This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (review)

Daniel Levitin’s book is remarkable for its simplicity and accessibility, while also being remarkable for its complexity and comprehensiveness of theoretical topics and issues. Levitin asks, ‘If there are twelve notes within an octave, why are there only seven letters . . .?’ He answers, ‘[T]his may just be an invention by musicians to make non-musicians feel inadequate.’ Levitin does not make non-musicians feel inadequate. In clear, plain language he gives explanations of music, music perception, music cognition, and the neurological bases of each, making these dimensions of music more understandable to the musicians as well.

This book invites immediate comparisons with Oliver Sacks’s (2007) book of stories of the neurological bases of people’s experiences with music, Musicophilia, or the most similar book, Robert Jourdain’s (1998) Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy. Rather than Jourdain’s musical element-by-element explanation, or a neurological, brain-structure approach such as ‘this is what the dorsal temporal lobes do,’ Levitin stories his own experience, human experience, research studies as process, and even the development of theories, resulting in a strongly holistic, readable, and even entertaining approach to theoretical explanation.

This style is consistent with his stated preferences in music research: an interest in mind rather than brain, in function rather than structure. He says, ‘The point for me isn’t to develop a map of the brain, but to understand how it works, . . . the functions of the mind, and knowing where they occur doesn’t interest me unless the where can tell us something about how and why.’ On balance he does this in the book, although there is also considerable ‘what’ and perhaps less ‘why.’ He declares another important research preference for the use of holistic, ‘real’ music rather than atomistic elements of sound. ‘Too many scientists study artificial melodies using artificial sounds – things that are so removed from music, it’s not clear what we’re doing.’

The book seems structured to introduce basic ideas early, examining them in depth later. For example, he introduces emotional communication in chapter 2 and then devotes a whole chapter to it later. The first two chapters present a comprehensive examination of what music is, probably familiar to musicians but necessary for non-musicians. Chapter 3 is the real beginning of the ‘brain on music’ part of the book, presenting an introduction to the mind and brain. He explores some important concepts such as plasticity, does an overview of some key brain parts and how they process sound and music, and reviews the basics of perception. In the next chapter Levitin moves from perception to cognition, examining one of the fundamental phenomena of mind, anticipation or expectation. David Huron, a music cognitive science colleague of Levitin’s, produced a whole book on this topic in the same year entitled Sweet Anticipation.

Chapter 5 presents an excellent explanation of theories of memory and knowledge. The discussion (storying) of categories and concepts is a wonderfully crafted tale of inquiry that covers all relevant theories while illustrating with musical examples from heavy metal to classical. It is a dramatic story with language such as ‘Wittgenstein dealt the first blow to Aristotle by pulling the rug out from strict definitions of what a category is’ and ‘Armed with the knowledge of Wittgenstein, Rosch decided that . . . .’ Although the theoretical explanation of general processes is excellent, one could be picky and point to a lack of comprehensiveness here in the music-related applications. For example, there is no reference to categorical pitch perception (Walker 1990), and Snyder’s (2000) Music and Memory is not even in the reference list. As an academic I wanted more connection of assertions to references. Although there are chapter bibliographies, references are not connected to any ideas specifically.

In the remaining chapters Levitin explores the essence of music and emotion, musical expertise, personal preference for specific music, and the evolutionary origins of music. What is not included is any exploration of...