Summary of Daniel J. Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Music is a vast genre that can be defined as organized sound. It can be traditional, like the great masters, or it can be avant-garde, like Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, or Pierre Schaeffer.

#2 The muscial terms I’ll be using are pitch, rhythm, tempo, and contour. Pitch is a purely psychological construct related to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale. Rhythm is the durations of a series of notes, and the way they group together into units.

#3 The five attributes of music are pitch, loudness, timbre, reverberation, and melody. These attributes are separable, and can be changed without altering the others. When these basic elements combine and form relationships with one another in a meaningful way, they create higher-order concepts such as meter, key, and melody.

#4 The idea of primitive elements combining to create art, and of the importance of relationships between elements, exists in visual art and dance as well. The most critical aspect of a work of art is not the objects themselves, but the space between objects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822505766

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Insights on Daniel J. Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Music is a vast genre that can be defined as organized sound. It can be traditional, like the great masters, or it can be avant-garde, like Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, or Pierre Schaeffer.

#2

The muscial terms I’ll be using are pitch, rhythm, tempo, and contour. Pitch is a purely psychological construct related to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale. Rhythm is the durations of a series of notes, and the way they group together into units.

#3

The five attributes of music are pitch, loudness, timbre, reverberation, and melody. These attributes are separable, and can be changed without altering the others. When these basic elements combine and form relationships with one another in a meaningful way, they create higher-order concepts such as meter, key, and melody.

#4

The idea of primitive elements combining to create art, and of the importance of relationships between elements, exists in visual art and dance as well. The most critical aspect of a work of art is not the objects themselves, but the space between objects.

#5

The term timbre refers to the overall sound or tonal color of an instrument. It is what distinguishes a trumpet from a clarinet when they are playing the same written note, or what distinguishes your voice from Brad Pitt’s if you are saying the same words.

#6

The pitch of a sound is the quality that primarily distinguishes the sound that is associated with pressing one piano key versus another. It is that quality that primarily determines what we call high and low sounds.

#7

Pitch is the mental representation an organism has of the fundamental frequency of a sound. It is a purely psychological phenomenon that is related to the frequency of vibrating air molecules.

#8

Pitch is the sound of an object falling in a forest if no one is there to hear it. It is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Humans can hear sounds from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, but each animal hears only a subset of the possible sounds.

#9

The range of human pitch perception is 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, but this does not