There's a lot of amazing stuff in this book to contemplate, but the author tries too hard to make it relevant for readers who listen to the Eagles and Mariah Carey (musicians he specifically sites), and he gets caught up in the most mundane details of his personal interactions with his colleagues at meetings and dinners and such, and who ordered what, and how everybody was dressed, and where everybody got their degrees.

My girlfriend got me interested in it because I found her passionate explanat More...

We tend to make music for as much granted as we do breathing. Music is EVERYWHERE. The same way that you encounter hundreds of advertisements in a day: you also encounter music in various forms.This is Your Brain on Music (yes, based on the popular egg-drug PSA, explores how music is processed within your brain and why we react the way we do.

This journey within the musical brain begins with a brief description of music in terms of notes, patterns, tempo, etc. One can skip this section if alread More...

It wasn't until I was half-way through this book that things started to get really interesting. As a musician, the first half was like retaking Music 101, but I felt this was a book I need to read, so I plowed on. I am looking for answers to the questions: "Why, when I near any musical interval, my brain automatically zips through all the tunes I know which start with that interval, and I start humming one of them?" and "Why the hell have I had '76 Trombones' on my mind for the last 6 weeks?" Is More...

This is one of those books that I think is a valuable read but not necessarily an enjoyable one..at least for the general reader. If you bring a background in neuroscience then this is a treasure chest of information. My personal interest lies in music specifically and I saw this as an opportunity to better understand how our brains engage with music. Coupled with Oliver Sacks collection "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" we begin to unlock the mysterious properties of music to help us com More...

From the reviews I've seen here, the material seems to have passed over most people's heads (by being too rough, or the phrase you'll come across a few times, "I didn't feel like I walked away exclaiming 'eureka!'"... or the book angered more expert readers by its simplicity, but it wasn't meant to talk of new discoveries as much as it was meant for a general public.

The book takes a while for an average person, and I'd say you have to have some knowledge of chorded instruments and such where yo More...

Levitin goes too far out of his way to make the book appeal to the layman. His tone isn't condescending, but he came across as an academic out of his element. Much of the research he cites is very fascinating. When it's all said and done though, I didn't walk away feeling like I had a much better grasp of what my brain is actually like on music. Levitin spends most of the book citing other research and did not assert his own opinions until the very end. I found his own views fascinating, but eve More...

I really despise myself for giving what should be an awesome book only 2 stars. I know I am mentally feeble, but was this ever dry!!! Interesting topic - neuroscience & music - but the author did go on at times (too much music theory, god I hated studying that and I'm a musician) and took the scientific aspects to a degree where I often found myself stopping to ponder "what the hell is he talking about?" It read like it could be someone's dissertation. The second half is slightly more intere More...

A book is the wrong medium for this information. As I read this book, I kept wishing I was watching a PBS show version of it instead, where I could HEAR the music Mr. Levitin was referencing, and see visuals of the brain showing what parts are being affected by music, and how they all link up.

Instead of having to tell us in excruciating detail what an octave is, he could demonstrate on an instrument, and we could hear it for ourselves. When discussing half steps and whole steps, we could both h More...

Someone left this behind in the cubby of the plane seat on a flight I took in December. As I'd finished my magazines, I picked it up, and then couldn't put it down. What was most fascinating about the book was the ease at which concepts I'd struggled with years ago were made crisp, clear, and, well, obvious, as they should have been back then. Introductory concepts of music were never made as clear to me than from this. I don't think I could have found a fuller survey of the subject, tying it to More...

So far it's off to a sort of dry start. I'm led to believe that it will get better when he starts getting into the subject matter a bit more, but the first chapter is basically a quick and dirty introduction to music theory, most of which I am already quite familiar with. I'll force myself to get into the second chapter and see how it goes from there.

After finishing, I can say this book has a lot of information in it. Levitin explores the Cerebellum's role in processing music, which was fascinat More...

