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troutman · 01-14-2011, 08:57 AM

^ Interesting. I always recommend this book:

http://www.yourbrainonmusic.com/

What is music? Where does it come from? Why do some sequences of sounds move us so while others - such as dogs barking or cars screeching - make many of us uncomfortable?

Music is unusual among all human activities for both its ubiquity and its antiquity . No known human culture now nor anytime in the recorded past lacked music. Some of the oldest physical artifacts found in human and proto-human excavation sites are musical instruments: bone flutes and animal skins stretched over tree stumps to make drums. Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep, and college students studying with music as a background. Even more so in non-industrialized cultures than in modern Western societies, music is and was part of the fabric of everyday life. Only relatively recently in our own culture, 500 years or so ago, a distinction arose that cut society in two, forming separate classes of musical performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries.

This book is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience - the field that is at the intersection of psychology and neurology. I'll discuss some of my own and the latest studies researchers in our field have conducted on music, musical meaning, and musical pleasure. They offer new insights into profound questions. If all of us hear music differently, how can we account for pieces that seem to move so many people - Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or Don McLean's "Vincent (Starry Starry Night (Vincent)" for example? On the other hand, if we all hear music in the same way, how can we account for wide differences in musical preference - why is it that one man's Mozart is another man's Madonna?

01-14-2011, 08:57 AM	#796
troutman Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Crowsnest Pass Exp:	^ Interesting. I always recommend this book: http://www.yourbrainonmusic.com/ What is music? Where does it come from? Why do some sequences of sounds move us so while others - such as dogs barking or cars screeching - make many of us uncomfortable? Music is unusual among all human activities for both its ubiquity and its antiquity . No known human culture now nor anytime in the recorded past lacked music. Some of the oldest physical artifacts found in human and proto-human excavation sites are musical instruments: bone flutes and animal skins stretched over tree stumps to make drums. Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep, and college students studying with music as a background. Even more so in non-industrialized cultures than in modern Western societies, music is and was part of the fabric of everyday life. Only relatively recently in our own culture, 500 years or so ago, a distinction arose that cut society in two, forming separate classes of musical performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries. This book is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience - the field that is at the intersection of psychology and neurology. I'll discuss some of my own and the latest studies researchers in our field have conducted on music, musical meaning, and musical pleasure. They offer new insights into profound questions. If all of us hear music differently, how can we account for pieces that seem to move so many people - Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or Don McLean's "Vincent (Starry Starry Night (Vincent)" for example? On the other hand, if we all hear music in the same way, how can we account for wide differences in musical preference - why is it that one man's Mozart is another man's Madonna? Last edited by troutman; 01-14-2011 at 09:00 AM.