Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination

I am a former research scientist and lifelong musician. I also have a graduate education in psychology and I don't approach any of the arts in a reductionistic fashion. It is from this space that I am evaluating this book on its merits with the understanding that its scope is indeed limited to Western music, which is only a small slice of the musical pie. What I most like about this book is the way it weaves a story of the emergence of hearing and how sound affects us physically and psychology. For this purpose, the author draws on diverse sources such as science, anthropology, sociology, etc. However, he does this by weaving a tapestry of interesting threads, which is not at all like the construction of an academic treatise. This book is also accessible to anyone and everyone! It is not just for musicians, scientists of psychologists. The target audience is the average person, however, if you have a background in one or more of these areas, you will appreciate the contents even more. An underlying premise of the book is that music is satisfying because it sets up "anticipations" and then goes about satisfying them in unexpected ways. The more complex the music, the more types of anticipatory events are created and satisfied in more imaginative ways. I didn't really think about this until I read the book, but it's true. I can validate this in my own experience over a lifetime. While some people may feel the application of biology or any other field is reductionistic, I didn't find this to be the case. Rather, I found that the author used various lenses and legitimate domains of knowledge to explore the many and varied facets of musical experience. Rather than taking away the mystery of what moves us, it makes the whole musical adventure even more fascinating and mysterious. My guess is that most of you reading this are not familiar with Ken Wilber who is a rather famous contemporary philosopher. Ken espouses a worldview that embraces four irreducible domains of human experience that inform each other. He feels the split between arts, science and morals was the result of one domain (science), dominating the others. I believe there is much truth to this argument, but you will find none of this spirit here. I don't want or need to go into Ken Wilber in detail here, but he provides a very credible and integral worldview and I think this book is very much in the spirit of honoring each domain of human experience without a need to reduce any one of them to another. (For more on Wilber's books, see my listmania lists or for a nice introduction check out A Brief History of Everything.

As a new student of music I was filled with questions. Why exactly did we humans (unlike animals) evolve to appreciate music? What survival benefit could it have provided? And how exactly does music give us pleasure? What is really going on in the body when a great piece of music touches our inner soul to the point of giving us goose bumps? Unfortunately I found teachers and peers not only devoid of answers to such questions, but completely unreceptive to them. Many people are even hostile towards such questions. I felt surrounded by automatons content only with pushing levers and petals on their instruments, completely disinterested in the exact nature of what they were doing. I find such people devoid of one of the most important instincts that supposedly separates us from the animal kingdom, high curiosity. Robert Jourdain's book, Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, was exactly what I needed to read. He explains how the origin of music appreciation in humans is a consequence of the evolution of speech to improve social interaction, which has survival advantage. He explains how pleasure in music is a consequence of a series of deviations from a tonal center (usually the tonic note or triad of the key in which the music is composed), which introduces conflict in the brain, followed by a return to the tonal center, which provides satisfactory resolution. He explains how such conflict and resolution can be composed into four different aspects of music: rhythm, melody. phrase, and harmony. Ecstasy is achieved when resolution is provided after a conflict has reached the limit in tonal space and time of the listener's comprehension ability. Throughout the book he supports his presentation with real, physical phenomena within the body, mostly within the brain. The presentation seems very valid scientifically. Personally, I think he makes fools out of the teachers, musicians, and friends with whom I have been associating. Some previous reviewers have been harsh, but I believe them to be out of context. For example, one gave the following quote from the book: "Almost anything that can be said in Arabic can be faithfully translated into Chinese or Finnish or Navajo." The reviewer claimed that this would be considered erroneous by any anyone who has ever worked on language translation. I myself am bilingual (English and French), and I believe that although there is some truth to this reviewer's opinion when it comes to the fine nuances of different languages, his comment is entirely out of context and blown out of proportion. In the book Robert Jourdain is referring to the accuracy of all languages to construct simple statements accurately. A sentence like, "On your way home, please go down to the corner store and pick up a loaf of bread." (I made up that sentence myself to make my point) Such a simple statement can be said in almost any human language where bread, home, and corner store have meaning. In contrast, music cannot be composed to deliver such ex

The majority of reviews of this book are generally positive, and I can only agree. I have bought and given this book to a friend, then re-purchased it for myself 3 times already! Its anecdotes and analyses are truly insightful and not to be found elsewhere. To the few negative reviews, however, take note: don't heed them! I myself play and produce, and LOVE music that is considered "jazz" or "electronic" or "black-influenced", and the material in this book is just as relevant to all of these musics, if not more so. (As merely one example, electronic instruments now offer the possibility of not only equal temperament, but also endless microtonal scales, the significance of which is richly described. I am afraid that another reviewer's idea of electronic music is limited to so-called contemporary techno, which is a droplet in the ocean of the history of composing...) The texture of an African drum is not something that resists scientific analysis. Emprirical science was little seen in Africa, but it is not a uniquely Western phenonemon -- although it has, yes, reached its highest point so far in the West -- and to say that Jourdain's book is an "impossible attempt to reduce the human soul to scientific scrutiny" comes across as ludicrous. Do read this book, it has made me think deeply about the joy of the ultimate artifice -- music.

As an advanced amateur musician, this book was a refreshing reminder of some points to note in my own interpretation and performance of music. Topics range from objective neurology involved in hearing and cognitive processing to subjective personal preferences (see other reviews for detail). Music terminology is explaned for non-musicians but not condescending or overly simplistic for those with a musical bent. The author's use of analogy to convey ideas is excellent, and the prose is flowing. Despite the broad topic, I felt at the end of the book that there had been a point to the discussion and progress made.The author does expresses his own opinions strongly and the coverage of musical types is specifically limited. As for opinions, this isn't a textbook. And despite a CD collection that is 90% alternative rock, I have no inclination to argue that any of that is representative of "complex harmonic development," which is part of the focus of the real topic. Western classical music is used as the example for ideas almost always. That music type was used for detailed description by example however, not asserted as the only basis for argument. More readers may have been appeased if the overly broad title of the book had been narrowed, but then, the scope of the topic did deserve a sweeping heading.Negatives: the author used the phrase "deep relations" about 2.17 times per page. I would recommend he become familiar with synonyms for use in future writing. He also asserts some points in his scientific arguments as undisputable facts, whereas resolution of some of these questions is indeed still at large.I found this book wholly entertaining and informative, one of the the top 10 non-fiction books of those I've read in the last few years.

I haven't been this excited about a book in years. Jourdain explains how the brain functions to hear sounds, tones, melodies, rhythms, and entire works. He constantly moves back and forth between the experience of music and how the brain is responding to the musical inputs, covering composition and performance as well as listening to music. And as to how music has the ability to work on our emotions, Jourdain comes up with the first truly compelling explanation. This book is well written and easy to read while still being thought-provoking and memorable. It's been several weeks since I read it, and now I find myself experiencing music in a different and richer way. Definitely read this book!