Sacks, Oliver (2008) Musicophilia - Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition (Paperback)

The famous neurologist Oliver Sacks brings us, again, a book full of intriguing case studies, this time on music. The book is a collection of heart-breaking and -warming, familiar, puzzling, funny and surreal case descriptions of individuals with various neurological conditions - all somehow affecting the person’s ability to experience, or get emotionally involved with music. The book approaches the subject from the grass roots: Individual stories deliver thread after thread, snippets of information and after a dozen cases, a pattern emerges. The patchwork pattern is not conclusive, nor exact, but it provides a comfortable approximate web of explanations for musical perception. It is easy, however, to get swept away with the cases. For me, the grand picture, was easier to grasp by reading the table of contents than following the main text.

In terms of writing, Sacks does a great balancing act: he describes in intimate detail the personal dilemmas and conditions of his (and others’) patients, and still keeps the writing very tactful. There is no sense of voyerism, nor of sentimentality. Sacks is polite, empathetic, very precise, and clinically analytic. The cases are memorable, and so are also his conclusions.

In terms of the book’s scientific value, it definitely is a great collection of stories but I don’t expect to be citing it that much. Having said that, the text (at least in the revised version) is peppered with references to interesting studies, research groups and patient associations which can prove immensely valuable for people with scientific interest in the subject area. More so, the inspirational boost that comes from learning about neurology and auditory perception by reading stories about real people is definitely enough to recommend the read.

Citation info: Ekman, I. (2009) "Modelling the Emotional Listener: Making Psychological Processes Audible", Proc. AudioMostly 2009, Sepbember, Glasgow, Great Britain.
 
Abstract. There is an increasing tendency to use of procedural strategies for the creation and manipulation of sound in computer games. This development is motivating a shift in the design process; meaning is no longer tied to a specific asset or asset type, but is instead linked to the procedural manipulation of the sound material. Often the design phase for this type of game sound includes modelling sound within the virtual environment in terms of a source, a medium and a listener. This way of thinking about sound is not new; however, how it relates to emotional expression has not been investigated before. Particularly what has not been modelled is the listener as a perceptual entity, whose perception changes to reflect psychological states and processes. This study addresses the lack of research in this area. We identify four psychological processes that influence what and how sounds are heard: attention, emotion, multimodal perception and internal sound. We also provide a detailed investigation of a special case of psychological process: the perceptual distortions people suffer during extreme stress. Drawing from this empirical data, we form a listener model capable of expressing the avatar’s psychological qualities through sound manipulation. The listener model is described, along with examples on how to apply it in practise.
 
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