In Daniel Levitin's own words, "This book is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience…. I'll discuss some of the latest studies I and other researchers in our field have conducted on music, musical meaning, and musical pleasure…. [H]ow can we account for wide differences in musical preference -- why is it that one man's Mozart is another man's Madonna?" (p. 11) After reading these 270 pages, I'm sure I can't tell you. I'm pretty disappointed, but then I had real More...

Seemingly for musicians or composers this book is more fitting a read for scientists and doctors. Not much content is musicianship related. Middle third is a bore.

What I learned:
- There is no sound in space
(there are no molecules to vibrate)
- Virtuosity comes from hours of practice
(talent and absolute pitch play a small role)
- Learning to play an instrument after 20 is hard
(the brain is done developing)
- Percussion is a primitive musical trait
(affirming my suspician drummers are apes)
- People More...

People often ask me about how I can be a musician and into sign language. It occurs for them like there is a dichotomy at play. I've never experienced my work in either area to be at odds with the other.

This week I'm reading the coolest book I've read in a while: This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. He was once a musician and sound engineer, but now is a neuroscientist (another set of odd-bedfellow occupations). A Publishers Weekly review says "This is likely the only book whose jac More...

Have you ever wondered how you can listen to an orchestra and pick out the melody, or pick out the violins from the whole ensemble, or pick out the first violin from the violin section, or separate the orchestra from the car alarm outside? If you ever wondered about music and why it is so appealing to us, you'll find this book interesting.

Beginning with the basics of how musicians and scientists define music, it moves on to discuss how our brain and mind have evolved to understand music, the im More...

Really cool book on the the brain's relationship with and to music. Although written for a general audience, Levitan doesn't significantly dumb down or shy away from the neuroscience at the very heart of the book. At the same time, Levitan let's a very wry, witty sense of humor season his writing. Finally, he's got both the musical and scientific chops to understand the subject matter from both sides. This means there's enough science and detail to impart some pretty technical information, but i More...

This is full a lot of technical information about the brain, but I've learned some interesting facts. 1)Humans have never existed without music. 2)It has only been in the past 500 or so years that we have differentiated between music-makers and music listeners. 3) Scientists are still unclear why we evolved an ability to make, understand or appreciate music. They theorize it may be tied into mating rituals since those who make music and dance well seem to attract more mates--even today. There is More...

I found myself reading this book very, very quickly. Why? Well, the sections explaining the language and technical aspects of music all consisted of information I already knew, so I zipped through them. The sections explaining the science of the brain while playing or listening to music were so over my head that I subconsciously decided to speed-read rather than really engage with the complexity of the material. And this is neuroscience for dummies! All that said, the work and studies done by Le More...

Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession is a fascinating study about what happens in the brain when we listen to music. Levitin, a neuroscientist and former session musician and producer, has crafted an excellent study that both scientists and lay readers whose grasp of science is somewhat limited will find informative.
Perhaps best of all, Levitin’s book doesn’t ruin the enjoyment of listening to music.

Levitin primarily takes a thematic approach in exami More...

I read the title of this book when reading a wiki article about the guy who wrote, "Don't Worry, Be Happy". It was amazing that our library actually had this book in the building - I think that's only happened one other time in the four years we've lived here. I'm glad I read it although I must confess, it took me an absurdly long time to get through it. I want to record some of what I painstakingly read although I lost the notes I took for 4 of the 8 chapters. Whoops! He wrote the information i More...

Two friends called this book the perfect companion to David Byrne's "How Music Works," and I heartily agree. Where Byrne covers issues of cultural cues and personal responses to music in a broad sense, Levitin dives deep into the neural processing that goes on in music interpretation, and the emotional cerebellar responses that come along for the ride.

As a former recording engineer that went back to school to become a cognitive neuroscientist, Levitin gives us just the right balance of persona More...

Review from Amazon.com:

I could not finish this book. It fell way short of my expectations.

