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.