Summary of Daniel J. Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Music is a vast genre that can be defined as organized sound. It can be traditional, like the great masters, or it can be avant-garde, like Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, or Pierre Schaeffer.
#2 The muscial terms I’ll be using are pitch, rhythm, tempo, and contour. Pitch is a purely psychological construct related to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale. Rhythm is the durations of a series of notes, and the way they group together into units.
#3 The five attributes of music are pitch, loudness, timbre, reverberation, and melody. These attributes are separable, and can be changed without altering the others. When these basic elements combine and form relationships with one another in a meaningful way, they create higher-order concepts such as meter, key, and melody.
#4 The idea of primitive elements combining to create art, and of the importance of relationships between elements, exists in visual art and dance as well. The most critical aspect of a work of art is not the objects themselves, but the space between objects.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• Social Aspects
• Philosophy
• Music

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 11 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822505766
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Daniel J. Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Music is a vast genre that can be defined as organized sound. It can be traditional, like the great masters, or it can be avant-garde, like Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, or Pierre Schaeffer.

#2

The muscial terms I’ll be using are pitch, rhythm, tempo, and contour. Pitch is a purely psychological construct related to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale. Rhythm is the durations of a series of notes, and the way they group together into units.

#3

The five attributes of music are pitch, loudness, timbre, reverberation, and melody. These attributes are separable, and can be changed without altering the others. When these basic elements combine and form relationships with one another in a meaningful way, they create higher-order concepts such as meter, key, and melody.

#4

The idea of primitive elements combining to create art, and of the importance of relationships between elements, exists in visual art and dance as well. The most critical aspect of a work of art is not the objects themselves, but the space between objects.

#5

The term timbre refers to the overall sound or tonal color of an instrument. It is what distinguishes a trumpet from a clarinet when they are playing the same written note, or what distinguishes your voice from Brad Pitt’s if you are saying the same words.

#6

The pitch of a sound is the quality that primarily distinguishes the sound that is associated with pressing one piano key versus another. It is that quality that primarily determines what we call high and low sounds.

#7

Pitch is the mental representation an organism has of the fundamental frequency of a sound. It is a purely psychological phenomenon that is related to the frequency of vibrating air molecules.

#8

Pitch is the sound of an object falling in a forest if no one is there to hear it. It is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Humans can hear sounds from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, but each animal hears only a subset of the possible sounds.

#9

The range of human pitch perception is 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, but this does not mean that the range of human hearing is the same. By analogy, colors at the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the spectrum lack definition compared to the colors closer to the middle.

#10

Pitch is one of the primary means by which musical emotion is conveyed. Mood, excitement, calm, romance, and danger are signaled by a number of factors, but pitch is among the most decisive. A single high note can convey excitement, a single low note sadness.

#11

The brain basis for the distinction between calm and excitement is based on learning. We all have the innate capacity to learn the linguistic and musical distinctions of our culture, and experience with the music of that culture shapes our neural pathways so that we ultimately internalize a set of rules common to that musical tradition.

#12

The brain has a direct map of pitch, and it is this map that determines what pitches are considered legal in a musical system. The names A, B, and so on are arbitrary labels that we associate with particular frequencies.

#13

The note names in Western music run from A to G, or Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do. The octave is the basis for music, and it is a frequency ratio of 2:1. When we double a tone’s frequency, we end up with a note that sounds remarkably similar to the one we started out with.

#14

The octave is the base of the musical scale. It is subdivided into twelve equally spaced tones. The intervallic distance between two tones is called a whole step or a tone. The smallest division in our Western scale system cuts a whole step in half: the half step, or semitone.

#15

The twelve notes of the octave are not the only tones that are important in music. The notes between the white keys on the piano are also important, and they are called black keys.

#16

The names of pitches are associated with particular frequency values. Our current system is called A440 because the note we call A that is in the middle of the piano keyboard has been fixed to have a frequency of 440 Hz.

#17

The major scale is the most common scale used in Western music. It is a subset of twelve notes, and it is typically drawn from the C major scale, which has the pattern of whole steps and half steps between each note.

#18

The most common minor scale is the A minor scale, which uses the white keys of the piano. The pattern of whole steps and half steps is different from that of the major scale: whole–half–whole–whole–half–whole–whole.

#19

The associations between musical patterns and emotions are very strong, and we create these memory links between a particular set of notes and a particular place, time, or set of events.

#20

The most important tone in the major scale is the seventh scale degree, B. The tone that points least strongly to the tonic is the fifth scale degree, G, and it points least strongly because it is perceived as relatively stable.

#21

The human brain is capable of automatically recognizing and recognizing musical structures and rules. It is able to do this because it is constantly absorbing new sounds and incorporating them into its structure. As we age, these neural circuits become less pliable, and it becomes more difficult to incorporate new musical systems.

#22

The brain is so attuned to the overtone series that it can fill in the missing fundamental when it hears a sound that is not harmonic. If we artificially create a sound with energy at 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, and 500 Hz, we still perceive it as having a pitch of 100 Hz.

#23

The overtone series is a fact of the world that we expect to find everywhere we look. Any organism that evolved in a world with vibrating objects is likely to have evolved a processing unit in the brain that incorporated these regularities.