The Music Instinct [Kindle Edition]

I am one of those sad people who loves music but can't play a note. But I listen to it all the time, and am fascinated by how it exerts its powerful effects on the mind. Out of all the books about it that I have read at this popular level, I would rate this one as easily the best. The fact that it is honest about what is not known, cited by one reviewer as a flaw, is to my mind one of its greatest strengths. Too many popular science books try to give the impression that everything is neatly wrapped up with a pink bow, whereas in fact the whole point of science is to explore what is still unknown. As it happens, music is currently an extremely active field of neurology and psychology, precisely for this reason.

Ball has written a number of popular science books, and I am impressed by how good the ones I've read are. Mostly I know little about his topics, but in the case of music I do happen to know a fair amount of the research, and can vouch for the fact that Ball is spot on in areas where there is a concensus (and I happen to think his revisionist approach to the contentious issue of music as an evolutionary adaptation is correct, too, which biasses me in his favour perhaps). He is as up to date with current experimental findings as it is possible to be given publishing lead times. In fact, I'm deeply envious of this man's renaissance-like ability to move into an area and understand the basics in a year or too - it just doesn't seem fair, even if the rest of us do benefit from it. But I guess that's the advantage of having a physics training - if you can understand physics, you can understand anything. And he is an editor at Nature, so I suppose he must be at the top of his game.

I should add that as well as being reliable and pretty comprehensive on the science, this book is also extremely well written - I can tell that, because it took me so little sweat to read it.

The only book I can think of to rival this which the general reader might tackle is Ani Patel's book on Music and Language. However, this is quite tough for a non-specialist to handle - it is probably more of an overview for research workers, unless you're really feeling strong. Also, anything by John Sloboda is excellent, but again some of it can be technical and a bit heavy going for the non-academic person. David Huron's 'Sweet Anticipation' is superb, though it covers less ground than Ball and it pushes a theory of emotion induction that I personally believe to be good but incomplete. But hey, that's just a personal view. Huron may turn out to be right all along.

Anyway, the bottom line is that if you have any interest in understanding music at anything below serious academic research worker level, get this book - and avoid the airport bookshelf alternatives by the way, as most of them are pretty unimpressive (I've tried them). There is some real crud out there, but by contrast this book doesn't dumb down, it doesn't try and impress you with how many famous people the author has dined with or how many has-been pop singers he knows, and it doesn't try, and embarrassingly fail, to be humorous. For those reasons alone it should deserve every reader's undying gratitude.

It's said that a good defence lawyer should never ask a question that they don't already know the answer to.

In writing 'The Music Instinct', Philip Ball would have been well advised to follow the same advice. The book is a painstaking and detailed survey of the current state of scientific research into how the human brain processes and reacts to music: but the further he goes into the subject, the more apparent it becomes that the depths of the answer are still pretty much unfathomed, giving the book a tentative and unfinished air, more of a report on a research work in progress than the definitive exposition promised by the book jacket.

There are some speculative conclusions about the evolutionary significance of some of the brain activities that are triggered by music, and some robust repudiation of the more reductionist and dismissive approaches to music in evolutionary science. The breadth and variety of research into the subject is conveyed well, although Ball's sheer inclusivity can make certain sections of the book rather repetitive and stagnant.

Structuring the book around the main areas of musical theory (pitch, harmony, etc.) leads Ball into some convoluted cross-referencing to other sections of the book, and similar research strands are occasionally referred to more than once. The structure also tends to highlight the deficiencies of the research into some matters such as timbre, a crucial part of the musical experince that is, from Ball's summary at least, obviously still little understiood in objective terms.

Providing you are prepared to ignore the central failure of the book to deliver on its headline promise, there is, having said all that, much to be gained from 'The Music Instinct'. The lack of definitive conclusions is hardly Ball's fault per se, as he cannot report conclusions that do not actually exist in the source research. Ball enlivens his examples and broadens the book's scope by drawing his examples from across the spectrum of music, equally comfortable discussing and occasionally comparing music as diverse as J.S. Bach, John Coltrane, Eliza Carthy, gamelan orchestras, ragas, Schoenberg, and the Sex Pistols.

Anyone with an interest in the technicalities of music will have their attention grabbed and their knowledge expanded by some of the research discussed (personally I found the whole concept of 'harmonic space' fascinating, for example), and Ball's summaries of works that I have read (Ross Duffin's entertaining and polemical 'Why Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony' for example) give a good deal of confidence in the accuracy of Ball's summaries of the rest of the research.

If the Amazon ratings system allowed fractions, 'The Music Instinct' would probably rate as a 3.5 or thereabouts. Ball quotes Elvis Costello's [or maybe Frank Zappa's] famous line, 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture'; 'The Music Instinct' shows that, sometimes, that's just precisely what writing about music is.

(This review originally appeared in BBC Focus)

Over the years Desert Island Discs has had over 2,000 guests, ranging from aesthetes to athletes. But no matter who they are, most of them insist that music is very important to them, and that picking just eight recordings was the devil's own job. Okay, some of them probably can't tell Scarlatti from Mr Scruff, but there's no doubting that for many of us music is more than acoustic wallpaper - it's mind-altering stuff.

Quite how it weaves its magic is described in impressive detail in this latest work by the award-winning science writer Philip Ball. He describes how music has developed since the first instruments (bone flutes) were created at least 40,000-odd years ago, and how composers have found ways to trigger specific emotions using nothing more than markings on lined paper. He then goes on to describe some of the theories now emerging for why, for example, a Mozart sonata can be wonderfully uplifting while Mahler's 10th symphony can leave you scared witless.

Ball really knows his stuff, and thinks nothing of comparing the final bars of Aaron Copland's
"Quiet City" to ZZ Top's "Ko Ko Blue". Frankly, in places the book is just too detailed, and while Ball explains the basics of musical notation, it's nowhere near enough to get the most out of this book. But music-lovers who want an in-depth understanding of what moves them should look no further.