Book Review-This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession By Daniel J. Levitin
A remarkable book that helped me tie three seemingly disparate but actually interconnected subjects together in my mind. It is actually an old subject, but new to me.
Ever since I looked at a hand scribbled sketch of the circle of fifth as drawn by John Coltrane, I became interested in the connection between mathematics and music. As a fine and obedient Chinese boy, I took violin lessons until I was in high school, but I am ashamed to say that none of the music theory was absorbed into my thick skull, so when I had all kinds of questions about music theory, I had to resort to YouTube and other means to try to get answer. The problem with using those resources is that they are able to answer some of the “How” questions but they weren’t about some of the “How” questions and they weren’t very clear about “Why” questions either. Why are the scales the way they are? Why are there different ways to form a scale? I understand that the circle of fifth is very useful, but why are they so useful?
I am trained as an engineer so my interest naturally skewed to the mathematics and physics of music, thinking that the music that we have enjoyed throughout history must have been systematically defined or else why have we consistently been entertained and enthralled by the music all the musicians have produced. I didn’t know just how wrong I was.
As I started to research the musical literature, I found many books that straddles three areas: music, mathematics, and quite interestingly, neurosciences. I had stumbled upon the linkage that every else seem to have been exploring: the connection between the three subjects. I had also stumbled into the rabbit hole of the cognitive and neural sciences concurrently to my interest in music. As an amateur who was curious about how our brain works, it was natural for me to dive into the trio of subjects.
I eagerly tried to read David J. Benson’s Music: A Mathematical Offering (Benson, 2007) and David Sulzer’s Music, Math, and Mind (Sulzer, 2021). I struggled with both, mainly because I didn’t have the musical background and I stubbornly held onto some strong ideas about how the mathematics of music is supposed to work. As I struggled to dissect those two books, I came upon this book by Levitin on my bookshelf. Apparently, I had the interest and foresight to have bought this book a few years ago. So, I took the plunge into a third reference on this topic. It was an extremely good move.
A fun note about Dan Levitin, he was in the music business as a performer and a producer. His veering into becoming a neuroscientist is a fortuitous turn for me that made this book possible. Part of the great fun with this book is that he shamelessly name drops and makes much of many stories that he had experienced firsthand in the music world. The uniqueness of the connection between a neuroscientist and musician makes the book that much more entertaining. Beside the sheer fun of that side of the story telling, Levitin’s familiarity with the necessary mathematics and his ability to connect the music that we hear with the relatively new science of neural system that interprets and translates the aural pleasures into electrical signals and the meaning of that process is quite remarkable. He makes it sound so matter of fact and natural that I had to sometimes stop and marvel at the implications of what Levitin is telling me.
Levitin is a name dropper with scientific luminaries as well. His story about his sole audience with Francis Crick was initially jaw dropping but it became exciting to the reader because Levitin was allowing me a rare look behind the curtain at how a genius biological scientists work and be innovative.
This book conveniently delves into the three subjects: mathematics and science of music, music, and how the brain process music just as my other two references did, but Levitin treats them more as a complex mixing of all three subjects.
The first two chapters discuss the linkage between mathematics and music, the fundamental tools of music that just happen to be very mathematical: pitch, tone, timbre, rhythm, meter, key, melody, loudness, tempo, and contour. The ideas exposited in the first two chapters were used as the foundation of the rest of the book.
The next three chapters delves into neuroscientific ideas, answering questions about what makes music music in our minds? How do we anticipate the music before it is played? How and why does our mind create categories of music so that our mind can sort them out?
The last four chapters dove into some amorphous and ambiguous questions, but in terms of the neurosciences rather than philosophically. Why does music make us emotionally respond? What makes a musician a musician? Why do we like what we like in music? He concludes with a look at our historical evolution as humans and partners the discussion with a discussion on our musical instincts.
Dan Levitin has an excellent track record as a great popularizer of dense topics, he has the technical background and advanced understanding of this subject to explore the granularities of the neuroscientific knowledge while he is also so erudite as to easily inform those of us who are not as advanced in our understanding of music and neurosciences. After having read this book, I now have confidence to dive back into the other two books to learn what I had missed the first time through. Maybe then will I have enough confidence in my autodidactic journey through the music, mathematics, and neurosciences to be able to come to be conversant in the subject.
Bibliography
Benson, D. J. (2007). Music: A Musical Offering. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Levitin, D. J. (2007). This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession Paperback . NYC: PLume/Penguin.
Sulzer, D. (2021). Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music. New York: Columbia Press.