Review of "This is your brain on music" by Daniel Levitin - Part 4

I found chapters 4, 5, and 6 to be the most interesting parts of the book. Without giving much away, I will try to provide my concise review of these chapters. Some of the topics covered in chapter 4 are the role of functional units (called schemata) in our long-term memory stores which help us in perception and enable anticipation of incoming information and how composers violate them to create a sense of novelty in the listener; the role of neurotransmitters and receptors in providing the listener with emotions w.r.t expectation and satisfaction or violation of expectations; hemispheric specializations and their functional roles in the context of music and language; and the effect of musical training on hemispheric specialization. At the end of this chapter, Levitin provides us with a summarized, high-level hypothetical picture of the neural organization of the brain for music and speech.

Chapter 5 deals almost entirely with functional processes pertaining to memory and categorization. Cognitive science students/researchers should find this chapter appealing. In addition, frequency effects of melodies, and melodic invariance are also briefly mentioned in this chapter.

I found chapter 6 to be the most enjoyable chapter of the book. I hope that other readers would find the remaining chapters equally interesting unlike me, because herein lies the problem. After reading chapter 6, I felt like a sky diver who completed a jump in the middle of the day.....experienced an intense adrenaline rush....after which he/she had nothing better to look forward to for the rest of the day, and had to experience the remaining part of the day in lethargy. To do justice to the book, I will end my review with chapter 6, and hope that someone more deserving will inform readers about the remaining chapters. Hopefully other readers will hit their high notes at later points in the book. Music, to most people, is an emotional activity, and this chapter highlights it beautifully, while informing us about the neural correlates involved in causing those emotions. Cognitive psychologists have studied various cognitive processes, but most have shied away from studying emotion. I am glad that the role of emotion was treated on par with other cognitive processes in this book, more so in the context of a routine yet wonderful activity such as listening to music.

Review of "This is your brain on music" by Daniel Levitin - Part 3

Chapter 3 is where Levitin starts involving the reader in the neural correlates of music cognition. The gross functional generalizations of the four lobes of the brain (frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital) are mentioned, along with the older/reptilian brain. It is nice reading about the several functional processes involved in different kinds of musical activity - perception, memory (both working memory and long-term memory), attention, motor control during performance and listening, and of course...emotion. Levitin highlights the fact that almost every neural center in the brain has a part to play for perceiving, recognizing, reading and performing music....vocal or instrumental. Another interesting thing to note is the similarity between music and language in the way they are organized and perceived, as well as the neural correlates they share such as Broca's area and Wernicke's area.

Two final points of interest in this chapter are 1) perception is the end product of a long chain of neural events, and is not instantaneous; 2) perception need not always be correct....our brain can actually misinform us and fool us into believing something.
It is just amazing thinking about how complex an activity "perception" is, and how our brains have evolved to respond to the requirements of perception with incredible efficiency.....something that most of us take for granted. However, in order to achieve this kind of efficiency, there has to be some kind of trade-off in accuracy. Our brain uses stored information, does some kind of probabilistic computation to complete/fill in perceived bottom-up information with top-down context. This is what enables us to "expect" things....in a lot of cases subconsciously.

This brings us to the interesting topic of auditory as well as musical illusions analogous to visual illusions such as the Ponzo and Kaniza illusions. The book led me to investigate Sardinian acapella music for the first time. (Unfortunately, I could not decipher/perceive the illusion, although I really liked the music). But I came across other auditory illusions with respect to melody, where the pitches were segregated into different ordered patterns for the right and left ear involving high and low pitches. But when heard, we perceive the segregation different from the actual order (we tend to group lower pitches as perceived by one ear, and higher pitches as perceived by another). This definitely needs to be tried out with earphones.

I will finish my review of "This is your brain on music" within my next two blogs. If you still haven't purchased the book, or at least checked it out from your local library.......you are seriously missing out!

Review of "This is your brain on music" by Daniel Levitin - Part 2

In Chapter 1, What is Music?: From Pitch to Timbre, Levitin provides an excellent, concise yet lucid overview of the basic elements of sound pertaining to music (tone, pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, spatial location, reverberation etc.), from a psychoacoustics perspective, useful to both musicians and non-musicians. He then proceeds to define the higher order elements made of these basic elements, such as meter, key, melody and harmony. The higher levels of our brain process the relationships between these elements in a coherent and cohesive way. The relationships are important not only from the standpoint of how notes feature in music, but also how they do not. To illustrate this point, Levitin uses a visual art metaphor through an example. “Miles Davis….described his improvisational technique as parallel to the way that Picasso described his use of canvas: The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between the objects.” According to Levitin, the most important part of Miles’s work was the empty space between the notes. Miles’ genius lay in his ability to know precisely when to hit the next note, giving the listener enough time to anticipate.

I couldn't help but think of Jeff Beck in this context. An extremely underrated guitar player who superbly uses space to emote. I found his guitar playing constantly evolve over time in comparison to his contemporary old school blues-based guitarists such as Jimmy Page, and Clapton.

Levitin interestingly approaches sound as a relative, non-absolute phenomenon. According to Levitin, pitch is an internal image of the end product of a chain of mechanical and neurochemical events caused by sound waves impinging on the eardrums and pinnae. The difference between Levitin's view from other physicists is that while most physicists agree that "pitch" is a mental percept, they consider sound to be absolute on account of vibrating molecules, irrespective of whether it is perceived or not.

Levitin talks about melody as an auditory object that remains invariant in spite of transformations along some of the basic elements of sound, similar to the invariance of objects in the visual domain. Although the areas of the brain that respond to individual pitches have been mapped, we do not know the neurological basis for key invariance, where transposed melodies sound perceptually equivalent.

In Chapter 2, Foot Tapping: Discerning Rhythm, Loudness, and Harmony; Levitin explains how we use various areas of our brain to discern rhythm, and to perform rhythmically. These areas include the cerebellum and basal ganglia, higher cognitive regions such as the motor cortex, and the frontal lobes for planning. He explains the difference between rhythm, meter, and tempo – related but often confused concepts, and how we use our brain to perceive these concepts. I was thrilled to see him spend some time talking about musicians' use of syncopation to play with listener's emotions and expectations. Our amazing ability to segregate sounds and group sounds based on the situation (The Cocktail party example), for performing auditory scene analysis is mentioned.