Unhappily, When This Talented Academician’s Dual Worlds of Art and Science Meet in His “Brain on Music” Book, the Bridge Often Seems to Be Out

I began reading neuro-musical polymath Daniel J. Levitin’s new book, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, with consideration anticipation. I mean, who can deny it . . . what an extraordinary phenomenon music is!

Some years ago, while living in a suburb of Denver, I remember being so affected by the unexpected radio rendition of a song that I could no longer drive. At least, not safely. I steered into a parking lot in emergency fashion and sat and listened, utterly transfixed by what I was hearing, somehow transported to some “high” place whose existence I’d had not the slightest inkling of moments before.

There are songs in my memory—yours, too, I’m quite sure—simply too painful to bear. (For me, the gospel hymns sung at my mother’s funeral, for example). Until the experience was considerably ruined by the ruthless sullying of the American ethos by the current Mayberry Machiavellis in Washington, my eyes teared at every halfway decent performance of the U.S. national anthem. Couldn’t help it.

So when Dan Levitin offers to explain how my brain makes music, I’m all ears. Surely, his background and talents are unique. Session musician, commercial recording and live sound engineer, record producer, Stanford B.A. in cognitive psychology, U. of Oregon Ph.D. in psychology, Booz-Allen Hamilton business consultant, founder of MoodLogic.com, the first internet music recommendation engine. And today, head of the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University.

When it comes to music, Dr. Levitin, how does the brain do it? And why? Levitan wastes not a moment in drawing on his remarkable background in cognitive neuroscience and his former career as a Rocker and recording industry fixture to explain it.

The sections of the book of most interest to me, a braaaaiiiinnnnn man, involve familiar territory. I never tire of hearing just how many neurons 100,000,000,000 neurons are. (Levitan illustrates by having you start passing out a dollar bill per second on the day Jesus is born; today, you’ll still have about $33,000,000,000 left.) Then you connect the neurons that go to the hip bone to those that go to the thigh bone and so forth, and you get so many connections that, says Levitin, “it is unlikely that we will ever understand all the possible connections in the brain, or what they mean.”

He explains how the brain takes the sounds of music and begins to analyze them, lightning-fast, from both top-down and bottom-up fashion, seeking a sense of perceptual completion. Perception, say great psychologists, is a process of inference and involves an analysis of probabilities. So with music, as with all other perceptual completion tasks, the brain is constantly at work creating illusions and using them for filling-in purposes. Composers realize this and use the phenomenon, Levitin explains, knowing, for example, that “our perception of a melodic line will continue, even if part of it is obscured by other instruments.”

He writes of other fascinating examples of the brain on music: “In piano works such as Sindig’s 'The Rustle of Spring' or Chopin’s Fantasy-Impromptu in C-sharp Minor, op. 66, the notes go by so quickly that an illusory melody emerges. Play the tune slowly and it disappears. Due to stream segregation, the melody ‘pops out’ when the notes are close enough together in time—the perceptual system holds the notes together—but the melody is lost when its notes are too far apart in time. As studied by Bernard Lortat-Jacob at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, the Quintina (literally 'fifth one') in Sardinian a capella vocal music also conveys an illusion: A fifth female voice emerges from the four male voices when the harmony and timbres are performed just right. (They believe the voice is that of the Virgin Mary coming to reward them if they are pious enough to sing it right.)”

But eventually my own perceptual completion abilities get worn down by Levitin’s habit of constantly jumping from one of his domains of interest to another. Does he know too much about too much? I don’t think this is quite the problem. I think rather that Dr. Levitin doesn’t have the ear for writing that he has for music. Or rather that the brain qualities that make him so musically gifted get in his way when he tries to explain them. Somewhere along about the 100th page, I began to long for Steven Pinker’s or Daniel Dennett’s or William H. Calvin’s or E.O. Wilson’s ability to weave complex technical ideas into seamless prose. On the final page, Levitin’s book doesn’t end. It just quits. I probably should have sooner.

Order the book here: This Is Your Brain on Music

More info here: Daniel J. Levitin

Posted on September 19, 2006

A Few Good Words, If You Don’t Mind, for An Instrumental Utopianism. And Who Better to Frame the Case in the Fewest Words Possible Than the Late Ernest Becker?

If memory is right, my first exposure to the late Ernest Becker was his Pulitzer-Prize-winning (awarded posthumously, in the height of irony, two months after his own death at age 49) The Denial of Death. One phrase from that book has stayed with me because it says more about the condition of us humans than any other phrase I’ve ever read. Our plight, said the learned Canadian cultural anthropologist, is that we are all “gods who shit.”

Another of his books that I read back in my formative years again crossed my path this week. I had forgotten the Beckerian plainspokenness in a work published a couple of years earlier than The Denial of Death about the sciences of sociology and anthropology, The Lost Science of Man. There, he wrote:

“I don’t see how it can be denied that the science of man is, historically and by its very nature, a utopian science. Plato saw this right at the beginning of Western history, and Rousseau revived his vision at the beginning of the modern epoch. But today we understand something these men did not: that the Platonic and Enlightenment utopianism is simply not possible; we cannot bring into being a world in which sanity can unchallengeably reign, and in which self-expansive human pleasure can be assured for the masses of men. At least, this is what seems to be the lesson of our time: that the social arena is one of struggle, inequality, and irrationality; and there seems no way to overcome this, except by revolution, which in turn leads to a centralized statism that itself crushes the human spirit.

“But this does not mean that a utopian stance by the science of man is unrealistic or unseemly. On the contrary, we must believe more strongly than ever in the ‘instrumental utopianism’ which stems from 2500 years of Western thought: that we must become as rational and critical as possible in our social arrangements, and that we must continue to design, rework, and uphold an ideal vision for the masses of men. We know this will not achieve the great community of man, but it is an instrumental utopianism that alone can prevent the disaster and the death of mankind.”
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Becker’s books are available here:
The Denial of Death
The Lost Science of Man

Posted on September 04, 2006