I am highly interested in neuroscience, and I do consider myself obsessed with music, and so I was very excited to be able to read this book in order to gain some insight into why music does what it does. I didn't get any of that. In all honesty I just barely made it past the third chapter before I decided to quite, so I can't say if the rest of the book gets any better.

The chapters I did read were filled w More...

A very interesting explanation on what makes music sooo attractive to the vast majority of us... the first two chapters are in my opinion, heavy to read (I had to go back several times to try and get the idea); actually, in this regard I found the first statements of the author a little bit contradictory, since as he somehow explains, science (technical facts) should be explained "easily"... well, it wasn't in my opinion for the most of the beginning. After that, the book gets much lighter, much More...

Sometime in your life someone has asked you, "Would you rather be blind or deaf?" Most people answer that they would rather be deaf. Not me. While I can "see" images in my mind - after all, what is meditation except for the concentration on a single idea or image? - I can never hear a Beethoven symphony or White Stripes recreated in my mind. So I really wanted to read this book.

But it's only so-so. The first two chapters the writer spends explaning such terms as tone, timbre, key, meter, which h More...

“A” for effort and ambition and “C” for execution. He tries to be all things to all people, bouncing too much from folksy to scholarly and from self-referential to didactic perspectives. Levitin has a substantial music background, both in performance and production, and a very productive track record in cognitive neuroscience. Thus, his personal ambition to account for the neural basis of music, music listening pleasure, and musical creativity is compelling to him, and that motivation is infecti More...

Loved it! The book was highly enjoyable for me and I'm not a professional musician (or a neuroscientist), but I've always been aware of what music can do to me, from meditation to headbanging and beyond. I've read some people got disappointed of finding 'too much music theory' or 'too much neuroscience'; well honestly I don't think the book has to much of either of them, it's not written for neuroscientists or for professional musicians (even when I think both groups could enjoy it), and lets fa More...

In short, I enjoyed this book enough while I was reading it; I was glad when it was over; I hardly can remember anything about it now.

It's a bit like watching a popular education channel (Discovery, Nat. Geo., History, etc) late at night: it serves the purpose of passing the time, but probably isn't going to blow your mind.

If you are interested in music cognition, it's probably worth checking out. If you really don't know anything about music theory (I mean, like you were out sick for a whole sc More...

This book is one I read to place in my final thesis. I wasn't expecting anything from it and the plan was to skim it in hopes of finding some really good quotes.
BUT, I hadn't planned on being so caught up and enjoying the book as much as I did. I started reading the first chapter to get the hang of his writing style and I was hooked within the first few pages. I basically read it from cover to cover and I am really glad that I did!
The book has taught me sooooo much new and interesting things whe More...

So much content! Unfortunately I found it a little haphazard. I guess that's the balance between being a neuropsychologist/musician/writer.
Depending on your level of music appreciation, you may get more/less out of this book. I enjoyed it, but lack a solid education in music and particularly in American bands from the 70s/80s. However, I do have a background in psychology, so I could relate with the dialogue on another level. I gained a better understanding, but didn't come away with too many ne More...

An awesome idea with a deep theoretical basis. All arguments are clearly well founded. However, and please note this is my opinion, it is extremely oversimplified. The physics of sound might not be known by everyone, but Levitin shouldn't forget them later to explain why the brain hears the fundamental frequency of any given note, namely resonance. Funnily enough he does mention resonance in a previous chapter, but he forgets about it altogether, and this clearly detracts from some of his explan More...

Easy to read, but not for lack of depth. Levitin combines his knowledge and love for music with his education and research in cognitive psychology in this fascinating look at our brains and the music we love. The introductory chapters lay the basic groundwork about music itself; rhythm, pitch, meter, scales, etc. It's smooth sailing for those who are less familiar with these technicalities, and his witty prose can also keep the more advanced reader engaged. Levitin makes substantiated arguments More...