Music Cognition Quotes

Music seems hard-wired into our very being. It moves us, stirs us to action, sets us in motion, sticks in our memories and minds.

Our bodies like rhythm and our brains like melody and harmony.

As human beings we're visual creatures, and it's so easy to play the guitar by looking at it. It's a real challenge to go from that visual way of perceiving the guitar to getting back to that pure sound connecting to the instrument.

The state-of-the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting's brain organizes music. That's important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one's mind rich representation of the desired soundscape.

I know when I sit with my band members and we're playing back a song that we've done, I know that they're experiencing it in a completely different way and hearing stuff that they're alerted to because the way the interpret the world is through their ears. Mine is through my eyes.

I think music is the most phenomenal platform for intellectual thought.

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.

A dissection of music perception and creation that starts slowly and inexorably builds to a grand finish. I loved reading that listening to music coordinates more disparate parts of the brain than almost anything else--and playing music uses even more! Despite illuminating a lot of what goes on this book doesn't "spoil" enjoyment- it only deepens the beautiful mystery that is music.

I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.

But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness

What I picked up on Michael Jackson - because I study people when I watch them - the way that he counts his rhythm with his feet and his neck at the same time is crazy... so he's hearing multiple things at once. And I don't know anybody who does that.

I don't have perfect pitch, but I have relative pitch. I'm glad I don't have perfect pitch because perfect pitch can drive you crazy.

I'm a big fan of music, I'm a student of music, and I just wanna learn and keep enhancing my education about the music.

In music the present is extended.

Because you've been exposed to Western tonal music, you know after a certain chord sequence what the next possibilities are. Your brain has compiled a statistical map of which ones are most likely and least likely. If the song keeps hitting the most likely notes, you'll get bored, and if it's always the least likely ones, you'll get irritated.

The same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen.

Your understanding of music depends on your capacity to perceive it.

For some reason, the evolutionists have not come up with an evolution-based explanation for why human beings react so powerfully to music. But surely they will.

Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.