This Is Your Brain on Music

What Hacker News says

1. velpSep 2024
   Highly recommend the book "This is your brain on music", as it explores this question (among other interesting things).

   According to the author, having separate words for singing and dancing is a relatively new phenomenon in linguistics, and the concept of a performer and an audience as a distinct separation is also relatively recent. He likens it to conversation - sure in any given instance there may be people more or less involved in the dialog of a conversation, but we would all think it very strange if someone said "I only listen to conversations, I don't talk in them" in the way someone today might say "I only listen to music, I don't sing/play/dance".

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2. ghostpepperJan 2024
   It's not a typical intro to theory but the "pop psychology" book This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin includes something like what you're asking for: What is pitch, why do our brains "like" certain combinations of pitches and dislike others, etc.

   It's a fascinating book in its own right on a bunch of theories about the neurology of music but it includes a very basic introduction to theory at the beginning.

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3. jraceOct 2023
   This Is Your Brain on Music -by Daniel Levitin

   --helped me understand why listening to music has such a varied and profound effect on me.

   Hallucinations -by Oliver Sack

   --piqued my interest in the brain and the notion that it is running the show behind the scenes and what we perceive to be reality is merely a construct of our neural activity.

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4. jvvwMar 2021
   There's a nice 5 minute video by neuroscientist Anil Seth here: https://aeon.co/videos/on-the-beholders-share-how-past-exper... and I was going to link to Schmidhuber too - I like this page on his site: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html There's also a chapter about these sort of ideas in the context of music in Daniel Levitin's book This is Your Brain on Music.

   I'm still trying to make sense of this all myself - you've got Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle essentially saying that the brain is trying to minimise surprise. And yet if you look at the explore-exploit dilemma then 'optimism in the face of uncertainty' is a possible strategy. I'm sure there is a way to reconcile these - I don't understand the Karl Friston stuff properly yet.

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5. t0mmyb0yAug 2020
   Simple book rec: This is Your Brain on Music.
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6. itsgreeneSep 2017
   The best answer I've heard to this and your previous question was at a QandA with Dr. Daniel J. Levitin. His answer was to a question "Is there any music that can make everyone upset or unhappy?" His answer was that in all his research the only music that can make someone upset or unhappy, was music the listener didn't like. It's 100 percent listener preference. The same was true for music a person did like. Unfortunately, the only way we could find out if Beethoven, Chopin, or the Beatles like the music is to ask them. I'm sure we'll find both support and disdain from the music community on AI generated music. Time will tell if there is a major preference on either side.

   Dr. Levitin has some really interesting research on music, but also has some great easier to read books for those of us without a neuroscience degree. My favorite is called this is your brain on music. The world in 6 songs was also a great read.

   http://daniellevitin.com/publicpage/

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