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The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature | 
 enlarge | Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 1938
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 368
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0525950737
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.11
EAN: 9780525950738
ASIN: 0525950737
Publication Date: August 19, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: new hardcover in dustjacket,NO marks or remainders, ships same or next business day with delivery confirmation
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Product Description
BR BThe author of the INew York Times/I bestseller and ILos Angeles Times/I Book Award Finalist IThis Is Your Brain on Music/I tunes us in to six evolutionary musical forms that brought about the evolution of human culture./BBRBR An unprecedented blend of science and art, Daniel Levitin's debut, IThis Is Your Brain on Music/I, delighted readers with an exuberant guide to the neural impulses behind those songs that make our heart swell. Now he showcases his daring theory of "six songs," illuminating how the brain evolved to play and listen to music in six fundamental forms for knowledge, friendship, religion, joy, comfort, and love. Preserving the emotional history of our lives and of our species, from its very beginning music was also allied to dance, as the structure of the brain confirms; developing this neurological observation, Levitin shows how music and dance enabled the social bonding and friendship necessary for human culture and society to evolve.BRBR Blending cutting-edge scientific findings with his own sometimes hilarious experiences as a musician and music-industry professional, Levitin's sweeping study also incorporates wisdom gleaned from interviews with icons ranging from Sting and Paul Simon to Joni Mitchell, and David Byrne, along with classical musicians and conductors, historians, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. The result is a brilliant revelation of the prehistoric yet elegant systems at play when we sing and dance at a wedding or cheer at a concert or tune out quietly with an iPod.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 A different kind of book from his first November 27, 2008
Philip R. Olenick (Cambridge, MA USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Daniel Levitin's first book, "This is Your Brain on Music," was a fairly br /dense "science for non-scientists" book (as one of the previous br /reviewers put it) that only occasionally let its insights take wing, as br /he felt the need to establish the legitimacy of the scientific findings br /he was presenting. As a rock guitarist who became a recording engineer br /who became a record producer who became a research scientist, he made br /sure in his first book to show that what he was talking about was br /empirically-based science, not a late-night dormitory bull-session. br / br /Fairly late in that book, he described, with evident distaste, the claim br /of another scientist that music (and by extension all art) is a useless br /"hitchhiker" that developed as a trivial consequence of the brain's br /linguistic and patterning abilities. br / br /This book is his extended - and poetic - cry of rebuttal to that belief. br /Here he stakes out his counter-argument: that the musical and artistic br /abilities of the brain develop first and pave the way for the br /acquisition of language and for bonding into families and societies. br / br /Don't expect another research-based book like the first. Here, what he br /showed in the first book is assumed, as the scaffolding for a leap br /into philosophy, with the empirical sources for this book being music br /and society themselves. The book itself is a suite: the chapter on songs br /of comfort - with a focus on the blues - had me in tears by the end. br / br /He's doing here what Jacob Bronowski did in The Ascent of Man: using his br /scientific insight to meditate on what it means to be human, and on how br /what we do makes us who we are. This book is an important contribution br /in that tradition, as well as heartfelt work of art.
 Very disappointing November 24, 2008
musico (Vancouver, BC)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I looked forward to reading this after I finished Your Brain on Music, but The World in Six Songs is more about chatty name dropping than it is about music or neurology. A pleasant light read for the non musician perhaps, but not much meat.
nice try October 19, 2008
Peregrino (Cedar Falls, IA)
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
I thoroughly enjoyed "This is Your Brain on Music" and anticipated a similar combination of witty, widely observed (pop, jazz, classical), and helpfully presented (science-for-non-specialists) material. All those qualities are present but distractingly encumbered by puffery (yes, yes, you lunch with rock stars and academic luminaries) and organization-by-digression. The dangers of first success? A timid editor? I'd wait for a revised edition.
An entertaining and informative examination of the human brain and culture as revealed by music September 30, 2008
Craig Matteson (Ann Arbor, MI)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
Daniel Levitin is both a rock musician and a cognitive scientist. That is, he looks at how the brain behaves as you perceive things. Music is one of those interesting puzzles that allows people like Levitin to see the brain behave in ways different than our other everyday behaviors, even speech. He wrote an interesting book "This Is Your Brain On Music" that I liked and reviewed. You can see it here: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession br / br /In this book, the author uses what he knows about music (almost always popular music) and the brain to speculate about what these imply about human evolution and how our development as a species and in our various social cultures was influenced by music and how these inner human qualities influence the expression of music. br / br /The title's use of "six songs" is a bit misleading, though it is nicely poetic and provocative at the same time. Levitin is really talking about six TYPES of songs. The six categories are Friendship, Joy, Comfort, Knowledge (teaching and memory songs), Religion, and Love. Also included in each of these six are the opposites. So, really it is twelve categories. Nor does he deal with purely instrumental music much, or the uses of music that fall outside of these categories. Art music, for example, he assumes is included in what he writes. But the kinds of music he writes about, while art, are not art music any more than butchers and surgeons are the same because they both cut meat. Nor does he deal with categories such as introspection, abstract instrumental music (non-programmatic music or absolute music), or complicated forms that deal with many of these categories (such as opera, passion plays (they are more than just religion), or even Broadway musicals). Heck, what about Ralph Sampson playing the banjo in something like "Cuttin' the Cornbread"? It isn't really telling you about cornbread. We enjoy it and it makes us happy, but it doesn't fit into these categories anymore than a Bach Fugue or Suite or Stravinsky's Piano Sonata does. br / br /While you can lump all kinds of pieces into these broad categories, after awhile they contain so many disparate items that the names become somewhat useless. For example, where