Review of "This is your brain on music" by Daniel Levitin - Part 1

Although, I was already intimately involved with music both academically (through research and modeling of certain aspects of specific performers, by way of case studies), and as a guitar player in various bands, the book that really turned me on to the neural correlates of music cognition was Daniel Levitin's, "This is Your Brain on Music - The Science of a Human Obsession."

While Levitin's book is intended for a general audience, it provides several avenues of interest for the serious music cognition researcher as well. What makes Levitin's style unique, yet personal and thoroughly engaging is his immensely, well-rounded experience in music as a performer/musician, recording engineer in the music industry, as well as researcher and academician. To make his point, he provides several relevant examples from mainstream genres such as classic rock, R&B, soul, and pop.

Another point worth mentioning is the fact that Levitin's interest is in cognitive systems and not just in neuroscience itself. So his research is in no way reductionist. He makes his intentions very clear by stating that his interest in neuroscience is to understand the functional aspects behind cognitive processes. This view is reflected well throughout the book when he consistently connects functional processes pertaining to memory, categorization, emotion, attention etc. to existing paradigms in experimental psychology as well as various neural correlates.

The book also provides a window to the music cognition research community. It helps acquaint even the general reader to several key researchers such as Peretz, Zatorre, Janata, Tillman, Trehub, in a non-pedantic way. In my next few blogs I will provide a deeper overview of some of the chapters in this book.

If you are even remotely interested in music in any way (avid listener, performer, teacher, researcher), you should have purchased this book already!!!

Welcome to the musical brain!

Given that music is a temporal activity, the perception and recognition of music elicit strong comparisons with spoken-word recognition. The difference between the two however is that spoken-word recognition has been an active area of study since the late 70s with highly influential psychological models published by scientists such as McClelland, and Marslen-Wilson, while music as a separate field of psychological study is just about gaining ground.

I find Marslen-Wilson's initial and revised versions of the cohort model appealing because of their explicit way of separating bottom-up sensory information from top-down context related effects, and providing specific rules for constraining the influence of context during recognition. Spoken-word recognition has several examples of context influencing recognition, such as the phoneme restoration effect. Intuitively, recognizing melodies follows a similar set of functional processes as speech. I know based on anecdotal experience that partial melodies are enough to enable mentally filling in and humming the rest of the melody. However, one of the problems I have faced is that of finding examples in melody recognition suggesting contextual effects consistent with the phoneme restoration effect in speech. On a positive note, experimental evidence based on the gated presentation of melodies (Dalla Bella et al.) does suggest that the recognition of melodies involves combination of bottom-up pitch-related information with top-down context.