Daniel Levitin Quotes

88 Sourced Quotes

The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

Daniel Levitin
It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of "experts" performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unkown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.

Daniel Levitin
The brain's synapses are programmed to grow for a number of years, making new connections. After that time, there is a shift toward pruning, to get rid of unneeded connections.... Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself.... the amount of reorganization that can occur in most adults is vastly less than can occur in children and adolescents.

Daniel Levitin
Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information.

Daniel Levitin
Music moves us because it serves as a metaphor for emotional life. It has peaks and valleys of tension and release. It mimics the dynamics of our emotional life.

Daniel Levitin
Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots.... Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard.... harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation.

Daniel Levitin
One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like Oh Susannah, This Land Is Your Land, and Frère Jacques.

Daniel Levitin
We may have had music before we had a word for it.

Daniel Levitin
Former secretary of state George Shultz, reflecting on forty years of United States foreign policy from 1970 to the present, said, When I think about all the money we spent on bombs and munitions, and our failures in Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world... Instead of advancing our agenda using force, we should have instead built schools and hospitals in these countries, improving the lives of their children. By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us.

Daniel Levitin
Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems.... Humans who just happened to find creativity attractive may have hitched their reproductive wagons to musicians and artists, and... conferred a survival advantage on their offspring.

Daniel Levitin
Cosmides and Tooby argue that music's function in the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands placed on it by language and social interaction.... Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both singing and rhythmic movement...

Daniel Levitin
On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.

Daniel Levitin
I think we will see personalized music stations in the next few years... controlled by computer algorithms... I think it will be important that... listeners have an "adventuresomeness" knob that will control the mix of old and new, or the mix of how far out the new music is from what they usually listen to.

Daniel Levitin