NF

A fun, informative, and provocative read from Dan Levitin, rock musician, producer, and neuroscientist.

Please follow the link to my Substack
https://open.substack.com/pub/thecuriouspolymath/p/book-review-this-is-your-brai... ( )

I tried so hard to get through this one because the premise was so interesting. But the music theory was just too complex for me to understand anything.

On page 60 of this book the author writes "On Paula Abdul's Straight Up there is so much going on, it is difficult to describe it in words" Yet, he spends the rest of the page doing just that . It's a tactic Levitin uses throughout the book, and it just doesn't work. You simply can not appreciate a song by reading about it. Music is something that must be heard to be enjoyed. Levitin raises some interesting arguments and I believe that as a lecture, with audio, this might be a interesting presentation. As a book, it just doesn't cut it. ( )

Pop Science, meet Pop Music. Pop Music, Pop Science.
It’s fun to hear how precisely specialists deploy concepts like pitch, timbre and rhythm in trying to explain how music works, and how intricately laboratory experiments can simulate/stimulate brain activity, but the brain is not the mind, and even (or especially) cognitive neuroscientists won't crack the ineffability of music. The chapter on the origins of music shows just how speculative and tentative the science is. What would Junior Kimbrough say?