Daniel Levitin: Quotes about music (page 2)

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”