This Is Your Brain On Music

Daniel J. Levitin

"This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel - I think it's pronounced "Lev-i-ton." I'll say "Lev-i-ton." Well, I'm on the side of things a musician, have been almost all my life. I almost went into cognitive psychology or more specifically molecular neuroscience, so these questions that he tries to tackle in his research and tries to sum up and embrace sort of all of it in this book are ones that, one way or another, people like me think about idly all the time.

It covers the connection between brain function, brain structure and function, and the human experience of music and the evolution - towards the end an evolutionary perspective which one has to take on why music has developed in the ways and to the degree that it has in the human species.

The style of the book is also a salient feature. It's extremely conversational and extremely erratic. He hops kind of seamlessly between - among personal reminiscences and biographical stuff of himself - autobiographical - and presentations of data and his own takes on various specific examples of music, covering everything from classical through rock and reggae and jazz.

I would love to give this book four or five stars because I think that it's a really important topic and a really interesting one, but for me, considering my experience of the book, the quality of the writing, the consistency of the writing, the compellingness of the structure of the argument being a little bit hard to follow too much of the time, I have to go with about three stars on this one."

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