Book description
All human cultures seem to make music - today and through history.
But why they do so, why music can excite deep passions, and how we
make sense of musical sound at all are questions that have, until
recently, remained profoundly mysterious. Now in The Music Instinct
Brain Shot Philip Ball provides the first comprehensive,
accessible survey of what is known - and what is still unknown - about
how music works its magic, and why, as much as eating and sleeping, it
seems indispensable to humanity.
BRAIN SHOT: Byte-sized survey of what is known - and what is
still unknown - about how music works and why it is indispensible to humanity
Philip Ball is a freelance writer and a consultant editor for
Nature
, where he previously worked as an editor for physical sciences. He
writes regularly in the scientific and popular media, and his many books
on scientific subjects include
The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern
Formation in Nature
,
H2O: A Biography of Water
,
The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic
and Science
, and
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another
, which won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books
.
His latest books are
The Sun and Moon Corrupted
, a novel,
Universe of Stone: Chatres Cathedral and the Triumph of
the Medieval Mind
, and
Nature's Patterns
. Philip obtained a PhD in physics from the University of Bristol -
where he also played a lot of music.
