This is your brain on music
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 7:11AM I'm currently reading this book, written by Daniel Levitin- a musician and record producer-turned cognitive neuro-scientist who specialises in studying the way our brains process and understand music. It's fascinating and very readable.
Here's an excerpt from the chapter where he is explaining why we end up with the musical tastes and preferences we do:
The first time I heard John Lennon or Donald Fagen sing, I thought the voices unimaginably strange. I didn't want to like them. Something kept me going back to listen, though – perhaps it was the strangeness – and they wound up being two of my favourite voices; voices that have now gone beyond familiar and approach what I can only call intimate; I feel as though these voices have become incorporated into who I am. And at a neural level, they have. Having listened to thousands of hours of both these singers, and tens of thousands of playings of their songs, my brain has developed circuitry that can pick out their voices from among thousands of others, even when they sing something I've never heard them sing before. My brain has encoded every vocal nuance and every timbral flourish, so that if I hear an alternate version of one of their songs – as we do on the John Lennon Collection of demo versions of his albums – I can immediately recognize the ways in which this performance deviates from the one I have stored in the neural pathways of my long-term memory.
This reasonates with my own experiences of listening to certain singers/music for so long they have become "incorporated into who I am". I suspect the more eccentric the voice, the more memorable it is and the more distinctive the impression it makes in your neural networks - if you give it the chance!
Reader Comments (1)
Yeah that's a great book...give lots of ideas for mixing...another goodie is http://musicophilia.com/ by Oliver Sacks