Your Brain on Music


Indian ListenerUntil recently, I could find little tolerance for anyone’s “love me, love my favorite rock band” attitude. It harked back to when I was a teenager and a serial girlfriend to guitar-playing boys. The guys talked about their favorite music for hours. If I disagreed out loud, I would leave the scene an ex-girlfriend. Their argument—that I didn’t know what I was talking about because I didn’t sing or play guitar or drums–never persuaded me to keep silent. I knew what music I loved and what I hated just as well as they did, even if I couldn’t say why it affected me so powerfully.

Now I can, thanks to This Is Your Brain on Music (suggested to me by newcritics’ music editor Jason Chervokas). The book by Daniel J. Levitin makes the case that while no one understands entirely why certain music becomes an obsession to some people, neuroscience can show what music does to our brain: it lights up every known region of our gray matter, whether we like the tune or not. Further, finding someone who shares our love for certain music may cue like-minds toward a resounding serendipity. Finding a full arena of ecstatic, kindred souls (an experience unknown to me—fear of crowds) must leave an indelible and even sacred imprint.

Daniel J. Levitin’s book offers “a neuropsychological perspective on how music affects our brains, our minds, our thoughts, and our spirit.” A sound engineer, producer, musician, and cognitive scientist, Levitin conjectures about our minds, thoughts, and spirits, which, like the musical term “pitch,” are not physically apparent.

Levitin’s roaming philosophical, clinical, historical, and personal insights offer fascinating examples that include classical music and jazz, but focus mostly on rock and roll. One of his chapter subtitles, What We Expect from Liszt (and Ludicris), only suggests the book’s range. Indicative of his style, page 143 includes references to Wittgenstein and Led Zepplin. Yet his presentation is playful, not forced.

For an expert listener like me, who’s nonetheless ignorant of music theory, he lays out a concise primer on: pitch; rhythm; tempo; contour; timbre (rhymes with tamber); loudness; reverberation; meter; key; and harmony. The circularity of pitch perception compares to the color wheel. The octave provides the musical base for every known culture.

In case you suspected I was a bit quick to claim my listening expertise, Levitin holds up two standards for what makes an expert. Most five-year olds recognize an off-key note. They may prefer simple music over complex but they can tell when it doesn’t make sense. We’re all experts when it comes to musical taste. Past that, Levitin cites numerous studies that set the expert point at ten-thousand hours. Scientists, the author explains, routinely find this nice round number popping up in their studies. “Ten-thousand hours is roughly equivalent to three hours a day, twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years.”

The number holds up in studies of master composers, basketball players, ice skaters, and even fiction writers. But a truly notable artist will also possess talent by genetic predispositions, as well as a passion to play.

Generally, we learn to love music most during adolescence because teenage brains make new connections at an explosive rate. Myelin, which speeds up synaptic transmission, develops mostly between ages fourteen and twenty. We can learn music, mathematics, and languages best during these years, and while the window can vary somewhat depending on the person, after one’s mid-twenties, acquiring complicated new mental schema will always require work. No matter how proficient you get, it probably won’t feel natural.

Of course, during adolescence many of us are especially influenced by the time and place that belong to us and our friends. Beyond this, Levitin attributes musical taste to personality. The musical balance between safety and adventure, simplicity and complexity will differ for everyone. But as John Hardford said in “Tryin’ to Do Something to Get Your Attention” and as one of my favorite pop stars concurs, “There is Joy in Repetition.” (Prince) There’s joy, too, in the backbeat and in surprising our expectations: Beauty rises from the notes between the notes.

“This Is Your Brain on Music” bursts with intelligence, instruction, science, and soul. If I were looking for a complaint it would be that for a book about meticulous organization, reading it makes you run all over the place. It’s rich with lore and lists. Did you know the end of “A Day in the Life” on the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s CD has a few seconds of sound at 15 KHz—usually inaudible to those over 40?

When asked to bring over six songs that would explain rock and roll to an eighty-year old lecturer on psychoacoustics (excluding Elvis, because the man had heard him), Levitin brought:
1. “Long Tall Sally,” Little Richard
2. “Roll Over Beethoven,” the Beatles
3. “All Along the Watchtower,” Jimi Hendrix
4. “Wonderful Tonight,” Eric Clapton
5. “Little Red Corvette,” Prince
6. “Anarchy in the U.K.” the Sex Pistols

To this day, the author would like to make adjustments.

Possibly Related Classroom Projects From DonorsChoose.org Powered by Social Actions

Information and Links

Join the fray by commenting, tracking what others have to say, or linking to it from your blog.

