Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Music Cognition Chat

Seed Magazine, which sponsors ScienceBlogs, has a great discussion between Daniel Levitin and David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne). They discuss the evolution of music, Asperger's and Williams Syndrome, memory, absolute pitch, synthesia, pattern detection, the social aspects of music; running through most of the curriculum I teach in my Psychology of Music course. It is a rather informal discussion, with each of them taking turns talking about things that they are working on. But that very informal nature makes the highly informative discussion that much more impressive. (via)

1 comment:

Hucbald said...

Wow. Thanks. That was very interesting and "DB" has been a favorite of mine for decades.

I'll leave the philosophical and psycological music discussions to others: As for myself, I prefer to simply understand the mechanics. All that other stuff seems to just happen intuitively anyway, but it is great to listen to those who have put a lot of thought into those aspects of music.