Daniel Levitin: Quotes about music
Daniel Levitin is American psychologist. Explore interesting quotes on music.“Your brain on music is all about… connections.”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography... between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems.... it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times of our lives. Your brain on music is all about... connections.
“It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of "experts" performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unkown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.
“Music, or any art form… has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable—we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity...
The World in Six Songs (2008)
Context: Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality.... that is a feature of the musical brain.
“The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography... between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems.... it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times of our lives. Your brain on music is all about... connections.
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of "experts" performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unkown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.
“Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/31/AR2007053101848.html (June 1, 2007)
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Australian Broadcasting Corporation http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/5009818 (October 11, 2013)
The World in Six Songs (2008)
The World in Six Songs (2008)
“We may have had music before we had a word for it.”
The World in Six Songs (2008)
“Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability.”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)