Literature Quotes (The Music Instinct)

The Music Instinct by Philip Ball.

1. " Before we can even start to ask how music creates emotion, we must wrestle with the conundrum of what 'musical emotion' means".
2. " Music can arouse all manner of passions, from anger to despair, even disgust, while remaining music to which we choose to listen".
3. "In contrast to moods, emotions are typically of shorter duration, often accompanied by distinct facial expressions, and most importantly, evoked by identifiable, specific stimuli rather than by a generalised ambience".
4. "When we see a sad film or read a sad book, we might be moved from empathy and identification by the experiences of the character. But if music can be said to be 'sad' (itself a simplistic description), in what does the sadness reside?".
5. " - in this respect, the brain might experience music as a kind of 'super-expressive voice'". 
6. "with anticipation comes tension - have we guessed right or not? - and that in turn carries an emotional charge". 
7. " 'Rhythm' . Certain purposeful violations of the beat are often exceptionally beautiful; wrote C.P.E Bach".  
8. "Musicians repeatedly use little signals to increase our confidence in our expectations and thus maximise the pleasure of their verification. This is why cadences are generally 'prepared' in classical music: their approach is clearly signalled. In rock music, drum fills and rolls serve this purpose in a rhythmic context as universally recognisable harbingers of change". 
9. "Another common trick for focusing harmonic expectation is the suspension. Here the movement from one chord to another is carried out in stages, as though one of the notes of the first chord has got 'snagged' while the others move".
10.  " Meyers himself was sceptical about formal, quantitative schemes for characterising the emotional structure of music, saying that ' what is profound about the experience of a listener is not the "deep structure" of a piece of music, but the power of the rich interaction of sound and silence to engage our minds and bodies, to give rise to feelings and to evoke associations".