Marigold's review
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
This was pretty technical for me - I read it for book group when the theme was "read outside of your comfort zone"! I do love music & participate in it as a singer, but the science end of things is not comfortable for me. I found the book fascinating but I can't say I understood all of what I was reading. So for me it was more like a collection of fun facts that cropped up as I was reading. For instance, I still don't understand what A440 is!
Did you know:
When men and women speak in unison, they generally speak one octave apart, even when they try to speak the exact same pitches?
Research on the development of the first MRI scanners was done by the British company EMI, financed mostly by profits from the sales of Beatles records?
When you get a song stuck in your head, that's called an ear worm?
Timbre is the overall sound of a song/piece of music. People can most reliably identify songs based on their timbre, not their melody or rhythm. For instance, you might...more
Did you know:
When men and women speak in unison, they generally speak one octave apart, even when they try to speak the exact same pitches?
Research on the development of the first MRI scanners was done by the British company EMI, financed mostly by profits from the sales of Beatles records?
When you get a song stuck in your head, that's called an ear worm?
Timbre is the overall sound of a song/piece of music. People can most reliably identify songs based on their timbre, not their melody or rhythm. For instance, you might...more
A440 signifies a tone created by a 440hz wave, which happens to correspond to the note 'A' in a typical western twelve tone, equal temperament tuning. Thus, "A 440".See more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
right -- 440 is the number of waves per second. "a" an octave below has 220 waves per second, and an octave above 440 is 880. i hope this helps.
