Daniel Levitin: Quotes about music

Daniel Levitin is American psychologist. Explore interesting quotes on music.

Daniel Levitin: 152 quotes1 like

“Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.”

The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/31/AR2007053101848.html (June 1, 2007)

“I think we will see personalized music stations in the next few years… controlled by computer algorithms… I think it will be important that… listeners have an "adventuresomeness" knob that will control the mix of old and new, or the mix of how far out the new music is from what they usually listen to.”

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“Cosmides and Tooby argue that music's function in the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands placed on it by language and social interaction. …Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both singing and rhythmic movement…”

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“Contour refers to the pattern of musical pitch in a melody—the sequence of ups or downs that the melody takes—regardless of the size of the interval.”

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“Memory for playing a musical piece… involves a process very much like that for music listening… through establishing standard schemas and expectation. In addition, musicians use chunking… tying information together into groups, and remembering the group as a whole rather than individual pieces.”

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“Collective music making… may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony, and may have been an exercise for other social acts…”

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“Music… is… a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

“Music has been a shaping force… music has been there to guide the development of human nature.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

“Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information.”

Daniel Levitin book The Organized Mind

The Organized Mind (2014)

“Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time.”

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)