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Editor CA&E
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No one knows when a good book is published anymore because only about 12 people in the entire country actually read these "bestsellers." Consider the millions who go online to browse a story, watch a TV program or go to the movies... If you sell a few hundred thousand books you're a rock star. And we won't even get into the numbers for a magazine. I didn't know about Daniel Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music until it was published in paperback form. Yes, just in time to purchase it at the reduced paperback price. I've been a songwriter and a "musician" (I'll let the real musicians use the term without quotation marks) most of my life and it never really interested me enough to investigate how the brain processes music. Turns out to be as fascinating as sitting around in the dark trying to decipher all the sounds in some Charles Ives' piece. I got chills reading the book, like I get chills listening to Wagner's "Liebstod" in Tristan & Isolde.
Here's an example: Levitin talks about how the brain registers frequencies. If you connect electrodes to your visual cortex and look at red tomatoes, the neurons in the brain won't cause the electrodes to turn a corresponding red; but the electrodes connected to the auditory cortex will cause neurons to fire the frequency that you pick up with your ears! So "what goes into the ear comes out of the brain." That there is a direct one-to-one correspondence like that makes me wonder just how fundamental music or sound is to humans (and to human development). Speaking of what's fundamental, he says that studies show that sound composed of different frequencies are perceived as having the fundamental frequency. Take away the fundamental from the collection of frequencies and the brain will still perceive it.
I like to say that music is great because it's the one thing that you don't need to explain. People feel as though they haven't really experienced, say, a work of literature or cinema until it's been explained and interpreted until everything that you experience has a correlation to something else. While music isn't free from the temptation for interpretation, I would say it's the one form that in general people experience most viscerally. I enjoy Sigur Ros because I enjoy Sigur Ros-and no, I don't care that they're singing in Hopelandish, a made-up language. Or have you ever listened to "The Double Dutch Bus"? I have no idea what that song is about, but it's one of my favorite "pop" songs of all time. It may have a meaning that's eluded me, but the point here is that I've found it so enjoyable and fun that it never occurred to me to analyze it that way.