Leila: Hi! Welcome to watchmojo.com. I’m your host Leila. I’m joining Dr. Daniel Levitin, author of International of Best Selling Book. This is your brain on music, The Science of Human at Obsession.
What is it about everything that we perceive about music that makes us expert listeners?
Daniel Levitin: Music as we listen to it as children creates templates in our brains. We figure out what notes are likely to follow, what and where the music is going to go. And by the age of five, most children know when a chord is out of sequence or note is out of tune. That’s why I say we’re all expert listeners. I could play a little sequence like this and if I go, you know that’s wrong, and any five-year-old would know that was wrong.
Leila: What role does theory of mind play in our appreciation of music?
Daniel Levitin: A theory of mine refers to our ability and it’s uniquely human ability to realize that other people have thoughts that may not be our own. It is crucial to our appreciation of music. We have to understand that the composer and the performer have some feelings that they’re trying to express and we’re sensitive to that.
Leila: In what ways are humans specifically adapted from music?
Daniel Levitin: Humans and music share an evolutionary history. What I mean by that is that music and human’s co-evolved over tens of thousands of years, and our brains became adapted from music and music became adapted to our changing brains.
Leila: Do you want to take us back to your childhood when you started with recording machines and starting to play instruments?
Daniel Levitin: I started playing the piano when I was four because I use to lie underneath the piano as my mom played it and I would lie underneath and on my back and be developed by the sound. Then I took up the clarinet when I was eight and the saxophone when I was nine. And I’ve been playing music ever since.
When I was 17 and I went to college for a year and then I dropped out after my loudspeakers got fire in my dorm room, I started playing in a succession of different rock bands. And the one that was really good broke up because of drug addiction within the band and then I couldn’t see starting over with the new bands, so I started producing other bands in the studio, after a while, things started to take off
Leila: Who have been some of the most wonderful people you’ve worked with, artists or groups?
Daniel Levitin: Well you of course, Leila. It’s interesting because different artist to work in different ways. Some are more personal and some are more business, some are more internet, some are more stand offish. I think a memorable experience was working with Stevie Wonder because I found him to be a very generous and a warm person. He’s just the man you would want him to be. He’s smart and he’s funny, and he’s spontaneous but he also manages to balance being a spiritual person with being an emotional one, and being an electoral and being physical. And those four are in perfect balance at all times.
Leila: And then I believe that you sort of worried that learning too much about musical theory might takeaway from the magic of it. How has it perhaps done the opposite?
Daniel Levitin: I have a greater appreciation for how complicated it is to write a good piece of music. And how complicated is the change of the events from your musician making noise to your eardrum wiggling in and out to your brain, being able to take it all in and understand it. With that appreciation, I find I don’t analyze music more but I appreciate it more.
Leila: Well thank you very much for your time Dr. Levitin.
Daniel Levitin: My pleasure.
Leila: I really appreciate it.
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