Listening to music has become such a banal and ubiquitous activity that it takes a deliberate effort to realize the cognitive complexity behind it. For those who want to shake off this deceptive familiarity, the book “Music in Your Brain”, by American psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, is quite a find.
Although brief, the work works both as a very didactic introduction to music theory and as a presentation of the challenges of studying the human brain. It’s no small feat, but the author’s surprising professional background helps.
Levitin dropped out of his first college degree to play in a band, and after the group broke up, he spent a decade serving as a music producer in the United States, having the opportunity to work with sound engineers who welcomed artists like Santana and Whitney Houston into their studios. His curiosity about such issues as the fine details of musical perception, the nature of talent and the origins of creativity prompted him to return to university and begin his academic career.
As the specialist points out, in recent decades a curious disconnect has emerged between the act of listening to music and that of producing it, at least in most of the world. It has become so easy to have access to “musical content” (to use the anodyne language of virtual platforms) that the vast majority of people just consume music passively, without even dreaming of playing an instrument or even singing (outside the shower).
It hasn’t worked that way for most of our species’ history, however. Everything indicates that our instinctive predilection for rhythms and melodies is at least as old as the origins of Homo sapiens and, almost always, it was something that happened in communal or family contexts. People who listened to music were also almost always capable of making music – singing, tapping their feet, playing simple or even more elaborate instruments.
With the changes in this scenario, ordinary people have become increasingly uncomfortable with understanding how music works, and it is this initial barrier that Levitin tries to overcome with his music theory crash course at the beginning of the book (the reader can be calm: even those who do not know the difference between note and chord should pass with ease).
This introduction is enough to show the great theme of the book: how music works a privileged window to understand the human brain’s capacity for abstraction.
In fact, this is the big magic. A banal example: how the hell can we always recognize the indefectible melody of “Für Elise” (Beethoven’s music that used to be played by every holy gas truck throughout Brazil), whether it’s generated by a skilled pianist on a well-tuned instrument or by the crude synthesizers from an old cell phone?
Between one extreme of musical competence and the other, practically everything changes, especially the timbre (basically the qualitative side of the sound, which comes from the way it is produced – by the vocal chords of a person or the strings of a guitar, for example) . Even so, the brain manages to capture the “essence” of the melody from the system of interrelationships between the notes (roughly, the variation between lower and higher notes over time) and nail: yes, this is ” Für Elise”.
Music also opens important doors for understanding the links between expectations, memories and emotions. It is well known that certain combinations of musical notes are capable of eliciting different emotional reactions, and that this occurs more or less independently of the culture to which the listener belongs.
Apparently, it’s the emotional context that makes certain songs so easy to remember, just as it does with other non-musical type memories. Why phenomena like these have become so important to all human cultures is still a mystery. But the book is an excellent way to draw attention to the complexity that lurks behind the simplest of refrains.
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