Daniel Levitin - This Is Your Brain on Music (2006)

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Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing.... Joni will talk compellingly and passionately about alternate tunings for hours, comparing them to different colors that van Gogh used in his paintings.

Daniel Levitin
In songbirds, it is generally the male of the species that sings, and for some species, the larger the repertoire, the more likely it is to attract a mate.

Daniel Levitin
Studies of violin players by Thomas Elbert have shown that the region of the brain responsible for moving the left hand... increases in size as a result of practice.

Daniel Levitin
During the first six months or so of life... the infant brain is unable to clearly distinguish the source of sensory inputs; vision, hearing, and touch meld into a unitary perceptual representation.... inputs from the various sensory receptors may connect to many different parts of the brain, pending pruning that will occur later in life. As Simon Baron-Cohen has described it, with all this sensory cross talk, the infant lives in a state of complete psychodelic splendor (without the aid of drugs).

Daniel Levitin
Memory strength is also a function of how much we care about the experience.... If I'm playing an instrument I like, and whose sound pleases me in and of itself... caring leads to attention, and together they lead to measurable neurochemical changes. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with emotional regulation, alertness, and mood, is released, and the dopaminergic system aids in encoding the memory trace.

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
Consonant intervals and dissonant intervals are processed via separate mechanisms in the auditory cortex.

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

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
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
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 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
Collective music making... may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony, and may have been an exercise for other social acts...

Daniel Levitin
Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability.

Daniel Levitin
Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found.... Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.

Daniel Levitin