by David Sulzer (Music 781.1 Sul) (a.k.a. David Soldier)
Over the last decade or so, there have been a few notable books that attempted to look at music from the perspective of the sciences: Oliver Sack’s Musicophilia comes immediately to mind, full of stories of music having seemingly unusual effects on the emotions or thinking of psychology patients or those with neurological disorders. Then we have books like Music Genome Project head Nolan Gasser’s Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste, in which he explains the kinds of musical markers he and other researchers are finding that point toward achieving relatively consistent reactions from listeners. Clearly there’s something to that work, as the algorithms simmering under the hood of services like Spotify or Apple Music depend on these things to keep listeners engaged. We have a whole section in the Polley Music Library of books that investigate this confluence between music, psychology, science, and how music helps to inform the human experience, and I always love reading these. I think they’re fun for both musicians and non-musicians alike. If you ever happen to drop by and want to check out some books like this, try looking around the 781.1 or 781.11 area, and you’ll find a bunch.
Today I want to highlight the latest addition to this part of our collection, a great new book called Music, Math and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music by David Sulzer. The author seems like the perfect person to add to our common understanding of these issues, as he’s lived a life with a foot firmly in both camps: by day, most probably know him as a professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Pharmacology at Columbia University Medical Center. But many others know him as Dave Soldier, the name under which he has led a rich musical career for decades. He’s been on hundreds of records spanning a wide range of genres. He has participated in some really unusual kinds of musical projects, too, like the Thai Elephant Orchestra, which is incredibly just what it sounds like, a group comprised of up to 18 elephants in northern Thailand improvising on musical instruments which have been made to a larger, more elephant-friendly scale.
Our humble but highly-qualified narrator starts his introduction by telling us that “no one needs this book”—you can enjoy music, or make music without ever knowing anything in here, and you’ll be fine. This is followed by recounting the Renaissance origins of the conservatory system that’s still the basic model for music education. Simply put, it was a system of educating orphans about music so they could work as musicians. I never thought about the implications of this before: we think of these places as fine art institutions, and of course in their way they are, but fundamentally they’re built on a trade school model. Then Sulzer contrasts this mode of music education with other kinds of intuitive or instinctual kinds of music-making. I’m already feeling good about the possibilities that lie ahead, and we’re only on page 2. What was that about no one needing this book, again?
A few pages later, we get a list of the main questions Sulzer will address through the course of the book, including things like:
“Which sounds are in and out of
tune, and how are musical scales derived?
How does the brain understand what it is listening to?
How are emotions carried by music?
How are we able to identify many sounds that occur simultaneously?”
And many more.
Once we get into the heart of the book, Sulzer takes a gentle but systematic approach that’s both satisfying for musicians and gentle enough for non-musicians to follow along with most concepts. Starting with properties of sound waves in general, he then focuses in on the spectrum of sound waves used in music, which leads to harmonic overtones, which then leads to scales, harmony, and tuning issues. Along the way, sidebars called “math boxes” focus in on specific concepts, and chapters all end with listening recommendations to put concepts into an immediate context.
Eventually we switch from harmonic concepts to rhythms, and most of our journey through this first half of the book relates more to the physics of sound. Then the second half of the book addresses more of the neuroscience aspects of sound and music, which are in some cases less thoroughly understood by the scientific community, but we can start putting together what is known to get some good ideas. Starting with how the human brain’s function relates to concepts of rhythm, and what chemical transmitters are associated with delivering and storing emotional responses in the brain, Sulzer gradually brings the physics and the neuroscience together. There’s a particularly good narrative in chapter 9 that follows a sound traveling into the brain, detailing its typical neural pathway in detail.
The final chapters offer a quick overview of sound-related neural disorders and how these can affect the understanding and appreciation of music for those with such conditions, and an overview of what we understand so far about several animals’ relationships to music and sound. As you might expect, Sulzer gets into more detail here about the Thai Elephant Orchestra project, which is fascinating to read. We may not be able to determine definitively how many animals are reacting to music, but certainly it seems like there are some noteworthy relationships in the animal kingdom.
In the end, as Sulzer suggests at the beginning of the book, you might learn a lot of interesting facts about sound, music, the physics of how it interacts with our bodies, and the neuroscience of how it’s processed in our minds through this book, and you probably don’t need to know any of this stuff to be a successful and satisfied musician. But it seems like knowing about these issues is likely to greatly enhance your relationship with music, too, and impart as much specificity as we presently have toward how it works its magic inside our bodies and minds. And that’s always a good thing.
[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste by Nolan Gasser or The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It by Philip Ball.]
[ publisher’s official Music, Math and Mind web page ] | [ official David Sulzer page at the Columbia University web site ]
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff
Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that
page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog
individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the
reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment