This Is Your Brain On Music

This Is Your Brain On Music, by Daniel J. Levitin, is the most exciting science book that I’ve read in a long time. It’s all about music: what is music, how do we perceive music, why do we care about music, and, primarily, what do we know about how the mind and brain react, process, and create music.

Some facts that I learned:

If I put electrodes in your visual cortext, and then I showed you a red tomato, there is no group of neurons and will cause my electrodes to turn red. But if I put electrodes in your auditory cortext and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at exactly that frequency, causing the electrode to emit electrical activity at 440 Hz — for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain! I find this amazing.

If you’re familiar with the phenomenon of restoration of the missing fundamental, in which you perceive the fundamental pitch if you are played only overtones of the pitch: it turns out that you can put in an electrode, play music with the fundamentals missing, and the electrode actually shows energy at the fundamental frequency! The very fact that we can know things like this is exciting.

Ordinary people, when asked to sing a song (of which there is one well-known canonical recording, such as most pop songs), will sing back the song at almost the exactly correct tempo! (They are accurate within 4%, which is as good as most people can perceive anyway.) They also often get the key right, even though few people have “perfect pitch” per se. I would never have guessed this.

The brain stem and the dorsal cochlear nucleus — structures so primitive that all vertebrates have them — can distinguish between [musical] consonance and dissonance; this distinction happens before the higher level, human brain region — the cortex — gets involved.

The book is extremely readable and fun. It teaches you all the music theory you need to know. In fact, his basic music theory section is the best quick introduction to music theory I’ve ever read. The author has been a professional producer, so he knows a lot about how modern music recordings are made. He currently runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill Unversity, and has published a lot in serious scientific journals. That’s a combination of expertise that may be unique. He knows several well-known musicians and quotes from them; what Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell have to say is quite interesting. The book is available in trade paperback for only $15 US.