Literature Quotes (This Is Your Brain On Music)

This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin.

1. "Pitch is a purely psychological construct, related both to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale".
2. "In the same way that a particular arrangement of pitches- the scale- can evoke music of a different culture, style, or idiom, so can a particular arrangement of rhythms". 
3. "When we organise rhythms into strings of notes, of varying lengths and emphases, we develop meter and establish tempo".
4. "The neural basis for this striking accuracy is probably in the cerebellum, which is believed to contain a system of timekeepers for our daily lives and to synchronise to the music we are hearing". 
5. " As with pitch, small-integer ratios of durations are the most common, and there is accumulating evidence that they are easier to process neurally".
6. "But as Eric Clarke notes, small-integer ratios are almost never found in samples of real music. This indicates that there is a quantization process - equalizing durations- occurring during our neural processing of music time"
7. "Tapping along with music, either actually or just in your mind, involves the cerebellums timing circuits. Performing music - regardless of what instruments you play, or whether you sing, or conduct involves the Frontal Lobes again for planning of your behaviour, as well as the motor cortex in the posterior part of the Frontal Lobe just underneath the top of your head, and sensory cortex, which provides the tactile feedback that you have pressed the right key on your instrument, or moved the baton where you thought you did".
8. "If the car horn has a pitch of A440, neurons that are set to fire when that frequency is encountered will most probably fire, and they'll fire again when an A440 occurs in Rachmaninoff. But my inner mental experience is likely to be different because of the different contexts involved and the different neural networks that are recruited in the two cases". 
9. "Abrupt, Short, Loud sounds tend to be interpreted by many animals as a n alert sound; we see this when comparing the alert calls of Birds, Rodents and Apes. Slow onset, long and quieter sounds tend to be interpreted as calming, or at least neutral. Think of the sharp sound of a dog's bark, versus the soft purring of a cat who sits peacefully on your lap. Composers know this, of course, and use hundreds of subtle shadings of timbre and note length to convey the many different emotional shadings of human experience".   
10. "Being an expert musician thus takes many forms: dexterity at playing an instrument, emotional communication, creativity, and special mental structures for remembering music". 
11. "Being an expert listener, which most of us are by the age of six, involves having incorporated the grammar of our musical culture into mental schemas that allow us to form musical expectations, the heart of the aesthetic experience in music".