Music is, Ball finds, a skill we have to learn just as language is, but we probably didn't need to be able to carry a tune to escape a sabre-toothed tiger. We have evolved hard-wired ability to acquire and use language, because such communication skills conferred an evolutionary advantage. The problem with that approach, as we soon learn, is that the ability to appreciate, let alone play music, is not innate in that same way that language clearly is. And Ball's whole thesis could be seen as a rebuttal of Pinker's stance, trying to do for music what Pinker does for language, even cheekily mimicking the title of Pinker's The Language Instinct. Very few readers who make it that far will disagree with his conclusion, but most will have gained some enlightenment about how music works and why we enjoy it.Īt the other end of his book he starts with a quote from cognitive scientist Steven Pinker who airily dismisses music as ephemeral confectionary for the mind. So says Philip Ball after 400 pages of talking about music. We need to talk about music, but it is hard. An occasionally challenging but refreshingly unstuffy approach to a universal human pursuit. Summary: A valuable and serious survey of current thinking about music's structures and how they relate to our cognitive functions.
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