This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work. The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today’s truths become tomorrow’s disproven hypotheses or forgotten objets d’art.

For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies, and cultures change.

Music, then, can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds.

categories are formed not just by matching properties, but by theories about how things are related.

the prototype is the central tendency, the average category member.

Music works because we remember the tones we have just heard and are relating them to the ones that are just now being played.

Repetition, when done skillfully by a master composer, is emotionally satisfying to our brains, and makes the listening experience as pleasurable as it is.

Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered to be the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time.

I’ve known a lot of artists whom the press has called “overnight sensations,” but who spent five or ten years becoming that!

In a sense, schemas are everything. They frame our understanding; they’re the system into which we place the elements and interpretations of an aesthetic object.

Safety plays a role for a lot of us in choosing music. To a certain extent, we surrender to music when we listen to it—we allow ourselves to trust the composers and musicians with a part of our hearts and our spirits;

Music for the developing brain is a form of play, an exercise that invokes higher-level integrative processes that nurture exploratory competence, preparing the child to eventually explore generative language development through babbling, and ultimately more complex linguistic and paralinguistic productions.