This is Your Brain on Music

Neuroscientist and former record producer Daniel J. Levitin brings the two halves of his career together in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, first published by Dutton in 2006. Drawing on his laboratory work at McGill University and on years spent in recording studios, Levitin asks why a species evolved to hear at all should care so much about organised sound — and why music moves us in ways that seem out of all proportion to its usefulness.

The book works outward from the raw materials. Levitin explains pitch, timbre, rhythm, harmony and loudness in plain language, then shows what happens in the brain when those elements arrive: how expectation is set up and violated, where emotion enters, and what PET scans and MRI studies actually reveal about listening and performance. Along the way he takes up the questions listeners ask themselves — why the music of our teenage years keeps its grip, how a phrase lodges itself and will not leave, what separates a trained musician's hearing from an ordinary listener's, and whether musical taste is settled early or stays open. His examples range across Mozart, Duke Ellington, Van Halen and the Beatles rather than staying inside the concert hall.

Its most argued-over chapter is the closing one, where Levitin takes issue with Steven Pinker's description of music as evolutionary "auditory cheesecake" and proposes instead that music was central to human social bonding and to sexual selection. Written deliberately without jargon for the general reader, the book sold more than a million copies, was translated into eighteen languages, became a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and is now assigned in courses at MIT, Stanford and Harvard.