I enjoy a wide variety of music. A song's sound is more influential than its genre. Whether a song is labeled country, R&B, punk, or reggae, if it sounds good, I like it.
This sounds good judgment is the result of my brain processing sound waves and interpreting elements like pitch, tempo, timbre and rhythm, coupled with my anticipation of "what comes next," to produce a pleasurable experience.
We don't consciously take all this into account when listening to music, of course, but we know what we like. In This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science Of A Human Obsession, Daniel J. Levitin, a neuroscientist and former session musician, sound engineer, and record producer, says although you may not be a music expert or a musician, you’re an expert in knowing what you like.
Levitin shares exciting discoveries that he and other scientists have made about how the brain processes music. He begins by answering a fundamental question: What is music? He writes, "As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, 'Music is organized sound.'"
Organized according to what?
When we listen to music, we recognize sound elements like pitch (defined below), tempo (pace of a song), timbre (how we distinguish one instrument from another), and rhythm (duration of a series of notes).
"When these basic elements combine and form relationships with one another in a meaningful way," Levitin writes, "they give rise to higher-order concepts such as meter, key, melody, and harmony."
Levitin explains these terms in a way non-musicians and non-scientists can understand. For example, just as we perceive color in our brains (because light waves themselves are colorless), we perceive sound waves in a similar way. Light and sound waves impinge on the retina and the ear drum, setting off a chain of neurochemical reactions, and we perceive "red" and "C-Sharp."
Consequently, pitch is a "purely psychological construct" that helps us answer the question, "What note is that?" Pitch represents, in our minds, a sound's frequency (the rate at which air molecules vibrate).
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