“The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.”
The World in Six Songs (2008)
Quotes from book
The World in Six Songs
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature is a popular science book written by the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin, and first published by Dutton Penguin in the U.S. and Canada in 2008, and updated and released in paperback by Plume in 2009, and translated into six languages. Levitin’s second New York Times bestseller, following the publication of This Is Your Brain on Music, received praise from a wide variety of readers including Sir George Martin, Sting, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Adam Gopnik. The Los Angeles Times called it "masterful". The New York Times wrote: "A lively, ambitious new book whose combined elements can induce feelings of enlightenment and euphoria. Will leave you awestruck." The Times wrote "Levitin is such an enthusiastic anthropologist, such an exuberant song and dance man, such a natural-born associative thinker, that you gotta love the guy." It was named one of the best books of 2008 by the Boston Herald and by Seed Magazine.The World in Six Songs combines science and art to reveal how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history. This book leans more heavily on anthropology and evolutionary biology than did This Is Your Brain On Music, which skewed more toward findings in psychoacoustics and neuroscience.
The World in Six Songs (2008)
The World in Six Songs (2008)
“The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others.”
The World in Six Songs (2008)
The World in Six Songs (2008)
“Music has been a shaping force… music has been there to guide the development of human nature.”
The World in Six Songs (2008)
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 World in Six Songs (2008)
Context: Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems.... Humans who just happened to find creativity attractive may have hitched their reproductive wagons to musicians and artists, and... conferred a survival advantage on their offspring.
