jacpgh's review against another edition
I could not understand what the author was saying. It was too complicated.
crgs's review against another edition
4.0
This book was such a good accompaniment to my starting to play piano again. I really enjoyed diving deeper into music and it’s role in our development. Not only is music essential for life, and us (as in human evolution) getting to this point, it’s also crucial to our enjoyment of this life.
At a time when I need to figure out why “I feel this way” - now- reading this book was good medicine. Music connects us when words and language miss the mark.
At a time when I need to figure out why “I feel this way” - now- reading this book was good medicine. Music connects us when words and language miss the mark.
chiel's review against another edition
challenging
informative
2.25
Oh oh oh, I really wanted to like this. There are so many questions and thoughts I have on this subject that I was really looking forward to reading this. But it really fails in its setup. As in a scientific paper, he sets out what he wants to achieve with the book and then the first two chapters are a rundown of musical theory that are dry but pretty good to follow.
Afterwards, the book starts going in many different directions. He switches from easy to hard topics without finishing the train of thought, an entire chapter is devoted to meeting biologist Francis Crick which has no impact or importance at all to music.
It really wasn't all bad, there were definitely some interesting ideas and I did learn quite a few things. The parts about where music activates more parts of the brain than any other mental activity. How people can remember pitch. How timbre works. It was all really interesting!
But to me, this book squandered its potential.
Afterwards, the book starts going in many different directions. He switches from easy to hard topics without finishing the train of thought, an entire chapter is devoted to meeting biologist Francis Crick which has no impact or importance at all to music.
It really wasn't all bad, there were definitely some interesting ideas and I did learn quite a few things. The parts about where music activates more parts of the brain than any other mental activity. How people can remember pitch. How timbre works. It was all really interesting!
But to me, this book squandered its potential.
ahammond013's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
kblincoln's review against another edition
5.0
From the perspective of someone with a lifelong passion for a wide range of music and with a job based on language acquisition, this book was utterly fascinating.
It's dense. My background in linguistics from college (with a dash of cognitive science) really helped in the scientific language as well as the idea of linking functions to specific parts of the brain. If you're not familiar with that, I recommend referencing the handy dandy brain diagram at the back of the book showing where different functions of humans experiencing music (recognizing pitch, experiencing emotion, forecasting a change in music chord, memory, etc) resides as you read.
The cool thing about this book is that Levitin himself is a musician and goes at musical processing within the context of a musicians inside knowledge and love for it. He brings up questions at the beginning that I never really considered before, like the amazing ability humans have to recognize the tune "happy birthday" regardless of what speed it is sung, what pitch it starts on, if half of it speeds up, etc. and what that implies about the way our brains work.
"The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes...When we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives."
Excellent book for anyone interested in human emotion, cognition, musicians, or the concept of talent.
It's dense. My background in linguistics from college (with a dash of cognitive science) really helped in the scientific language as well as the idea of linking functions to specific parts of the brain. If you're not familiar with that, I recommend referencing the handy dandy brain diagram at the back of the book showing where different functions of humans experiencing music (recognizing pitch, experiencing emotion, forecasting a change in music chord, memory, etc) resides as you read.
The cool thing about this book is that Levitin himself is a musician and goes at musical processing within the context of a musicians inside knowledge and love for it. He brings up questions at the beginning that I never really considered before, like the amazing ability humans have to recognize the tune "happy birthday" regardless of what speed it is sung, what pitch it starts on, if half of it speeds up, etc. and what that implies about the way our brains work.
"The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes...When we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives."
Excellent book for anyone interested in human emotion, cognition, musicians, or the concept of talent.
rachbreads's review against another edition
4.0
I really enjoyed this exploration of music and the brain. I thought Levitin took both a really wide and narrow approach at the same time. I appreciated the detail that he dedicated to topics like music theory, music history, and neuroscience. He didn't assume that his readers knew everything about these topics, so he did what he could to do a crash course. As a music professional, I didn't need a lot of that information, but I found those sections very skim-able. Even so, the book rarely got bogged down in details - he consistently broadened his scope, in the way that the best researchers do, to ensure that we as the reader were really getting the full picture. It's impossible to list all the topics he ended up covering but there is anthropology, human behavior, psychology, world population statistics, animal science, and many others, obviously all in addition to the main topics of music and neuroscience. I loved hearing about how scientists have mapped the brain and learned all of this information that we generally accept to be true about how music affects our emotions, actions, and daily lives. His musical examples always varied between classical, contemporary classical, and popular music, and he made efforts to include examples from other musical cultures (or at least acknowledged that there were other musical cultures whose rules and experiences were different from the Western musical experience).
It was a little weird reading something written over 10 years ago that relied on the technology of 2006 because there have obviously been so many advances since then, both in research technology and in the tech related to music creation and experience. I laughed out loud at the paragraph where he predicted that there would one day be "personalized music stations, in which everyone can have his or her own personalized radio station, controlled by computer algorithms," because not only was Pandora a huge success, but it's honestly already been outdated by Spotify and other on-demand streaming services. The tech surrounding music changes so rapidly that any book older than 1-2 years old on this topic would be hopelessly outdated, so I didn't count that against him.
I don't think it was a perfect book, both in execution or in impenetrable research, but I appreciated the fresh take and increased musical knowledge.
It was a little weird reading something written over 10 years ago that relied on the technology of 2006 because there have obviously been so many advances since then, both in research technology and in the tech related to music creation and experience. I laughed out loud at the paragraph where he predicted that there would one day be "personalized music stations, in which everyone can have his or her own personalized radio station, controlled by computer algorithms," because not only was Pandora a huge success, but it's honestly already been outdated by Spotify and other on-demand streaming services. The tech surrounding music changes so rapidly that any book older than 1-2 years old on this topic would be hopelessly outdated, so I didn't count that against him.
I don't think it was a perfect book, both in execution or in impenetrable research, but I appreciated the fresh take and increased musical knowledge.