The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It

Description

Philip Ball provides the first comprehensive, accessible guide to how music works and why it is indispensible to humanity Why have all human cultures - today and throughout history - made music? Why does music excite such rich emotion? How do we make sense of musical sound? These are questions that have, until recently, remained mysterious. Now The Music Instinct explores how the latest research in music psychology and brain science is piecing together the puzzle of how our minds understand and respond to music. Ranging from Bach fugues to nursery rhymes to heavy rock, Philip Ball interweaves philosophy, mathematics, history and neurology to reveal why music moves us in so many ways. Without requiring any specialist knowledge, The Music Instinct will both deepen your appreciation of the music you love, and open doors to music that once seemed alien, dull or daunting, offering a passionate plea for the importance of music in education and in everyday life. 'You'll never listen to music the same way again' - Independent

Philip Ball writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and worked for many years as an editor for physical sciences at Nature. His books cover a wide range of scientific and cultural phenomena, and include Critical Mass- How One Thing Leads To Another (winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books), The Music Instinct, Curiosity- How Science Became Interested in Everything, Serving The Reich- The Struggle for the Soul of Science Under Hitler and Invisible- The history of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics.

Wonderful account of why music matters... one of the finest and most versatile of current non-fiction writers * Sunday Times * Exemplary... In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also contemplating the mystery of ourselves... Ball, thankfully, doesn't try to provide any easy answers, but rather sends the reader back to the music a better listener * Observer * This is a truly fascinating and eye-opening account of a phenomenon so commonplace we barely think about it, yet one which is also mind-bogglingly complicated. Once you've read The Music Instinct, you'll never listed to music the same way again * Independent * A musical experience in itself...his love of the subject is abundantly evident.. His mastery of many scientific disciplines is a delight * Daily Telegraph * Impressively engaging...it will be the rare music lover that does not come away without having learned many interesting things * Guardian *