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 enlarge | Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Plume/Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $5.89
You Save: $9.11 (61%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  114 reviews
Sales Rank: 1149
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 322
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0452288525
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.11
EAN: 9780452288522
ASIN: 0452288525
Publication Date: August 28, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Uniquely, Levitin Gets It September 7, 2006
10 out of 14 found this review helpful
Daniel J. Levitin understands the connection between rhythm (and consequently music) and the genetic human drive to belong to the group through emulation. How better can we move together that with a beat? When do we feel closer that sharing a music experience where we can move together? It sounds simple when said, but how many understand enough to say it? A landmark book.
Excellent Review of the Neuroscience of Music. September 7, 2006
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
This is a very approachable book that will appeal to anyone who wonders why we all find music so compelling. It summarizes our best understanding of the physics, as well as anatomical and physiologic basis of our ability to feel and make music. Sophisticated concepts of mind-brain interaction are presented with reference to popular music, and simple occasionally comical models. It's an easy read that will make you smarter. Recommended for musicians, teachers, scientists and thinking people in general.
If music be the food of love, play on Understanding why we all so love 'every sha-la-la' September 6, 2006
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Daniel Levitin knows the world of music from many sides. He started out as a musician, but then studied Neuroscience where he has made a distinguished career. This book is the product of his varied experience and learning. It is an exciting exploration of a world of activity almost all of us in one way or another relate to, and receive great pleasure from.
Levitin explains what he aims to do in his introductory chapter.
"
This book is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience - the field that is at the intersection of psychology and neurology. I'll discuss some of my own and the latest studies researchers in our field have conducted on music, musical meaning, and musical pleasure. They offer new insights into profound questions. If all of us hear music differently, how can we account for pieces that seem to move so many people - Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or Don McLean's "Vincent (Starry Starry Night (Vincent)" for example? On the other hand, if we all hear music in the same way, how can we account for wide differences in musical preference - why is it that one man's Mozart is another man's Madonna? "
In nine brilliant chapters he studies music from a number of different points- of - view.
The chapters are:
Introduction: I love music and I love science. Why would I want to mix the two?
1) What is Music? From Pitch to Timbre
2) Foot tappin. Concerning Rhythm, Loudness and Harmony
3)Behind the Curtain Music and the Mind- Machine
4) Anticipation
5) You know my name, look up the number. How we categorize Music
6)After dessert Crick was still four seats from me .Musical emotion and the reptilian brain
7) What makes a musician Expertise
8) My favorite things Why do we like the music we like
9) The music instinct Exolution's Number One Hit
The book's opening chapter provides a rich technical analysis of music listening. Its final chapter focuses on 'evolutionary pyschology' and the question of musical origins. Is music's origin in the cry of the courting male to his beloved? and vice- versa? Or is it more likely in the social binding it provides to lone individuals, the communal chorus which unites in our hymns, anthems, singalongs, ? In this regard Levitin points out that the way we experience music today, by and large as listeners to the 'experts' the 'performers' is far different from mankind's experience through most of our history when music truly was a communal activity?
What Levitin clearly denies is the claim of Steven Pinker that our music making and music appreciation are somehow secondary to more primal and important linguistic or mathematical skills? For Levitin our experience of music is an appetite and pleasure as deep in us as hungers for food and sex. He points out too its universal quality in seeming to touch all cultures. It too touches all stages of our life, and as his own researches show all areas of our brain, not being confined to one lobe only.
While it is not guaranteed that the reader of this book will come to finally understand how and why Music is made and appreciated, they will certainly better understand this than they have before
Oh why I wonder when I sing to myself do I feel such a great great happiness when I do not have a particularly good voice?
WOW - What a great book September 3, 2006
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
What a wonderful book. I have worked for a number of years trying to understand music - not just what I like but how to tell others what I like and why I like it. I now have the vocabulary to be able to say what I like about a bit of music and why I like it. I have had so many `aha' moments while reading the book I have lost count. I have recommended the book This Is Your Brain on Music to all who I know that love music - even the ones with music degrees and play music for a living. If you love (even just like) music this is a book you should not pass up. If you only buy one book this is the one on which to spend your money.
 what a mess September 1, 2006
57 out of 77 found this review helpful
This is possibly the most sloppily written and edited book I have ever come across. Individually, the inaccuracies, poorly framed arguments, and misstatements probably don't seem to amount to much, but the cumulative effect is at the least disconcerting.
Some slightly random examples:
On page 30, the distance between "do" and "re" (as in "Doe a deer...") is identified as a whole step or a tone. Levitin explains that since "tone" has other meanings in music, he will use "whole step" "to avoid ambiguity." But there's a smaller division in our scale, that "cuts a whole step perceptually in half." So of course he calls it.... a semitone. Not a half-step? He goes on to talk about scales made up of whole steps and semitones, which seems twice as ambiguous.
Some slips may be typos, but I suspect they aren't. On page 29, doubling or halving the frequency of a sound wave ("2:1 or 1:2") is correctly identified as producing an octave relationship. That's repeated correctly on page 72, but later on the same page he says that "a ration of 3:1 is a simple integer ratio, and that defines two octaves." It's a simple integer ration, but it isn't two octaves; if 2:1 defines one octave, you double the 2 to get the second octave, so a ration of 4:1 defines two octaves. The frequencies of the A's in the vicinity of middle C on your piano are 220, 440, and 880.
On page 62, Levitin quotes the opening of "That'll Be the Day" to illustrate a pickup -- a note or gesture that precedes the first strong beat of a musical phrase -- but the text he gives leaves out a word: the initial "Well" -- the upbeat he is supposedly illustrating. On the next page he continues his assault on the song, using it to misinterpret "syncopation." It isn't the beat (the foot-tap) that shifts, it's the accent (the stress) that is displaced to a weak part of the beat.
The illustration of "Ba Ba Black Sheep" immediately above this example is supposed to show the temporal relation of syllables in two lines of the song; Levitin assures us that he has "kept the spacing between syllables proportional to how much time is spent on them." But the spacing is completely off; none of the temporal units line up properly, so is at best useless. Unfortunately, since it's there, it's also misleading.
The discussion of "Jailhouse Rock" on page 61 is rendered literally meaningless by his use of "note" instead of "beat." And on and on it probably goes.
I realize these may seem like a series of carefully picked nits, but the cumulative effect is annoying, and for an unsuspecting novice, could be pretty baffling. The only way to get through this text is to read it as carelessly as it was written, and that has begun to look like a waste of time.
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