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essentialsaltes The Science of Human Obsession
The book won a number of awards when it came out in 2006, and has been incorporated into some college classes. It relates what is (or was then) known about the neuroscience of musical perception.
I really enjoyed the earlier parts of the book that focused very tightly on the perception of sound and music, probably because it bridged the physics of sounds and music (that I know to some degree) with the neuroscience. Like, you may know that a plucked string or an organ pipe has many resonant frequencies other than the fundamental -- the one we think of as 'the' note it's playing. But we don't experience it as a group of separate frequencies, but as a unified note. And if a guitar and an oboe are playing the same note simultaneously, we don't experience it as a guiboe, but we hear the two instruments more or less distinctly.
As the book goes on, it moves from tones and notes to chords and songs and harmony and genres and musical tastes, and at each step along the way, it seems the connection neuroscience gets more diffuse. I can't fault the science for being what it is, but for me it was less compelling and interesting.
The book won a number of awards when it came out in 2006, and has been incorporated into some college classes. It relates what is (or was then) known about the neuroscience of musical perception.
I really enjoyed the earlier parts of the book that focused very tightly on the perception of sound and music, probably because it bridged the physics of sounds and music (that I know to some degree) with the neuroscience. Like, you may know that a plucked string or an organ pipe has many resonant frequencies other than the fundamental -- the one we think of as 'the' note it's playing. But we don't experience it as a group of separate frequencies, but as a unified note. And if a guitar and an oboe are playing the same note simultaneously, we don't experience it as a guiboe, but we hear the two instruments more or less distinctly.
As the book goes on, it moves from tones and notes to chords and songs and harmony and genres and musical tastes, and at each step along the way, it seems the connection neuroscience gets more diffuse. I can't fault the science for being what it is, but for me it was less compelling and interesting.
