Book Review: This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

When it comes to music, I know what I like. Or at least, most of the time, I do. Sometimes things sneak up on me. For instance, Nirvana's on my play list these days, even though I remember rolling my teen-aged eyes at all that noise. So if I don't always know what music I like, it probably comes as no surprise that I know pretty much nothing about the science of music. About timbre, rhythm, scale and key. About the science of why things sound good or bad, and why my brain can change its mind that way.

Lucky for me, there's Daniel Levitin. Levitin, a cognitive psychologist at McGill University, explores the brain's relationship with music in This Is Your Brain On Music and it's a catchy a little number.

Music is something we take for granted, and Levitin makes it clear how astonishing our musical faculties are. Take a common scenario: You're in the local mall, and suddenly the piped-in music catches your ear. It's pan flutes and they're playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit." You roll your eyes and think nothing more of it (it's probably best that way). It certainly doesn't cross your mind that your brain has just demonstrated an extraordinary feat of identification.

I have a recording of a bluegrass group, the Austin Lounge Lizards, playing "Dark Side of the Moon" by the progressive rock group Pink Floyd, using banjos and mandolins. I have recordings of the London Symphony Orchestra playing the songs of the Rolling Stones and Yes. With such dramatic changes, the song is still recognizable as the song. It seems, then, that our memory system extracts out some formula or computational description that allows us to recognize songs in spite of these transformations.

Just think about that: The tempo changes, the instruments change, the keys might change — but our ability to recognize it is constant. There is more to music, as it turns out, than meets the ear. And it happens between them.

With a background in the music industry (he's worked with Blue Öyster Cult, Chris Isaak and the Grateful Dead, and was president of new-wave label 415 Records before its buyout by Sony), Levitin starts with an aficionado's passion for music and explains the circuitous route that brought him around to studying the subject scientifically. Like many popular science books, there is an affable , avuncular quality to Levitin's prose, which includes analogies between scientific concepts and daily experience, a smattering of puns and the inevitable mention of Phineas Gage.

Once Levitin explains the basic science of music, he moves on to music and the brain. It is fascinating stuff. One of the most interesting areas is Levitin's discussion of how music and language both use similar areas of the brain, parts of the brain that seem to seek out structure and patterns. In other words, the grammar of music.

The appreciation we have for music is intimately related to our ability to learn the underlying structure of the music we like—the equivalent to grammar in spoken or signed languages—and to be able to make predictions about what will come next. Composers imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and when they won't. The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having our expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that music.

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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