Stumbled across great book ! Never read anything like it re music. For musicians and listeners alike...
"This Is Your Brain On Music" by Daniel J. Levitin
from website: http://daniellevitin.com/publicpage/books/this-is-your-brain-on-music/
Think of a song that resonates deep down in your being. Now imagine sitting down with someone who was there when the song was recorded and can tell you how that series of sounds was committed to tape, and who can also explain why that particular combination of rhythms, timbres and pitches has lodged in your memory, making your pulse race and your heart swell every time you hear it. Remarkably, Levitin does all this and more, interrogating the basic nature of hearing and of music making (this is likely the only book whose jacket sports blurbs from both Oliver Sacks and Stevie Wonder), without losing an affectionate appreciation for the songs he's reducing to neural impulses. Levitin is the ideal guide to this material: he enjoyed a successful career as a rock musician and studio producer before turning to cognitive neuroscience, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a top researcher into how our brains interpret music. Though the book starts off a little dryly (the first chapter is a crash course in music theory), Levitin's snappy prose and relaxed style quickly win one over and will leave readers thinking about the contents of their iPods in an entirely new way.
"Endlessly stimulating, a marvelous overview, and one which only a deeply musical neuroscientist could give. Daniel Levitin has a huge knowledge of music developed since the 1950s (and of Blues, Jazz, and etc. before this), and not merely a formal but a deep personal knowledge as an expert performer no less than as a listener. I liked the discussion of 'safe' and 'dangerous' music, and I very much liked the final chapter on the evolutionary origins of music. An important book."
——— Oliver Sacks, M.D.
"A dissection of music perception and creation that starts slowly and inexorably builds to a grand finish. I loved reading that listening to music coordinates more disparate parts of the brain than almost anything else--and playing music uses even more! Despite illuminating a lot of what goes on this book doesn't "spoil" enjoyment- it only deepens the beautiful mystery that is music."
——— David Byrne
"Brilliant."
——— Sunday Times of London
"Levitin has a real flair for analogy. His dual background adds to the fun."
——— Nature
"A layperson's guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. Levitin is a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal, perhaps the world's leading lab in probing why music has such an intense effect on us."
——— The New York Times
$3.65 free ship at abebooks: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Levitin&bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&sortby=17&sts=t&tn=This+is+your+brain+on+music&x=73&y=17
[Edited on 6/12/2015 by BrerRabbit]
I went to a forum couple months ago where Dr. Levitin spoke & shared the stage with Rosanne Cash. They discussed music & played / sang several acoustic songs. It was a really impressive night. Rosanne came off as exceptionally bright, & Dr. Levitin is off the charts interesting and is musically full of insight and depth. He has quite the educational and musical biography.
Check his site for really cool info.
From his web site -
Dr. Daniel Levitin earned his B.A. in Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science at Stanford University, and went on to earn his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Oregon, researching complex auditory patterns and pattern processing in expert and non-expert populations.
He completed post-doctoral training at Stanford University Medical School (in Neuroimaging) and at UC Berkeley (in Cognitive Psychology). He has consulted on audio sound source separation for the U.S. Navy, and on audio quality for several rock bands and record labels (including the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan), and served as one of the “Golden Ears” expert listeners in the original Dolby AC3 compression tests. He worked for two years at the Silicon Valley think tank Interval Research Corporation.
He taught at Stanford University in the Department of Computer Science, the Program in Human-Computer Interaction, and the Departments of Psychology, Anthropology, Computer Music, and History of Science. Currently, he is a James McGill Professor of Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience, and Music at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec), and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the Minerva Schools at KGI.
He is the author of the #1 best-seller This Is Your Brain On Music (Dutton/Penguin, 2006), which was published in nineteen languages and spent more than one year on the New York Times Bestseller list. His second book, The World in Six Songs (Dutton/Penguin, 2008) hit the bestseller lists in its first week of release. His newest book is the #1 best-seller The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (Dutton/Penguin 2014).
