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    The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
    Unavailable
    The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
    Unavailable
    The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

    Written by Daniel J. Levitin

    Narrated by Daniel J. Levitin

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The author of The New York Times bestseller This is Your Brain on Music reveals music's role in the evolution of human culture and "will leave you awestruck." (The New York Times)

    Daniel J. Levitin's astounding debut bestseller, This is Your Brain on Music, enthralled and delighted readers as it transformed our understanding of how music gets in our heads and stays there. Now in his second New York Times bestseller, his genius for combining science and art reveals how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history.

    Dr. Levitin identifies six fundamental song functions or types-friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love-then shows how each in its own way has enabled the social bonding necessary for human culture and society to evolve. He shows, in effect, how these "six songs" work in our brains to preserve the emotional history of our lives and species.

    Dr. Levitin combines cutting-edge scientific research from his music cognition lab at McGill University and work in an array of related fields; his own sometimes hilarious experiences in the music business; and illuminating interviews with musicians such as Sting and David Byrne, as well as conductors, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. The World in Six Songs is, ultimately, a revolution in our understanding of how human nature evolved-right up to the iPod.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 19, 2008
    ISBN9781429552523
    Unavailable
    The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

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    Reviews for The World in Six Songs

    3.5/5

    82 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Warning! You probably won't be able to get through this book without stopping to listen to the songs the author mentions. I discovered some new ones, and listened to many old favourites while reading this book.The book is not what I expected. It's not based on scientific research or a hypothesis. Rather, it presents the author's personal framework for how music forms the core of human nature,and how it helped the brain evolve. It was interesting, but rambled a bit.Another unexpected element is the mismatch between the title and the contents. My husband asked me which were the six songs. And,there aren't six songs, but six types of songs. And should have been more than six types, as I think he sometimes "shoe-horned" songs into his framework.
    • 4/5
      Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist who is also a musician and former record producer, so he would seem to be uniquely qualified to write a book like this, about how music has shaped the human mind and how the human mind has shaped music. The "six songs" of the title are actually six categories of song, which Levitin believes can be used to describe the various functions of music in human society: songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. He regards this as an exhaustive list. I am unconvinced by that, personally, although I will say that it's at least closer to exhaustive then you might think, as he defines these categories very broadly. "Friendship" songs, for example, are defined as any (non-religious) songs that function to bind people together, including national anthems, work songs designed to establish the rhythm of a task, and songs associated with a particular movement or group.I have decidedly mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I think it contains a lot of interesting and often insightful commentary on music, the role it plays in human society and the effect it can have on us as individuals. I found the chapter on "knowledge songs" particularly interesting. Here, Levitin discusses the fact that we remember things much better if we learn them in the form of a song, which, when you stop to think about it, is both obvious and kind of strange. He also talks about techniques that make songs easier to memorize, which is extremely important in cultures without writing, where all knowledge and all stories must be passed on orally. And he considers the idea that many songs are written to remind the writer of their own experiences and the life lessons they have learned, and to share those experiences and lessons with others. There's some thought-provoking stuff here.As a popular science book, though, I think it's less successful. A lot of his discussions about music and the brain seem rather simplistic to me, and to imply a lot more scientific certainty and scientific understanding than we really have yet about how anything this complex works in the brain. (Although Levitin has apparently written a previous book specifically about music and the brain, so it's possible he deals with the subject in a more nuanced way there and has deliberately simplified things a bit here to avoid going over too much of the same ground.) Also, while his more general explanations about evolution are fine, the specific ideas he presents about how music might have influenced human evolution and vice versa are really speculative. Evolutionary psychology is often criticized for making up "Just So Stories." I think that's often kind of an unfair characterization, but there are places here where it most definitely applies.Levitin can also get a bit rambly and is sometimes prone to repeating himself. And while his tendency to include his own experiences with music provides a nice personal touch, I think there are parts of the book where he lets it all become a little bit too much about him for just a little too long.Bottom line: It's worth reading and sometimes fascinating, but flawed, and some of it is probably best taken with a grain of salt.
    • 3/5
      Enjoyable read! Levitin explores the effect that six categories of "songs" have had on human evolution, communication-to-language, and society. He illustrates his hypotheses with snippets of lyrics, and includes interesting comments from song-writers like Sting and Joni Mitchell, which enhance the book. This is NOT much of a neuroscience book as Levitin's previous book is; it is more a speculation on evolution, though not particularly deep. That is, I feel that the book is only an introduction to a theory that songs have shaped the world, but it is an enjoyable read that I hope is followed up with continuing research, study, and analysis.
    • 3/5
      I respect anyone with a more diverse taste in music that me, and Levitin fits the bill. In fact, having read the first sentence of the book, I wonder if anyone alive listens to a broader array of tunes than he does.Unfortunately, this book wasn't what I expected. Given his vocation (Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Music at McGill University), I expected more science and less conjecture. This book relies quite heavily on personal anecdotes and conversations with musicians to move it along. There were times when the length of some stories felt like he was grasping for content.The most fascinating part of the book was how he reached cross-genre to provide examples for his various categories—friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love. If only he had more killer and less filler!
    • 3/5
      This book I half liked. The part about the songs we love as human beings, the types that run through all sorts of cultures and times. That was great as the author has a wonderfully diverse sense of music and really went to great lengths to insure he was well rounded in talking about songs the world over. There were some great comparisons and some new thoughts. You have to love a book that references the Bible and Lord of the Rings in the same paragraph.But then the section the subtitle refers to just irritated me. Perhaps I shouldn't have been reading this book with a massive headache, but the evolution sections were annoying. Its not that I have anything against evolution, but using it to explain social phenomena always seems hit or miss to me. Sometimes the examples and assumptions are unlikely to the point of being silly. The one that comes to mind is the thought that groups who buried their dead found an evolutionary benefit because it was more hygienic-so they were a tiny bit healthier than other groups. But weren't these ancient groups nomadic? So there would be just as much hygienic value in leaving the bodies at the old campsite. Or just dragging them off where you couldn't smell them any more. Or what of cannibalistic groups? They wouldn't have to spend the energy digging a great big hole and they would get extra protein. I could come up with questions about this particular theory all day. It was mentioned in the book by the way, in the section on religious songs. I think that is another reason I didn't like the evolutionary posts, the author seemed to be bringing in a lot of behaviour evolution to support his thesis, whether it was relevant or not.