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What was the first song that humans sang and why did music become an integral part of human life from the beginning?
Levitin tells the story of the co-evolution of music and of the human brain, how each one influenced the development of the other over tens of thousands of years. An unprecedented blend of science and art, Daniel Levitin’s best-selling debut, This Is Your Brain on Music (translated into 14 languages), changed the way we think about how music gets in our heads. Now in what is being called a tour de force by leading scientists, he shows how six specific forms of music played a pivotal role in creating human culture and society as we know it. Levitin masterfully weaves together the story of human evolution, music, anthropology, psychology and biology from the dawn of homo sapiens to the present. |
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Dr. Daniel Levitin is the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University, where he holds additional faculty positions in the School of Computer Science, School of Music, and Faculty of Education. Levitin earned his B.A. in Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science at Stanford University, and went on to earn his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Oregon, researching complex auditory patterns and pattern processing in expert and non-expert populations. He completed post-doctoral training at Stanford University Medical School (in Neuroimaging) and at UC Berkeley (in Cognitive Psychology). He has consulted on audio sound source separation for the U.S. Navy, and on audio quality for several rock bands (including the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan), record labels, and served as one of the "Golden Ears" expert listeners in the original Dolby AC3 compression tests. Prior to entering academia, he worked as record producer and recording engineer, and has been awarded 14 gold or platinum records by the RIAA. Before coming to McGill, he taught at UC Berkeley in the psychology department, and at Stanford University in the Department of Computer Science, the Program in Human-Computer Interaction, and the Departments of Psychology, Anthropology, Computer Music, and History of Science.He is the author of the #1 Bestseller "This Is Your Brain on Music," which spent over a year on the New York Times list, and has been translated into 14 languages.
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"Music seems to have an almost willful, evasive quality, defying simple e
xplanation, so that the more we find out, the more there is to know, leaving its power and mystery intact, however much we may dig and delve. Daniel's book is an eloquent and poetic exploration of this paradox.."
— Sting |
"The human mind is an amazing thing and its greatest attribute is imagination; from this has come great inventions, medical discoveries and art. All those great works from Bach onwards up to the present day have come from the fertile imagination of the human brain..."
— Sir George Martin |
"This is the worst idea for a book I've ever heard - it makes me want to vomit. The idea encapsulates the very worst part of Western thought. It makes a purely Socratic distinction about something that isn't intellectualizable." [One week later:] "I take it back - I'm sorry! This is great!"
— Joni Mitchell |
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Following up on his bestselling This is Your Brain on Music, musician and cognitive scientist Levitin argues that we evolved to produce and consume music for six reasons: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. Drawing on personal anecdotes, conversations with greats such as Sting and Joni Mitchell, and his own knowledge of evolutionary history, Levitin creates a rich account of how music has allowed humans to thrive even when faced with war, loss, and dwindling romance.
— Seed Magazine |
With protean musical reach and intellectual grasp, Levitin strides past academic boundaries, a Pied Piper celebrating diversity within community, in this exploration of music, emotion, and the brain...
— Library Journal
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I found this a fresh, compelling construct that allows the author to explain how music enriches and informs our lives, how it teaches us, how it helps us-and also for him to share vivid stories that illustrate his points.
Perhaps the story of how he visits the John Lennon/Yoko Ono suite at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth hotel-the one where John and Yoko held their famous 1969 week-long "bed in" to protest the Vietnam War-is my favorite...
— Readers Digest
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