Book description
Why have all human cultures - today and throughout history - made
music?
Why does music excite such rich emotion?
How do we make sense of musical sound?
These are questions that have, until recently, remained mysterious.
Now The Music Instinct explores how the latest research in
music psychology and brain science is piecing together the puzzle of
how our minds understand and respond to music. Ranging from Bach
fugues to nursery rhymes to heavy rock, Philip Ball interweaves
philosophy, mathematics, history and neurology to reveal why music
moves us in so many ways. Without requiring any specialist knowledge,
The Music Instinct will both deepen your appreciation of the
music you love, and open doors to music that once seemed alien, dull
or daunting, offering a passionate plea for the importance of music in
education and in everyday life.
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: Chartres 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.
