‘This is Your Brain on Music’ is a fascinating book about connections – exploring how emotional links are made through memories and interactions while listening to or performing music.

Daniel Levitin starts from the basics, asking the question ‘What is music?’ –  examining what it is about music that makes us obsess about it.  He writes: “the emotions we experience in response to music involve structures deep in the primitive reptilian regions of the cerebelar vermis, and the amygdala – the heart of emotional processing in the cortex”. A phrase like this, taken out of context, sounds a bit dry but he manages to weave such information into a text rich in anecdotal asides and down to earth examples.

Danile Levitin

Daniel Levitin

As a rock producer, Daniel Levitin worked with Stevie Wonder, the Grateful Dead and Chris Isaak.  Disillusioned by the music business , he turned to academia, where he began a career in neuroscience.  Now, Levitin is an associate professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal and one of the world’s leading experts in cognitive music perception.

As the book is aimed at the broadest possible audience – essentially anyone who loves music –  he keeps the scientific jargon to an absolute minimum.  He makes it clear that he prefers to study the mind rather than the brain – he’s more interested in thoughts rather than neurons.

He disagrees with Steven Pinker’s view that our music perception system is a hedonistic periphery  what Pinker called an ‘auditory cheesecake’ – that could vanish from our species without adversely affecting our lifestyle.  For Levitin, music not only stimulates our pleasure zones, but also contributes to our evolutionary development. In other words, he sees music as fundamental to human survival.

The bulk of Levitin’s examples come from popular classics and familiar songs with The Beatles being one of the most frequently cited bands. There’s a neat website link to the book where you can listen to clips of the tracks he refers to.

My main criticism  of the book is that I think it would have been even richer had Levitin widened his frame of reference to include more marginal genres. While I wouldn’t argue with the fact that the foot tapping appeal of popular music is a major part of its appeal,  ambient, drone and noise music are not mentioned at all even though these sounds feed the head just as much as catchy commercial pop or riff based rock . You may not be able to dance or tap your feet to Stars of the Lid , Merzbow  or Sunn 0)))  but the way such music is perceived by the brain would have made for fascinating reading.

Levitizin keeps it straight, however,  and largely steers clear of anything which deconstructs harmony, melody and rhythm. He dismisses such music in an aside : “in its least accessible form it is a purely intellectual exercise“.  I know that experimental avant-garde music may have a limited audience but I would have preferred to read about this than to be told that Sting is some form of musical genius.

Nevertheless, Levitin is a witty and highly engaging guide with a happy knack of putting complex ideas into an accessible form, something for a non scientifically minded person like me is important.

Recommended reading for music addicts and armchair scientists alike.