would you put Schubert's "Erlkoenig"? As fear (the opposite of comfort)? Well, it is also fantasy, drama, it also has the father and son connection where the father fails to save the son despite his best efforts because he cannot see, comprehend, or believe in what the son sees. Or maybe it was just a fever after all and the son's dealing with the phantom was just the son's hallucination. Or what about "Auf dem wasser zu singen"? Is this merely about ecstasy? Or is it about the glorious sensory impressions of being on a boat on the water in the light of sunny day? This is a song about mortality and existence but isn't about love, comfort, religion. Maybe you could put it in the joy category. But I think that it would be stretching it quite a bit to lump it in with "I heard it through the Grapevine" or "Suspicious Minds". But this becomes the problem of categories. br / br /This is a very entertaining book that will help you learn more about what scientists currently know and suspect about our brain. Obviously, the science knows a lot more than it did, but not nearly as much as they will down the road. Some of what they are certain of today will become outmoded. But no one knows what that is yet. br / br /Levitin writes in a breezy and entertaining style. He drops lots of names and that is both fun and, at times, a tad irritating. However, I recommend the book pretty strongly. Not only for what you will learn about how your brain works, but because Levitin talks about art and music in ways beyond what the mere consumer of music usually considers and he does it without sounding academic, or using dense or complex language. The book is actually fun. br / br /Get it and enjoy it. br / br /Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI br / br / br /
The science of music as fun! September 20, 2008
Larry Spencer (Santa Barbara, CA)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
I liked this book a lot - I think Howie Klein said it best in his review in the Huffington Post (which is why I bought the book in the first place) so I'm pasting his review here. br / br / I am not a scientist, and I didn't like science in school. Something about the Krebs cycle and the free electrons in isotopes (whatever they were) left me cold. I do read a lot of non-fiction, mostly political books, as part of my new "day job" of helping to raise money for the Democratic party. But in my former life I ran a record company and I consider myself to have had a lifelong obsession with music and art. br / br / I first met Levitin in 1981 when he was playing in a San Francisco punk band that had one or two songs I liked, The Mortals. I introduced him to some friends of mine who were in bands and he produced them back in the 80s. In the 90s he went to college and got a Ph.D. in neuroscience. When his first book came out, "This Is Your Brain on Music," I read it first because of the cleverness of the title's play on the assinine Nancy Reagan-era "This is your brain on drugs" ad campaign. That book taught me a lot of things that I had always wondered about - not just what a scale is, or why some musicians succeed where others fail, but also the way that music is studied in scientific laboratories (it's not just poor monkeys being given electrical shocks by soulless nerds in white coats). br / br / "The World in Six Songs" sounded to me like a terrible idea for a book. I'm not sure what I expected - maybe a list of six songs that Levitin felt were the best in the world, or the six songs that shaped human culture. The world doesn't need more lists and music doesn't work that way - people's tastes are too subjective. I decided to read the first few pages just to see where the book was going, and I planned to put it down. I had better things to do. Obama had just become the de facto nominee for 2008, and I was busy tracking dozens of critical local races across the country where a progressive candidate was pitted against a truly vile, corrupt opponent. The world needed some electoral change, not silly lists. I picked it up at breakfast and would put it down before I was even done with my grapefruit. br / br / Sometimes things don't work out like you planned them. By lunch I was in the middle of Chapter 3 and I had already learned how music helped to form cooperative bonds, the very sort that were necessary to create societies, about the chemical changes that take place in the brain when people sing together, and about how music that you like (not any music will do) can mimic the functions of anti-depressants. The musical examples ranged from Abba to Zappa, and from Tuvan throat singing to 18th century opera and the theme song from Ren Stimpy. (And believe it or not, there's a connection between all these.) br / br / The phone rang. I had to take care of some urgent business for a California State assembly race. An hour later I was back in the book and reading about the honest signal hypothesis, the idea from biology that some forms of commucation are impossible to fake. Levitin cites evidence that it is easy to lie with language (Really??? I didn't need to be reminded given my current career is trying to oust lying politicians, and that my former career was in the music business, enough said about that) but that it is harder to lie in music. That is, we can tell whether a singer is being sincere or not and we respond to that on an emotional, and unconscious level. This makes music, historically, something exceptionally valuable in the evolution of human nature: An honest signal. Music is a kind of truth serum. Maybe if politicians had to sing instead of making speeches we'd be better at picking the good ones (Bulworth is still a terrible movie). br / br / There were a few places where Levitin did present lists of songs, but he did so in a kind of self-mocking way - he wasn't self important about them.. The six songs of the title, it turns out, are the six ways (read: six kinds of songs) that Levitin believes humans have used throughout time to manage social, emotional, and cultural development. We use music to comfort babiesfor example. We get together with people and sing or drum or strum and all of a sudden we feel a special bond of friendship. In the Amazon our ancestral cousins used to sing about how to make a canoe. br / br / That passing on ofknowledge function was one of the most interesting because I often have songs stuck in my head throughout the day. Levitin explains that this is actually a clue as to the evolutionary origins of music. Songs were meant to get stuck up there, and music and brains co-evolved among other reasons to pass down information from person to person, and from generation to generation, before there was writing. br / br / As the writers Scott Turow and Elizabeth Gilbert have said, the book is exquisitely well-written and easy to read, serving up a great deal of scientific information in a gentle way for those of us who are a bit science-phobic. More than that, the book is fun. As the LA Times said, "Masterful." Who would have thought that a scientific hypothesis could be supported by the "Slinky" song or by Dylan's "Death is Not the End?" The last chapter is a love song to love songs, a sort of Valentine to some of the best songs ever sung. Read it if you have ever wondered where music came from, why we have it, and what it really does for us. But for now I have to get back to work. I've got to get Obama and McCain singing so we can see who the liar is. br /--Howie Klein, The Huffington Post
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