Music, the brain, and ecstasy
Subtitle: how music captures our imagination
By: Robert Jourdain.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: W. Morrow
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 377
Subjects: Music -- Psychological aspects; Music -- Physiological aspects; Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics
Description: Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy is a far-reaching study of how music captivates us so completely and why we form such powerful connections to it.

Leading us to an understanding of the pleasures of sound, Robert Jourdain draws on a variety of fields including science, psychology, and philosophy. He uses music from around the world to show how melodies work, how rhythm differs from beat, and why some sounds are beautiful and others ugly. Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy looks at the evolution of music and introduces surprising new concepts of memory and perception, knowledge and attention, motion and emotion, all at work as music takes hold of us.

Along the way, a fascinating cast of characters brings Jourdain's narrative to vivid life: "idiots savants" who absorb whole pieces on a single hearing, composers who hallucinate entire compositions, a psychic who claimed to take dictation from long-dead composers, and victims of brain damage who can move only when they hear music. In each of these, Jourdain assures us, we will see parts of ourselves.

Using such examples, he helps explain the parallels between music and language, and asks how the brain reacts to each.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [351]-359) and index.