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.

Jourdain, Robert (1997) Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy. Harper Perennial.

Robert Jourdain’s book is a delight to read. The writing is fluent and the insights are frequent and not far apart. The whole book is structured like the best of detective stories, and the question: wherein lies the pleasures of music?

Where other books deal with cochlear stucture and Corti’s organ and sine waves, this one tackles the interdisciplinary and controversial questions that have only recently (think 20 years) been opening up to researchers: what in earth is it that happens in the brain that gives music its meaning, emotional powers and, ultimately, mind-altering characteristics. Jourdain´s answer synthesizes findings from psychoacoustics and sprinkle over some exciting personal thoughts, and does so in an exceptionally engaging way - with each revelation, the book tickles the reader’s curiosity with an equal amount of unanswered questions, new perspectives and busted myths.

Jourdain starts low level and gradually moves from there and "upwards". The chapters start with basic sound perception, and from there moves higher up the levels of musical hierarchy: tones, harmonies, temporal patterns, gradually all the way to the thematic structure of whole pieces. Jourdain also considers separately performance, musical imagery, and the process of composition. In the last parts of the book, all these pieces are combined into an exploratory discussion about some really tricky questions within music research: what it is in music that makes us tick, what makes a good melody, how do great composers become great, etc. While the answers are controversial (and at times I found myself slightly annoyed by Jourdain’s apparent preference for western tonal music) the argumentation is both insightful and careful and as a special treat to the meticulous reader, there are a lot of interesting tidbits and anecdotes to color the experience.

Personally, my biggest enjoyment was to follow how Jourdain handles the body in relation to sounds and meaning making. I’ve always felt that there must be some very intricate relationship between how we perceive sounds of our environment and the way we perceive our body (and its sonic capacities). Jourdain starts out boldly, scrapping body as basis of rhythm in the early beginning, crushing any hopes of mappings to heart-rate, body size, walking speeds etc. But then, along the book and particularly in the very last chapters, he returns to the body assigning it the most grand of responsibilities there is in musical perception. Essentially, what he suggests is, that music’s emotionality relies in music’s capability to use the body as an amplifier for understanding (and enjoying) high-order abstract orderliness, imposing perfect structure on a body that is usually deprived from it, introducing organization into a world, that in everyday is messy, unorganized and chaotic. Writes Jourdain: "By providing the brain with an artificial environment, and forcing it through that environment in controlled ways, music imparts the means of experiencing relations far deeper than we encounter in our everyday lives. […] Thus, however briefly, we attain a greater grasp of the world (or at least a small part of it), as if rising from the ground to look down upon the confining maze of ordinary existence." (p. 331)

All in all, I highly recommend the book to any reader interested in expanding their understanding of what goes on inside the head when we listen to music. The book is a good read; even if the content deals with brainy topics (psychology, perception and neurology) the text should be both easy to pick up and hard to lay down. The book also has an excellent glossary, which helps a lot if the terms and concepts are not that familiar. However, I found myself at time missing exact pointers to relevant research as they were being dealt with in the text; the lack of references slightly diminishes the uses of the book in academic context. Then again, some of the most fascinating arguments in the book are, essentially, speculation, so in this sense the exact references to scientific back up aren’t that important. As a personal note, I did feel Jourdain has a certain bias to his writing, but this does not in any way undermine the value of the book as a mind-opener and source of inspiration.