The World in Six Songs (2008) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Eddie: Add a description of this character.
• David Huron
• Victor
• Lennon
• Rubin
• Joni Mitchell
• Rodney Crowell
• John
• Ian
• Oliver
• Etienne
• Wallace
• Neil Young
• Dylan
• Mccartney
• David Byrne

Quotes edit see section history

• “(Religon) "God doesn't need our praise. He is not in vain,he doesn't need us to tell him he is great. But because He designed us, He knows what we need. He dictated that we should sing songs of religion and belief because He knows they help us to remember, they motivate us, and they bring us closer to Him, He knows that they are what we need."”

  Rabbi Hayyim Kassorla

• “Pairs of children from different countries took turns at the microphone, singing lines from the song in their native languages: Cantonese, Japanese, Romanian, !Xotha, Portuguese, Arabic, with each stanza ending in the English refrain in three part harmony: "Music alone shall live, never to die"”

• “Representation is a cognitive operation that allows for displacement in time and space--thinking about things that aren't there now. I can talk about fear without being afraid; I can sing abut sorrow that I don't necessarily feel right now. I can represent love with a <3 or an arbitrary string of vocal utterances such as "luv," "amoor" or "aijou". Such symbolic representations constitute abstractions, and lay the foundation for the creation fo visual art.”

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• This new neural mechanism gave us the three cognitive abilities that characterize the musical brain. The first is perspective-taking: the ability to think about our own thoughts and to realize that other people may have thoughts or beliefs that differ from our own. The second is representation: the ability to think about things that aren’t right-there-in-front-of-us. The third is rearrangement: the ability to combine, recombine, and impose hierarchical order on elements in the world.

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• Singing together releases oxytocin, a neurochemical now known to be involved in establishing bonds of trust between people.

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• What distinguishes us most is one thing no other animals do: art. And it’s not just the existence of art, but the centrality of it. Humans have demonstrated a powerful drive toward making art of all different kinds—representational and abstract, static and dynamic, creations that employ space, time, sight, sound, and movement.

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• Americans spend more money on music than they do on prescription drugs or sex, and the average American hears more than five hours of music per day.

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• This understanding of relations turns out to be fundamental for music appreciation; it is a cornerstone of all human musical systems.

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• Decades of research on music cognition have shown that humans process music using both absolute and relational processing—that is, we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values.

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• Neuroscientists have recently found that playing music can modulate levels of dopamine, the so-called feel-good hormone in the brain. The exact mechanism by which this happens is not well understood, but the secretion of feel-good chemicals in the brain in response to playing and listening to music points to an ancient and evolutionarily advantageous connection between music and mood.

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• Making and listening to music, then, feels good not because of anything intrinsic in the music. Rather, those of our ancestors who just happened to feel good during musical activities are the ones who survived to pass on the gene that gave rise to these feelings.

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• Music, I argue, is not simply a distraction or a pastime, but a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next. This book explains how I came to the (some might say) radical notion that there are basically six kinds of songs that do all of this. They are songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.

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• What we call emotions are nothing more than complex neurochemical states in the brain that motivate us to act. Emotion and motivation are thus intrinsically linked to each other, and to our motor centers. But the system can work in the other direction, because most neural pathways are bi-directional. In addition to emotions causing us to move, movement can make us feel emotional.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• United States
• California
• San Francisco
• North America
• Stanford

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Daniel J. Levitin (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 781.11

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Professional & Technical › Professional Science › Physics › Acoustics & Sound
• Books › Entertainment › Music › Theory, Composition & Performance › Appreciation
• Books › Science › Physics › Acoustics & Sound
• Books › Entertainment › Music › History & Criticism