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(9 reviews)
Author: Aniruddh D. Patel
ISBN : 0199755302
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Format: PDF
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In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. Since Plato's time, the relationship between music and language has attracted interest and debate from a wide range of thinkers. Recently, scientific research on this topic has been growing rapidly, as scholars from diverse disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, music cognition, and neuroscience are drawn to the music-language interface as one way to explore the extent to which different mental abilities are processed by separate brain mechanisms. Accordingly, the relevant data and theories have been spread across a range of disciplines. This volume provides the first synthesis, arguing that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities.
Winner of the 2008 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award
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- Paperback: 520 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (June 1, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0199755302
- ISBN-13: 978-0199755301
- Product Dimensions: 1 x 6 x 9.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Music, Language, and the Brain Free Download
This is the best book so far on language, the brain, and music. It is highly technical, especially the first five chapters. Nonspecialists with a serious interest can get through the last two ("Meaning" and "Evolution") but the first five are hard going unless you are fairly advanced.
Patel reviews an enormous, and almost entirely very new, literature on similarities and differences at the micro level between language and music. Overall, music is clearly related to language in many ways, but equally clearly a separate realm--a different communicative modality.
He also points out that music and its meanings are learned. We are not born knowing that minor key is "sad"; that's a recent west-European idea, unknown to the rest of the universe. We have to learn about the pastorality of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, and so on. On the other hand, lullabyes sound like mothers shushing their babies, and I would add that laments in every culture sound like ordinary weeping. Still, most musical meanings appear to be culturally learned.
This is an excellent book, and I am duly impressed with all of it, but I do have some modest points to raise. First, I would find music and language somewhat closer than he does. He rules out of consideration a number of intermediate forms--chant, rhythmic speech (like African-American sermons), incantation, word-music poetry (like Russian romantic lyrics), children's play-games, and a great deal more. It seems that a huge percentage of human communication, including much of the most important religious material in every culture, is in that neglected border zone. Something very important is here and is being missed.
Second, he concludes language definitely evolved, but music is a rather recent invention--not an evolved part of communication.
Music, Language and the Brain is a well-researched and comprehensively presented comparison of the ways in which humans process music and language in the brain. Patel presents his information in an entertaining and informative manner. The book consists of seven chapters, the first an introduction and the remaining six an examination of characteristics music and language share. These include pitch and timbre, rhythm, melody, syntax, meaning and evolution. These chapters are then further subdivided (and sub-subdivided); examples of some of these subdivisions include sections specifically about music or language, or sections comparing the two. As someone who has always enjoyed both language and music, I found the book an engrossing but difficult read.
This subdivision of chapters makes the massive amount of information Patel presents more digestible, as does his style. Dense but not weighted down in jargon, Patel does an admirable job of condensing his research into the simplest terms possible, making the complex cognitive systems used to process language and music possible for a laymen to understand. Breaking down language and music into multiple shared components allowed for more effective contrast and a more effective explanation of both music and language alone - the understanding afforded of the specific components led to a better understanding of how both systems functioned in their entireties. Within the chapters themselves, the subdivision of chapters into a description of music, language, and then "key links," which Patel describes as "areas in which direct comparisons are proving fruitful" provides an effect overview of the topic.