Music City, Meet Your Maker

Life is a horn-tooting parade float of mysteries. What came before the Big Bang? How did migrating birds evolve crystals of magnetism-detecting minerals in the brain? Why is Paris Hilton famous? And why the hell can’t you get “Boogie Shoes” out of your head after hearing part of it on the radio three days ago?

Daniel J. Levitin doesn’t address all these important mysteries, but he tackles some of them, as well as hundreds of others, in his acclaimed book This Is Your Brain on Music. It’s a fascinating, lively and clear-headed wilderness adventure of a volume, one that seems to have begun with the question, “So gosh, how does music work, anyway?” Why do we tap our feet to a tune? How does a ditty settle into orbit and keep revisiting your brain? Why must Homo sapiens compose hymns, marches, lullabies, jazz, symphonies, advertising jingles, Muzak and, God help us, “Achy Breaky Heart”? Levitin also addresses that not-at-all-trivial question, “Why is one man’s Mozart another man’s Madonna?”

Anyone might have these passing thoughts, especially at the bar during a concert intermission, but Daniel Levitin is uniquely qualified to explore them—and, impressively often, to answer them. He started out in a rock band and then became a session musician; he went on to work as a sound engineer and as producer of such big names as Stevie Wonder. But curiosity, that sin as gloriously dangerous as lust, took over his life. He went back to college and studied how the brain produces and responds to music. He now holds a chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication at McGill University, where he runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise. It’s probably safe to say that few writers have published in both Grammy and the International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems.

Levitin’s experience as both doer and thinker join to craft a stronger book than either side might have created alone. He maintains that “the work of both scientists and artists involves similar stages of development: a creative and exploratory ‘brainstorming’ stage, followed by testing and refining stages that typically involve the application of set procedures, but are often informed by additional creative problem-solving.” Throughout the book, he proves the fascination (and entertainment value) of a hybrid career. “What artists and scientists have in common,” he remarks at one point, “is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work.”

The subtitle of Levitin’s new book is clever, because his theme actually embraces several human obsessions. Yes, we do seem hard-wired to make a joyful noise—or, if you’re a blues singer, a gloomy one—but we also can’t stop trying to figure out why we are the way we are. The neuroscience of the brain may be the most challenging and narcissistic discipline on Earth. Don’t forget to bring your brain to school tomorrow, children; you’ll be using it in class to examine itself.

Levitin draws upon a seemingly inexhaustible fount of information. Consider this offhand aside: “The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God.” Or this one: “Whenever we hear the lowest notes on the piano or double bass, we are not actually hearing 27.5 or 35 Hz, because those instruments are typically incapable of producing much energy at these ultralow frequencies: Our ears are filling in the information and giving us the illusion that the tone is that low.”

Levitin is amazing. He explores at length the role of memory in weaving separate notes into a melody. He looks critically at prenatal musical preferences and affectionately at the melodic structure of “Over the Rainbow” and Beethoven’s “Pathétique” sonata. When talking about how human ears perceive different instruments at different levels, he explains how, in the instrumental intro to “One of These Nights,” the Eagles merge a single sustained bass note with a guitar glissando (sliding from one note to another) to create the illusion of a sliding bass note.

Although science at its best strives for an elegant simplicity, relatively few scientists are elegant writers. Levitin is one of those rare birds who combine experience and research, straightforward jargon-free expression and a sense of wonder about the sheer craziness of nature (including that ancient and complex bit of nature between our ears). He weaves together memories of Sonny Rollins concerts, dinner conversations about evolutionary theory with Francis Crick, analysis of Sting’s bass lines and remarkably lucid explanations of such subjects as tempo, pitch and timbre. He’s also funny.

But the book is challenging as well as wonderful, and many potential readers may wonder why they should work quite so hard when the book isn’t even assigned reading for a college class. In explaining why he wrote the book, Levitin offers this: “The more I learned about music and about science the more fascinating they became, and the more I was able to appreciate people who are really good at them.” His decades of experience and research inspire many intriguing questions. “But instead of finding answers,” he writes, “I came away with more questions—as is often the case in science. Each new question opened my mind to an appreciation for the complexity of music, of the world, and of the human experience.”