Information
December 4th, 2007
Comments
Feeds and Links
Comment Feed
From This Author
Del.icio.us
Digg
Technorati
Categories
Uncategorized

Other Posts
Waiting For Beckett: Any Godot Will Do
My Kid Could Paint That, or What is a Painter?

Readers

Shop newcritics

Featured books:


Viewing 12 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Nice review, Kathleen (not that I am biased or anything). However, I must quibble with that silly list at the end. How could he choose "Roll Over Beethoven" as the Beatles song, when it is essentially a Little Richard cover? I would substitute "Can't Buy Me Love" or possibly "Helter Skelter".
    And "Wonderful Tonight"?? That's not rock and roll. How about "Layla"? (the electric version of course).
    "Little Red Corvette"? Great song, but I would suggest "Kiss".
    And the Sex Pistols? Come on. Kick those no-talents off the list altogether, and add the Rolling Stones: "Bitch".
    That would be a much stronger list, though Lord knows why he didn't make it seven songs (a more symbolically potent number). Then you could add "Come as You Are" by Nirvana.
    • ^
    • v
    The writer said that Pierce, the lecturer, who was an august inventor at AT&T and an authority at Stanford was especially impressed by the timbre in "Little Red Corvette," where the instruments, including the singer's voice, created a unified sound.
    • ^
    • v
    I read a slightly older book by Robert Jourdain called Music, the Brain and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination. Based on your review of This is Your Brain on Music, they sound very similar. While the neuroscience underlying our sensual and emotional response to music may be interesting to some, I'm left thinking "well, duh, just about anyone could tell you that intuitively." Also, the inevitability of assembling lists of any sort invites so much nitpicking over the choices that the point of the list tends to be lost. However, the lists are not intended to be prescriptive; they're merely illustrative. So nitpick is you want, but I daresay you're missing the point.

    The overall thrust, that musical organization stimulates and enhances organized thinking, runs somewhat counter to the commonly held intuition that music first and foremost evokes emotion. It's a case where the end results don't fully agree or correlate with the underlying perceptual apparatus as revealed by the science. But no matter. The pleasures derived from music need little scientific explanation to be compelling. The real payoff, of course, is getting to know the music on its own terms and understanding the connections between things, which even among listeners may require those 10,000 hours mentioned in the book.
    • ^
    • v
    Not to be reductive, but somehow it all goes back to Bach, the most towering of music's towering geniuses.

    I am learning Bach's Mass in B Minor with a small semi-professional group, and believe me, my gray matter is firing on all sides.
    • ^
    • v
    But what does it say about your brain when you're middle-aged and still like to listen to the absurd crap you listened to when you were eighteen? Right now I'm listening to Technicolor Web of Sound 60s Psychedelic Web Radio (www.techwebsound.com)
    and lovin' it. With what's left of my brain.
    • ^
    • v
    Brutus, hello! Some people take real pleasure in seeing their intuitions confirmed by MIRs. The author finds that interesting but never stops asking why some music evokes greater emotion and sensation in some people than others. Some people care about music to the point of obsession. The mystery remains locked inside the mind/body quandary.
    He offers lists and examples and knows so many famous people that the book veers from pop history, musicology, and neuroscience. Having participated in some of the 10,000 hour studies, he suspects 10,000 as being convenient but not arbitrary. An expert listener does need to listen approximately that long to know the music.
    • ^
    • v
    MA Peel, you're an inspiration. Do you sing the Mass? I've heard people play versions or pieces on the flute.

    Dan, If you're listening to it, those early cues can take you back to when you didn't care if it was absurd. Music plays with time so well it even alters it, if temporarily.
    His point about middle-age, I think, was that it's not the best time to take up the violin. You learned to listen to music in childhood, though, and can continue to listen and learn to love and hate all kinds of music whenever you want.
    • ^
    • v
    Kathleen, yes, I'm singing the alto part. Bach wrote some wildly difficult lines for the alto and basses in that Mass, considered the summation of his musical life.
    • ^
    • v
    Altos are my favorite. To be truthful, I'm not that familiar with Bach's Mass in B minor. I'm familiar with the Mass and have heard choirs sing some selections from Bach on special occasions. It was always for once glorious.
    • ^
    • v
    A lot of people seem to be critical of looking at things like music from a scientific angle, as though it will ruin the romance of the thing (a fundamentally religious reaction, in a way). I love the subject and find the more I know, the deeper and more fantastic the mystery. Looks like a worthwhile read. Thanks for letting us know about it.
    • ^
    • v
    OutOfContext, That concern or myth is one of the strongest arguments throughout the book. It's why the writer entered academia in the first place: the more we know, the greater the beauty, the deeper the mystery.
    • ^
    • v
    wow i really found this to be interesting. thanks for sharing

    Cheers
    good-jobs.org , jewelryreview.net
 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus