Music, Language, and the Brain

This is the best book so far on language, the brain, and music. It is highly technical, especially the first five chapters. Nonspecialists with a serious interest can get through the last two ("Meaning" and "Evolution") but the first five are hard going unless you are fairly advanced. Patel reviews an enormous, and almost entirely very new, literature on similarities and differences at the micro level between language and music. Overall, music is clearly related to language in many ways, but equally clearly a separate realm--a different communicative modality. He also points out that music and its meanings are learned. We are not born knowing that minor key is "sad"; that's a recent west-European idea, unknown to the rest of the universe. We have to learn about the pastorality of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, and so on. On the other hand, lullabyes sound like mothers shushing their babies, and I would add that laments in every culture sound like ordinary weeping. Still, most musical meanings appear to be culturally learned. This is an excellent book, and I am duly impressed with all of it, but I do have some modest points to raise. First, I would find music and language somewhat closer than he does. He rules out of consideration a number of intermediate forms--chant, rhythmic speech (like African-American sermons), incantation, word-music poetry (like Russian romantic lyrics), children's play-games, and a great deal more. It seems that a huge percentage of human communication, including much of the most important religious material in every culture, is in that neglected border zone. Something very important is here and is being missed. Second, he concludes language definitely evolved, but music is a rather recent invention--not an evolved part of communication. I am usually highly allergic to "genes as destiny," and this is surely the first time I ever argued for a genetic explanation against a learning-based one! But I can't separate music and language enough to see music as a recent invention. It depends on some of the same recursive hierarchic-nesting systems of planning as language does; it is universal among humans; it is deeply important; it seems a physical need for a lot of people. Of course I cannot be sure if this means there really is an evolved mechanism, and the question remains open. Third, he rather misses the relevance of bird song. He is aware of, but strangely downplays, recent work showing that many (most?) songbirds learn their songs and use them to recognize their mates, neighbors, local dialect sharers, and so on. Birds also use song to keep in touch with their families, show their levels of health (as pointed out by Marlene Zuk), show their reproductive status, find each other, and much else. They also use song to communicate their mood states: level of arousal, type of arousal, and more. This is important, as will appear below. Many songbirds are quite brilliant composers; mockingbirds and many others incorporate all sorts of learned noises into their songs, change the noises to fit their song patterns, work them into original phrases, and so on. Of course no bird comes close to composing even a simple song in the human sense (i.e. a single hierarchically-nested composition using phrases to carry out an overall plan). Bird song has mere "phrase structure grammar," to be technical; they don't do sentences. (No nonhuman animal is known to.) But they are doing something more than just marking territory and finding a mate. Actually, many of the best singers mate for life and don't need to find a mate in most years. Yet they and their mates often sing to each other. Also, many birds sing all year round, not just in the breeding season. We don't know what they are saying, but obviously a lot. Very simple calls do fine for territory-and-mating. Song is incredibly dangerous (hawks and cats home in on it) and expensive (it takes a lot of brain tissue, enough to be a real cost in flying). If the simple and humble songs of birds are this complex and demanding, human music must be a really major enterprise, far more important than social scientists have allowed till now. Bird songs are important because no nonhuman primates and very few other mammals are known to have complex learned songs. Bird songs are about our only models. (Whales sing too, but don't make great lab animals.) I think music evolved, and did so to handle the management, manipulation, and communication of broad, general, but intense mood-states. Language handles the specific cognitive information; music handles the powerful but unsayable moods. Partly, the moods are directly represented in the music (as in lullabyes and laments); partly we learn our cultures' rules about communicating. There is a great deal more to say about this, especially when one folds religious chants into the mix. We need more dialogue and better cross-cultural and cross-species knowledge. Is there a group out there working on this?

I bought this book because I had seen it mentioned in a few other books I had read on the topic of music and the brain. Oliver Sacks and Daniel Levitin have both referenced this work at some time. I am, as a music teacher in public schools, always looking for ways to strengthen the argument for keeping music instruction alive in the public schools, and have always believed that the links between learning language and learning music might be one of the building blocks of this argument. I have only just started reading this dense volume, but it is chock full of rigorous research and is very accessible even to regular people. It has been written to be accessible either to musicians -which I am- or neurologists-which I am not, and in the reading I have done so far, this seems to be the case. It is a book also which is meant to be read over time, and not necessarily in the order as it is presented. Each of the sections can stand alone, and I have found even that I can dip into it for a particular bit of information and come away with something new to add to my understanding of how music, language and the brain all work together.

I don't think so, but I admit I didn't find it as difficult as rumored. It IS very detailed. Basically, it's a comparison of the linguistic aspects of pitch, timbre and rythm between language and music. Many of the details, all backed up by annotated research studies, are quite interesting. By themselves, they don't provide an answer to the big question of the evolutionary relationships between the two. Speculations on this are provided in the last chapter. I'm now reading Mithren's SINGING NEANDERTHALS for a more bluesky view. This book, the book reviewed, is a necessary prerequisite to any of that more general work and I would recommend it to any student of language or music.

