Levitin Reading Notes

UNDERSTANDING AND GIVING FEEDBACK ON THE READING ‘WHAT IS MUSIC? FROM PITCH TO TIMBRE’ FROM ‘THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC: UNDERSTANDING A HUMAN OBSESSION’ BY DANIEL LEVITIN.

The very first thing I noticed was that it is written in first person, so a lot of the text will be his own opinion, also I realised very quickly how wordy it is. I found it tricky to ready and I ended up googling pretty much every other word so that I could understand what I was reading.

I highlighted the text that I thought was the most important and I circles or underlined any words or phrases that I couldn’t understand even after googling. Words/phrases highlighted in yellow are what I couldn’t find meanings for/what I still don’t understand.

·         Music can mean different things to different people.

·         The Catholic Church banned music that contained ‘polyphony’ (more than one musical part playing at a time) because they feared it would cause people to doubt the unity of God.

·         The Catholic Church also banned the Tritone (Devils Chord) It was considered so ‘dissonant’ (a harsh, disagreeable combination of sounds) that it must be the work of the Devil/Lucifer. The named the chord ‘Diabolus in Musica’ which means the Devil in Music.

·         I noticed that there was/is racial and cultural differences between music styles and sounds. White suburban parents maybe fearful that African rhythms would cause a permanent mind-altering trance in their innocent children.

·         Avant-garde (new/experimental ideas) composers stretch the bounds of what most of us think music is. Instead of using melody and harmony they use recordings of found objects such as jackhammers, trains and waterfalls. They edit is to an organised collage with the same emotional journey as traditional music.

·         Compares avant-garde composers to the Cubists and Dadaists Picasso, Kandinsky and Mandrian.

·         Edgard Varese defined “music is organised sound”.

·         This book focusses on the neuropsychological (a specialist in relationships between physical brain and behaviour) perspective on how music affects our brains, minds, thoughts and spirit.

·         The basic elements of any sound are; loudness, pitch, contour, duration/rhythm, tempo, timbre, spatial location and reverberation.

·         Our brains then organise these basic elements.

·         This chapter is to define the musical terms and quickly review some basic ideas in music theory.

PITCH

Pitch is a psychological construct (a measurement by question and evaluation rather than what you can see and the actual position of the music scale.

We call a single sound a note, scientists call it a tone. Tone is what you hear and note is what you see written. Frequency and musical scale combined. I.E ‘Mary had a little lamb’ the first 7 notes, differs in pitch not anything else.

Pitch can define a melody or a song

RHYTHM

Duration of a series of notes and the way they are grouped together into units. I.E The Alphabet Song, the first six notes ABCDEF are equal in duration and G for twice the length.

The Beatles have several songs in which the pitch is held constant and only the rhythm varies across several notes.

TEMPO

The overall speed or pace of the piece.

CONTOUR

Overall shape of the melody.  When a note goes up and down and how much by. I.E Rising Melody or Arch-shaped phrase.

TIMBRE

Distinguishes one instrument from another.  Tonal colour that is produced in part by overtones from the instruments vibrations. Also describes the way a single instrument can change sound.

LOUDNESS

Psychological construct that relates to how much energy an instrument creates – how much air it displaces.

REVERBERATION

Perception of how far away the music is from the listener in combination with how big a room/hall is. Often referred to as an ‘echo’.  It has an underappreciated role in communicating emotion and creating an overall pleasing sound (Doesn’t get enough credit for portraying).

PSYCHOPHYSICISTS

Scientists who study the ways that the brain interacts with the physical world.

WHAT HAVE PSYCHOPHYSICISTS ‘DISCOVERED’?

All of the basic elements are separable. I.E You can play the same song on a different instrument (changing the timbre) without changing the pitch. You can change pitch without changing rhythm.

·         The difference between music and a random set of sounds is by the way basic elements combine and form a relationship in a meaningful way.

METER

It is created by our brains, extracting information from rhythm and loudness cues. The way tones are grouped together with another across time.

KEY

Hierarchy of importance between tones in a musical piece. Only exists in our minds with our experiences of a musical style.

MELODY

Main theme of a musical piece, the part you sing along with, the most noticeable in your mind. It differs style across genres.

HARMONY

Relationships between the pitches of different tones, expectations for what will come next. A skilful composer can meet or violate these expectations for artistic and expressive purposes. Can be a parallel melody with the primary one (two singers harmonise) or chord progression.

·         The idea behind combing primitive elements also is in visual art and dance

·         Music is created the same way as visual art, art and dance

·         Miles Davis (trumpeter) described his improvisational technique the same as Picasso his use of a canvas.

·         Not the objects themselves but the space between.

·         Miles Davis said “Most important part of my solos is the empty space between notes”.

·         To non-musicians terms like Diatone (right notes for the key), Cadence (a progression of chords that ends a phrase/song), Key and Pitch can be an unnecessary barrier.

·         Some musicians and critics use these terms sometimes and it can come across pretentious.

·         We really want to know if what was performed moved the audience I.E the characterisation, previous performance, or another act.

·         More interested in the music that the technical side of it.

·         Some people that study music, musicologists and scientists disagree with what some of the terms mean.

MY OPINIONS

·         Most of the chapter discusses technical terms and how academics view the subject compared to what an audience would think about music.

·         It has helped me to understand terminology.

·         I found the majority of the text too technical and it came across as well written blabber.

·         It is written in first person so it only really has one person’s opinion.

·         Full of extended statements.