One of the most known books tackling music science is Daniel Levitin’s 2009 book The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. It was also one of the first books I read when I started to get interested in the topic. Continue reading…
music science
Music is magic
And we can’t live without it
I feel lucky, sometimes, because I’ve chosen to focus my academic efforts on a field that arouses interest in both the general audience and amongst scientists. Consequently, there are books which are perfect for a relative beginner such as myself: books that talk about the scientific aspects of music in an understandable way. One such book is Philip Ball’s The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It (2010). Below are a couple of curiosities I learned while reading it.*
Mind-mapping music science
Or introducing colours to the world of music
Recently, while sitting on the couch, I started thinking about the many branches that the scientific study of music appears to encompass. Everybody in the field(s) seems to implicitly understand the different aspects, but no one writes about them. This was, I realized, one of the reasons why I held so much wonder at the beginning, when I started discovering the many sides of the music science equation. That day, I grabbed my sketchbook* and outlined the following mind map (to which I later added colours, because my life needs a splash of rainbow). Continue reading…
The Singing … What Now?
Talking about the origins of music and language
The curiously named book The Singing Neanderthals by Stephen Mithen is the book I wish I’d written and still hold hopes that one day I might. Its basic premise is that music and language developed at around the same time and that music is a fundamental part of us, not merely a byproduct. It’s a thought that surely resonates with all music enthusiasts. Continue reading…