Music, Language and the Brain is a well-researched and comprehensively presented comparison of the ways in which humans process music and language in the brain. Patel presents his information in an entertaining and informative manner. The book consists of seven chapters, the first an introduction and the remaining six an examination of characteristics music and language share. These include pitch and timbre, rhythm, melody, syntax, meaning and evolution. These chapters are then further subdivided (and sub-subdivided); examples of some of these subdivisions include sections specifically about music or language, or sections comparing the two. As someone who has always enjoyed both language and music, I found the book an engrossing but difficult read.This subdivision of chapters makes the massive amount of information Patel presents more digestible, as does his style. Dense but not weighted down in jargon, Patel does an admirable job of condensing his research into the simplest terms possible, making the complex cognitive systems used to process language and music possible for a laymen to understand. Breaking down language and music into multiple shared components allowed for more effective contrast and a more effective explanation of both music and language alone - the understanding afforded of the specific components led to a better understanding of how both systems functioned in their entireties. Within the chapters themselves, the subdivision of chapters into a description of music, language, and then "key links," which Patel describes as "areas in which direct comparisons are proving fruitful" provides an effect overview of the topic.For the remainder of the review, I'll be focusing on my favorite chapter (the one on melody) because I think it displays both the strengths and weaknesses of the book well. Melody is a difficult concept to define - to many people, including me, the term is intuitive more than anything else - but Patel does an excellent job of providing his own definition ("an organized sequence of pitches that conveys a rich variety of information to a listener"), and then goes on to explain the significant points of his definition and why he believes they are important. In this case, the two most important points in this definition are the fact that "melodies are tone sequences that pack a large informational punch" and that "a tone sequence qualifies as a melody by virtue of the rich mental patterns it engenders in the listener." Compared to the dictionary definitions he also provides, Patel's definition is much closer to my intuitive understanding of the term memory.Most of the chapter is devoted to melody in music, for obvious reasons - melody in music is easily and immediately identifiable, and there are often more variations in musical melody than there is linguistic melody. (The sentence "[i]f a musical melody is "a group of tones in love with each other" (Shaheen, quoted in Hast et. al, 1999), then a linguistic melody is a group of tones that work together to get a job done" is a typical example of Patel's excellent synthesis of his own work with his research, expressed with clarity and wit.) After a description of melody in both music and language, he defines his key links as melodic statistics and melodic contour, emphasizing his point by including the fact that "quantitative differences emerge between the music of two nations that reflect linguistic differences." He also describes amusia ("deficits in musical perception and/or production abilities following brain damage that are not simply due to hearing loss or some other peripheral auditory disorder") and tone deafness ("severe problems with music perception and production that cannot be attributed to hearing loss, lack of exposure to music, or any obvious nonmusical social or cognitive impairments"). To further emphasize the connection between melody in speech and melody in music, he cites a study that states that people suffering from amusia were unable to recognize not only tones in music but also emphasis in speech, indicating that "intonation and tone-sequence processing overlap in the brain."The remaining chapters all follow this general template effectively and informatively: music and language apart, key links, and sometimes a description of a relevant disease such as tone deafness in the chapter on melody or aphasia in the chapter on syntax to further elaborate on the processing of music and language in the brain.When I think of melody, however, I know that I personally think most often of a melody that's sung - a song, rather than a piece of music. Including music with lyrics could have been a fascinating connection of both language and music, a bit of a missed opportunity, I think (although it is hard to fault Patel for the research he didn't do when he did do so much). There are only two pages on song in this book where I imagine it could be the subject of a separate book on its own, which was a bit of a disappointment for me. Similarly, the inclusion of something like poetry or even dramatic language - a speech, political or otherwise, rather than everyday language, could have provided a more in-depth comparison. This is, however, addressed in his introduction, where he says "[c]omparing ordinary language to instrumental music forces us to search for the hidden connections that unify obviously different phenomena." Maybe the inclusion of poetry and music with lyrics rather than instrumental music could be the next step? The only other complaint I have is that Patel could have included more about the way the brain processes music and language; a more in-depth description of these processes would have helped me personally. These problems are not confined solely to the chapter on melody, either - they hold true throughout the book; Patel focuses more on linguistics and acoustics rather than neuroscience.These are admittedly fairly minor quibbles, though, and Patel recognizes and addresses many of them. Many academics have read and enjoyed this book, including Oliver Sacks and reviewers at Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and Language and Cognition have read and enjoyed this book, but it is just as accessible for students as it is Ph.D's, thanks to Patel's writing. It is not an easy read, but it is well worth the time and effort. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested in language, music, or the brain, regardless of level of expertise.

Libro muy bueno, una tesis bastante sencilla de entender para cualquier persona interesada en el tema.

Excellent resource!

Great book

Great book, perfect condition!

Ein Klassiker mit programmatischem Titel. Unumgänglich für Forschungsarbeit (d.h. geeignet für Neurowissenschaftler, Musikwissenschaftler, Linguisten, Phonetiker, Mediziner) in diese Richtung. Mit umfassender, gemäß Erscheinungsjahr, aktueller Bibliographie.