Daniel Levitin quotes - page 3

I think we will see personalized music stations in the next few years... controlled by computer algorithms... I think it will be important that... listeners have an "adventuresomeness" knob that will control the mix of old and new, or the mix of how far out the new music is from what they usually listen to. (Daniel Levitin)
Memory for playing a musical piece... involves a process very much like that for music listening... through establishing standard schemas and expectation. In addition, musicians use chunking... tying information together into groups, and remembering the group as a whole rather than individual pieces. View quote
Daniel Levitin
One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like Oh Susannah, This Land Is Your Land, and Frère Jacques. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing. ...Joni will talk compellingly and passionately about alternate tunings for hours, comparing them to different colors that van Gogh used in his paintings. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Consonant intervals and dissonant intervals are processed via separate mechanisms in the auditory cortex. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Studies of violin players by Thomas Elbert have shown that the region of the brain responsible for moving the left hand... increases in size as a result of practice. View quote
Daniel Levitin
There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists - and the rest of us - must stop giving equal time to things that don't have an opposing side. View quote
Daniel Levitin
I became a cognitive psychologist because I met a bunch of teachers I really liked. View quote
Daniel Levitin
I don't think I'm always right, but I would like to empower people to come to sound conclusions using a systematic way of looking at things. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots. ...Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard. ...harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation. (Daniel Levitin)
A gene that promotes nurturing behavior postcopulation could... spread throughout the population, to the extent that the offspring of people with the nurturing gene fare better, as a group, in the competition for resources and mates. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Cosmides and Tooby argue that music's function in the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands placed on it by language and social interaction. ...Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both singing and rhythmic movement... View quote
Daniel Levitin
Music... is... a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. ...If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of memories can cause competition... leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes... leaving you with nothing. View quote
Daniel Levitin
It's not just that we remember things wrongly, but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly. View quote
Daniel Levitin
A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact with my tongue. It doesn't have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential. View quote
Daniel Levitin
No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones. View quote
Daniel Levitin
The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. View quote
Daniel Levitin
The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language. View quote
Daniel Levitin
In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. (Daniel Levitin)
We need to take a step back, and realize that not everything we encounter is true. You don't want to be gullibly accepting everything as true, but you don't want to be cynically rejecting everything as false. You want to take your time to evaluate the information. View quote
Daniel Levitin
The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business--all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry). View quote
Daniel Levitin
Your brain on music is all about... connections. View quote
Daniel Levitin
The multiple reinforcing cues of a good song. View quote
Daniel Levitin