our cerebral cortex (the most evolved, most human part of our brain). … It is why rock, metal, and hip-hop music are the most popular musical genres in the world, and have been for the past twenty years.

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