Your Brain On Music

I was really, really, really looking forward to reading This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin. And it was ... OK.

When I saw this book at B&N I immediately picked it up, read most of the preface, and bought it. This book seemed written specifically for me like few others. I read about Levitin's headphone epiphany as a teenager--I had the same experience! I was about ten when I borrowed my sister's headphones and heard "Swingtown" by Steve Miller Band in all its stereophonic glory. The auditory imaging had drums and synthesisers that sounded like they were right inside my head. I loved it, and I was hooked. After that I spent many, many hours of my youth listening, actively listening, to music with headphones. After reading about Levitin's experience, I thought he and I were certainly resonating on the same frequency.

One problem I had with the book is that it came to me far too late. I studied electrical engineering in college, where we dissected waveforms of all flavors to death. I also studied music theory. So much of the book was review.

A much bigger problem, though, is that the book is poorly edited, at least the first edition copy I have. One of the earlier chapters is particularly bad, with a number of misspellings and a missing word. While the editing did improve later on, I almost couldn't recover. It's very hard for me to read for pleasure when I expect to mentally edit the text myself.

My last beef is that Levitin obviously feels he has to impress the reader with his name dropping. OK, you met Francis Crick and had lunch. Congratulations. But not every detail of this encounter is relevant to your book. Get to your point and spare me the rest already.

The book had a few nuggets that almost made up for its shortcomings. For example, it forced me to reconsider hearing (and music) as a subjective experience. Just as the red I experience in my mind when I see something red may be different from your red, my experience of an octave, a pitch, or a timbre may be different from yours. They're probably similar, but not necessarily. Another nugget: the reason that octaves, fifths and other intervals from the harmonic series sound "harmonious" is likely because it would help the brain to relate different sound frequencies into common sources. This could be very advantageous--the many bits of sound I hear now are actually one sound, namely that hungry tiger over there!

Overall, this book has its moments but falls short of my (perhaps too lofty) expectations.