100 Books - This is Your Brain on Music

One Hundred Books. This is a short list of 100 books I have read, listed here in no particular order.

This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

I've been interested in these issues for quite some time. As a musician, I began playing the Violin and the Cornet early, dabbling in Piano and taking some Guitar lessons. Singing in the middle school choir and eventually settling into the Drums as my primary and most played instrument. Add to this a long experience in a great variety of kinds and styles of music performance, including Rock, Country, Jazz, Soul, Classical, and Spiritual, and eventually writing and producing my own recordings and organizing projects for other musicians. It becomes clear that my brain has been deeply involved in musical expression for most of my life. 

Levitin's book: This Is Your Brain on Music - The Science of a Human Obsession intrigued me when I read the title. I had to find out more. Even today, I routinely run into real-life discussions on how the brain is used to think about the particular musical, and in my case, rhythmic ideas, and how best to think of them. Here's an excerpt that illustrates this common question. Levitin writes:

The three most common meters in Western music are: 4/4, 2/4, and 3/4. Other rhythmic groupings exist, such as 5/4, 7/4, and 9/4. A somewhat common meter is 6/8, in which we count six beats to a measure, and each eighth note gets one beat. This is similar to 3/4 waltz time, the difference being that the composer intends for the musicians to "feel" the music in groups of six rather than groups of three, and for the underlying pulse to be the shorter-duration eighth note rather than a quarter note. This points to the hierarchy that exists in musical groupings. It is possible to count 6/8 as two groups of 3/8 (One-two-three One-two-three) or as one group of six (One-two-three-Four-five-six) with a secondary accent on the fourth beat, and to most listeners these are uninteresting subtleties that only concern a performer. But there may be brain differences. We know that there are neural circuits specifically related to detecting and tracking musical meter, and we know that the cerebellum is involved in setting a internal clock or timer that can synchronize with events that are out-there-in-the-world. No one has yet done the experiment to see if 6/8 and 3/4 have different neural representations, but because musicians truly treat them as different, there is a high probability that the brain does also. A fundamental principle of cognitive neuroscience is that the brain provides the biological basis for any behaviors or thoughts that we experience, and so at some level there must be neural differentiation wherever there is behavior differentiation.

The discussion goes on and on in great depth, as any musician can tell you there are many ways to look at similar time signatures, keys, the relationship of one note, or even a dozen notes to one another. The main point here is that music and all its forms stimulate the brain so that the musician uses his knowledge and creativity. Combined with how individuals or even a group of musicians' brains are organized to participate in the musical experience, this is a worthwhile study. Just like dancing translates to a feeling of joy or sadness in the motions, music affects the one who hears the sounds on a profound mental, emotional, and intellectual level. Of course, that experience is ultimately different for each individual. Yet, at the same time, we also experience a typical response to hearing certain types or even specific pieces of music.

Daniel Levitin's book gives us a great deal regarding how we experience music and how it is processed through our brains as passive listeners or active participants. For me, this book merits a second read-through. There is so much here worth thinking about. I'm ready to dive in all over again and pull out more useful gems that enrich my life as a musician and consumer of music.