The Music Instinct by Philip Ball | Book review

Steven Poole tunes in to an engaging analysis of the sound of musicHow do we hear music? As the science writer Philip Ball's book shows thrillingly, listening to Lady Gaga is a hugely complex mental activity. It is already strange that we hear a single note played on the violin or piano as a single note, rather than a chord of harmonic overtones. Add harmony, polyphony and rhythm, and the brain has to recruit considerable processing resources, as recent research in cognitive science shows, to un...

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