How Music Works
The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond
1 of 1 copy available
Have you ever wondered how off-key you are while singing in the shower? Or if your Bob Dylan albums really sound better on vinyl? Or why certain songs make you cry?
Now, scientist and musician John Powell invites you on an entertaining journey through the world of music. Discover what distinguishes music from plain old noise, how scales help you memorize songs, what the humble recorder teaches you about timbre (assuming your suffering listeners don't break it first), why anyone can learn to play a musical instrument, what the absurdly complicated names of classical music pieces actually mean, how musical notes came to be (hint: you can thank a group of stodgy men in 1939 London for that one), how to make an oboe from a drinking straw, and much more. With wit and charm, and in the simplest terms, Powell explains the science and psychology of music.
Clever, informative, and deeply engaging, How Music Works takes the secrets of music away from the world of badly dressed academics and gives every one of us—whether we love to sing or play air guitar—the means to enhance our listening pleasure.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 24, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781469026220
- File size: 233878 KB
- Duration: 08:07:14
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 30, 2010
In this enlightening book, Powell, a British scholar and professor, sets out to explain how we experience music. He selects examples from all manner of disciplines—music composition, simple mathematics, physics, engineering, history—and offers his insights, such as how Bach’s Prelude in C Major is similar to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” In the first half, he defines the elements of music like pitch, frequency, harmony, rhythm, and decibel. Building on this foundation, Powell hits his stride in the book’s second half as he demonstrates, using both classical and pop music, how musicians create sound and how we listen to it. Some of the information can get scientific but Powell conveys the material with enough humor (“I think the decibel was invented in a bar, late one night, by a committee of drunken electrical engineers who wanted to take revenge on the world for their total lack of dancing partners”) and cocktail party facts (“when we listen to Mozart’s music nowadays, we are hearing it a semitone higher than he would have intended”) to keep the book light and fun. Included in the book is a 10-track CD.
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