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Book review: Phillip Ball. The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It. London: The Bodley Head, 2010. 452 pp. ÂŁ20.00 ISBN 9781847920881 John Sloboda Psychology of Music 2010 38: 506 DOI: 10.1177/03057356100380040802 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pom.sagepub.com/content/38/4/506
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The book is likely to be of interest to a wide readership. It is likely to be of interest to music therapists, music educators, students and researchers. It is also likely to be of interest to any professionals working with teenagers, such as youth workers or after-school club leaders. References McFerran, K. and Sawyer, S. M. (2003). From recreation to creative expression: The essential features of an adolescent inpatient psychosocial support program. ANNALS: Journal of the Singaporean Medical Association [Special issue on Adolescence], 32, 64–70. McFerran-Skewes, K. and Grocke, D. E. (2000). What do grieving young people and music therapy have in common: Exploring the match between creativity and younger adolescents. European Journal of Palliative Care, 7(6), 227–230. Wigram, T. (2004). Improvisation: Methods and techniques for music therapy clinicians, educators and students. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Tiija Rinta Westminster Local Authority, UK
Phillip Ball. The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It. London: The Bodley Head, 2010. 452 pp. £20.00 ISBN 9781847920881
What goes on in our heads when we listen to tonal music? How and why does it engage our emotions? Why does music seems to make such sense to us, and what does this tell us about the origins and biological purpose of music? These are the main questions addressed in this wellconstructed book by the respected British science journalist Philip Ball. The Music Instinct is a contribution to a small but growing group of books about psychological aspects of music that are aimed not at researchers, professional musicians, or students, but at interested lay people (e.g. Levitin, 2006, 2009; Sacks, 2008). Such books have a number of shared characteristics. Most important among them is a strong narrative, held together by a sense of personal excitement and discovery conveyed by the author. It really is possible to read a book such as this from beginning to end (say on a long train journey) in a way that would be both taxing and possibly counterproductive when applied to a scholarly text. To assist this, the style is informal, veering towards journalistic; referencing is light; and there is a minimum of footnotes or technical details of research studies, although sufficient to point the reader to major scholarly studies should they be interested. Researchers are introduced by first and last name, suggesting personal acquaintance, which in this author’s case has some genuine underpinning – he has indeed met and interviewed several of the psychologists whose work he discusses. This book shares another feature of the best examples of this genre, which is the conveying of a sense of intellectual discovery, as the author engages with, grapples with, and occasionally argues with, the scholarly material, to produce something that is neither an uncritical or effusive summary nor a tetchy and nit-picking demolition, but a thoughtful and stimulating invitation for a reader to engage in mental debate with the author and those scholars whose work he lays before the reader. Conclusions are suggested rather than ‘nailed down’ and closure on a thorny issue is not imposed where no such closure is possible. A very striking feature of this enterprise is the highly detailed treatment of musical materials, at a level that would be more common in a book on music theory or music analysis. This author is highly musically literate and knowledgeable, and is very capable of rolling his sleeves
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up and digging right down into the technical details of the use of scales, melodies, chords, rhythms and other musical elements, operating in their musical context (which is predominantly the context of 18th- to 20th-century classical music). There are more than 100 musical examples, and most are available for free as open-access soundfiles on the publisher’s website (http://www.bodleyhead.co.uk/musicinstinct/index.asp). This website also contains very useful summaries of each chapter of the 13 chapters, which means that a potential reader can get a very good sense of both style and content prior to deciding whether to obtain a copy to read. This is exemplary practice, which one hopes is spreading more generally in the publishing world. In reviewing the book, I had two questions in mind. The first and, for this journal, more important question is: could this book be useful for scholars, researchers or classroom teachers, despite these not being its primary intended audience? The second question is: does it represent current scientific knowledge fairly to a lay reader. Would I recommend this to a musically interested friend as an introduction to the field? The answer to both questions is a qualified yes. Let me deal firstly with possible scholarly uses. There is not much in here for the serious postgraduate or postdoctoral researcher. Scholarly sources cited and discussed are generally well known in the literature (e.g. Krumhansl, Meyer, Peretz, Patel) and although the author views the material through a thoughtfully critical lens, there is nothing sufficiently new to cause one to imagine that future scholars would cite this book as an original source in its own right. However, I could imagine this book being very useful to a teacher, either in a psychology department, or in a music faculty, particularly in conjunction with some of the primary sources cited. What students quite often need (and sometimes fail to get from ‘designed’ teaching texts) is a sense of excitement and discovery and the sense that these issues matter intensely to someone. What they also need is the opportunity to interact with and discuss real musical examples, of the sort that are provided here in profusion. There is sufficient musical and scientific sophistication here for students from both sides of this divide to learn something from across the divide. Finally, students need an integrating source to hold together a set of specific topics that might be covered week by week. I could imagine this book being the integrative backbone of a 12-week course on music perception and cognition. The main topics would be, in chapter order as they appear: • • • • • • • • • • •
The origins of music Musical scales and tuning Melody Grouping and stream segregation Harmony Rhythm Timbre Emotion and affect Style Music and language Musical meaning
Now to the lay person. My sense is that the book provides a very sound and accurate portrayal of some of the main themes that have emerged from the cognitive sciences of music over the last few decades. In particular, it shows how the act of listening to music is a complex process where memory and anticipation operate on sound materials unfolding over time to deliver a
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highly structured cognitive representation, a representation that is deepened and sharpened through experience with materials that share underlying features. Such experience does not depend upon, though may be assisted by, formal musical education or the knowledge of musical vocabulary to describe these structures and elements. Ball also deals deftly and sensitively with some of the most contentious and often overblown controversies in the field. His treatment of the ‘origins of music’ debate is a judicious cutting down to size of some of the more overblown and speculative propositions with which this field is rife. He rightly concludes that you don’t need to prove that music serves a unique evolutionarily programmed need for it to nonetheless have profound and widespread value to human beings. Likewise, his no-nonsense treatment of the much-hyped ‘Mozart Effect’ makes it laudably clear what one can and cannot conclude from the research studies. He makes a well-argued case for concentrating his attentions on western tonal music, while pointing out that all music operates in a cultural context, of which one must be fully aware before trying to generalize. There are sufficient cross-cultural references to cash in this insight, and allow it to be pursued by those who have interest. All of this means that a lay reader would be enlightened rather than misled, and would engage with precisely those issues that have engaged some of the best minds in the discipline. Where I would want to issue a slight warning is in relation to Ball’s coverage of the field at large. There is very little in the book about music performance, and virtually nothing about musical education, training, talent or development. One might also be tempted, after reading this book, to imagine that music engagement was primarily a matter of listening. A broader cultural and historical perspective would probably place song, dance and generative activities (improvisation and composition) as equally primary. In many cultural contexts musical enactment comes first, and the listening finds its place as one of the necessary feedback loops (alongside, for instance, motor proprioception). Listening without enacting would be a strange concept in many cultures. Perhaps, therefore, this book reflects somewhat accurately the state of affairs in early 21st-century developed countries, where most people don’t make music to any significant degree, but have become largely passive consumers. Philip Ball does indeed show that behind this physical passivity there is a lot of mental activity. However, he might have done more to suggest that, for full engagement of those cognitive and affective capacities that music draws on, his readers probably need to get out of their armchairs and pick up an instrument, or join a choir or dance class. References Levitin, D. (2006). This is your brain on music: Understanding a human obsession. New York: Dutton. Levitin, D. (2009). The world in six songs: How the musical brain created human nature. London: Aurum Press. Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia: Tales of music and the brain. London: Picador.
John Sloboda Keele University, UK
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