music cognition
-
On The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes The Mind
Seth Horowitz’s The Universal Sense is an exhaustive, lucid, and entertaining neuroscientific foray into the many ways hearing, listening, and sound shape the mind–how sound affects the way we think, feel, and act. Horowitz is a professor of neuroscience at Brown University who specializes in studies of comparative and human hearing. He’s also an enthusiastic Continue reading
-
On Gary Marcus’s “Guitar Zero”
About five years ago I began playing acoustic guitar. I played off and on for a while, learning chord shapes, and trying (without success) to build callouses on my fingertips. I also experimented with alternate tunings and used a capo, recording a number of chord progressions I thought sounded interesting (hear the audio file at Continue reading
-
Sound Decisions: On Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”
“Instinct puts us in the moment, intellect is slower.” – Robert Fripp “The proof that you truly understand a pattern of behavior is that you know how to reverse it.” – Daniel Kahneman Sometimes while working on writing new music I’ve noticed how I oscillate between two frames of mind. One frame feels spontaneous and intuitive. Continue reading
-
On David Eagleman’s Incognito: How We Know What We Know
The field of neuroscience is hot these days, and I suspect that it will continue to get hotter still as it explains away more and more of the mysteries of how our minds work. Case in point: David Eagleman’s recent book Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain is a whirlwind, high-definition look at the neural underpinnings of our Continue reading
-
On The Most Human Human
In his book The Most Human Human, an engaging account of competing in the annual Turing test, Brian Christian ranges far and wide through the literature of AI (artificial intelligence), linguistics, computer science, philosophy and even poetry to figure out what exactly makes us distinctly human and distinctly different from machines. The Turing test was conceived by Alan Turing, Continue reading
-
On David Sudnow’s Ways Of The Hand
They don’t seem to make books like David Sudnow’s Ways Of The Hand anymore, but then, Sudnow, who died in 2007, was no ordinary explorer of musical experience. Trained as a sociologist, Sudnow took a turn inward in the late 1970s and wrote Ways Of The Hand (1978/2001), a remarkable insider’s phenomenological account of learning to improvise jazz Continue reading
-
On The (In)significance Of Musical Experience
Sometimes when I’m in the middle of listening to a podcast interview with a writer talking about information theory, or art history and design aesthetics, or the philosophy of work, or the politics of technology, I find myself thinking about the purpose and relative (in)significance of music. Musicologists have long studied the formal properties of Continue reading
-
The Neuroscience Of Music
In a recent article posted on his always interesting neuroscience blog at Wired magazine, Jonah Lehrer writes about the neural basis of how music listening makes us feel emotion (or at least the semblance of emotion). Citing a recent study in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Lehrer discusses how music stimulates a brain region called the Continue reading
brettworks 
You must be logged in to post a comment.