Book Summary (blog post #5)

book title: "This Is Your Brain On Music"
author: Daniel J. Levitin
chapter: one

• many people, when they hear the word music, the great masters; Beethoven, Debussy, and Mozart, come to mind.

• others may instantly think of Busta Rhymes, Dr, Dre, Moby, etc.

• the people who grew up in the 1940's or 50's may believe that anything made before 1940 or after 1960 isn't really considered music at all.

• a well-known composer, Edgard Varese, famously defined it, "Music is organized sound."

• while we listen to music, we are actually perceiving multiple attributes or "dimensions,' and our brains organize these fundamentals into higher level concepts.

• music and dance contribute to similar attributes such as giving rise to perspective, foreground and background, emotion, and many others.

• pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, spatial location, reverberation all are extremely important elements of music, which lead on to the higher-order concepts such as meter, key, melody, and harmony;busying every part of our brains.

• each genre of music helps to change our brains in to believing everything we're hearing, but not always act on it and make good or bad decisions in life.

Chapter Summary - 

In the book This Is Your Brain On Music, the author, Daniel J. Levitin explains that your brain has a complex way of responding to music and many people are biased towards which genre of music relates to their own life. I agree with this statement because our brain does respond to things strangely and it does change over time. Obviously, people are going to choose their favorite genre of music depending on what they have gone through in life to relate, and the attributes of music giving us a strong perspective and emotion.