Title: This is your brain on music - The Science of a Human Obsession (on Librarything)
Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Format: hardcover
Pages: 314
Year published: original 2006, my edition 2006
Language: English (original English)
ISBN number: 0525949690
Reason for reading: I saw "Singing neanderthals" in the bookstore and it looked interesting, but a bit expensive. When I told a friend about that book, she said 'I have this book, it's a bit similar, do you want to borrow it?' So I borrowed it :)

Back cover text:
This is the first book to arrive at a comprehensive scientific understanding of how humans experience music and why it plays such a unique role in our lives. As Oliver Sacks has suggested, Professor Daniel Levitin is one of the very few people in the world who could write it. This is your brain on music is a meeting of the two magnificent worlds of art and science and is destined to be a landmark in cultural history.
Levitin unravels the mystery of our perennial love affair with music - but should we call it instead a love/hate relationship? Ever have a jingle you couldn't get out of your head? Throughout history certain music has been deemed subversive and even outlawed. Where does the power of music come from?
This unprecedented investigation of the role of music in human evolution and everyone's daily lives synthesizes psychology, neuroscience, and musical examples from Mozart to Eminem. Levitin explains the elements of music - pitch, rhythm, tempo, timbre, harmony, and melody. Then, building on his own research as well as that of his colleagues, he explores the perception of music in the human brain. The parade of music continues from Bach to Count Basie to Creedence to Van Halen as Levitin shows that a cascade of activity, from the eardrum to cells deep inside the brain that regulate emotion, is set off whenever we hear music - at weddings, in shopping malls, at dance clubs, at church. He also shows how composers exploit the way our brains make sense of the world, how our musical preferences begin to form before we are born, and how musical experience is built.
Despite a pervasive cultural distinction in the West between an expert class of performers and everyone else, Levitin asserts that we are all more musically equipped than we think because our brains are hardwired for music. Some leading experts have long held that music is a decoration living parasitically on the fringe of human nature. On the contrary, Levitin argues and convincingly demonstrates that it is an obsession at the heart of human nature, perhaps even more fundamental to our species than language.

First alinea (of the Introduction):
In the summer of 1969, when I was eleven, I bought a stereo system at the local hi-fi shop. It cost all of the hundred dollars I had earned weeding neighbors' gardens that spring at seventy-five cents an hour. I spent long afternoons in my room, listening to records: Cream, the Rolling Stones, Chicago, Simon and Garfunkel, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, George Shearing, and the saxophonist Boots Randolph. I didn't listen particularly loud, at least not compared to my college days when I actually set my loudspeakers on fire by cranking up the volume too high, but the noise was evidently too much for my parents. My mother is a novelistl she wrote every day in the den just down the hall and played the piano for an hour every night before dinner. My father was a businessman; he worked eighty-hour weeks, forty of those hours in his office at home on evenings and weekends. Being the businessman that he was, my father made me a proposition: He would buy me a pair of headphones if I would promise to use them when he was home. Those headphones forever changed the way I listened to music.

Review:
Read it here!