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What is music? How and why does it affect us? What is the nature of musical genius? Author/composer Robert Jourdain explores these and other questions, from the essential nature of sound through composition, performance, and, finally, the nature of ecstasy. His prose is eminently readable, offering a very accessible account of a difficult subject to the general reader as well as to the musical sophisticate. This is a fascinating and intriguing book, written by someone who clearly knows his subject. From Booklist When we listen to music, it appeals on many levels. Jourdain guides avid listeners, composers, and performers alike through the auditory pathways of the brain on a quest to understand how music affects the emotions. The journey winds from the basic physics of sound and the neurophysiology of the brain, through tone, melody, harmony, rhythm, composition, performance, listening, and understanding, and finally to the pleasure music gives. Always linking the physical sounds to their interpretations in the various areas of the brain, Jourdain also speculates on why people enjoy some types of music and not others (partly this is a matter of acculturation) and comments on the content of music that challenges logic and appeals to emotions. Moreover, he relates all the elements of music by reference to a single, continuing (very familiar) example. Students of music appreciation, composers, performers, and teachers all should consult this book for insight into why music is enjoyed. Alan Hirsch From Kirkus Reviews A layman's primer on the psychology and history of the human response to music. Jourdain, a California composer and pianist, goes at his subject with the zeal of an impresario, approaching music from as many different angles as he can think of: the anthropological, the biological, the aesthetic, the moral, and the physical. The book that results from his discoveries swarms with information. We learn that ``all in all, it took some 500 million years "Jourdian's deep love for serious music...gives his book a moral force and passon rare in science writing." Bringing together discoveries from neurophysiology, psychology, music theory, and philosophy, Robert Jourdain moves from the simplest aspects of music, such as sound and tone, to the more complex, like composition and performance. In clear, accessible language, Robert Jourdain writes about the extraordinary array of physical and mental functions involved in the appreciation of music. Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy is divided into chapters on the basics of sound and aspects of music and the way music is perceived, then it considers the neurological and emotional adaptations of composers and musicians to the demands of the music. He notes that there is no proof that any particular brand of emotionality is tied to musical greatness. Stretching the mind in every dimension that music occupies, Robert Jourdain encourages one to think like a paleontologist, a neurophysiologist, an acoustician, a psychophysicist, a musicologist, a composer, a performer, a sociologist, a linguist, and a philosopher. He looks at the evolution of music, and introduces surprising new concepts of memory and perception, knowledge and attention, motion and emotion, all at work as music takes hold. Ingram Drawing on advances in neurophysiology, psychology, music theory, and philosophy, the author explores the intimate connections humans form with their favorite types of music and the physical and mental reactions music produces in us. From the Inside Flap Human beings have always found intensely personal meaning in patterns of sound. They help us identify ourselves and reflect our personalities and our values. Attack someone's political opinions and risk being taken for a fool, but assault someone's musical tastes and you may be taken as an enemy. Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy> is a far-reaching study of how music captivates us so completely and why we form such powerful connections to it. Leading us to an understanding of the pleasures of sound, Robert Jourdain draws on a variety of fields including science, psychology, and philosophy. He uses music from around the world to show how melodies work, how rhythm differs from beat, and why some sounds are beautiful and others ugly. Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy looks at the evolution of music and introduces surprising new concepts of memory and perception, knowledge and attention, motion and emotion, all at work as music takes hold of us. Along the way, a fascinating cast of characters brings Jourdain's narrative to vivid life: "idiots savants" who absorb whole pieces on a single hearing, composers who hallucinate entire compositions, a psychic who claimed to take dictation from long-dead composers, and victims of brain damage who can move only when they hear music. In each of these, Jourdain assures us, we will see parts of ourselves. Using such examples, he helps explain the parallels between music and language, and asks how the brain reacts to each. This scintillating study promises to engage and stimulate all lovers of music - in fact, your favorite song may never sound exactly the same again. From the Back Cover "For a few moments music makes us larger than we really are, and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and that the world is more than it seems. That is cause enough for ecstasy." -- from Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy About the Author A professionally trained pianist and composer, Robert Jourdain does independent research on artificial intelligence. He lives in Mendocino, California. Excerpted from Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures our Imiagination by Robert Jourdain. Copyright (c) 1997. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved From sound... On a balmy summer's afternoon, beneath a weeping willow beside a pond, a solitary flutist draws a deep breath and begins to play. Within the glistening tube, a column of air rattles in protestation of its confinement, its cries fanning upward to ears perched on branches, downward to ears nestled in burrows, outward to ears immersed in water. A paramecium patrols the ooze at the pond's edge, searching, ingesting, dividing, fleeing. Although its entire being is expressed in but a single cell, this protozoan knows much of the world. A light-sensitive spot fills its days with brightness and darkness and shades of gray. Chemical mechanisms let it smell what is near and taste what it encounters. Collisions with its surroundings are felt and acknowledged. But the paramecium senses no more of the flute's sweet warble than we do of the radio waves that pass through our bodies. It spends its life in silence, or more correctly, in soundlessness, for silence is the delicious muffle of an auditory system in repose, and an animal lacking an auditory system can no more know silence than one born blind can know darkness. Circling the paramecium are multicellular behemoths - flatworms and mites and rotifers - whose tissues, simple organs, and nerve nets flaunt distinguished ancestries. The first 80 percent of life's three-and-a-half billion-year evolution went into building such creatures. Primitive? Yes. Yet their complex eyes, their sensitive touch, their versatile chemical receptors are the bedrock that one day would support the appreciation of a Sargent watercolor, a Balanchine Tarantella, a glass of fine Margaux. But nowhere in these estimable beasts is there so much as a hint of the possibility of knowing a Mozart quartet. Even with two hundred million years' evolution more - still soundlessness. For a jellyfish or a sea anemone, an octopus or a sea slug, a starfish or a sea urchin, the ocean's swooshes and gurgles are felt but not heard. Insects fared little better. A few species developed ears, but hardly of the sort that could one day evolve to accommodate a symphony. Such an ear would have to wait until animals developed backbones, and even then this newfound sense would pass its infancy minding little more than the bass tones of thrashing prey. Hearing, it seems, is the difficult sense - slow to evolve, repeatedly undercut by evolutionary developments, reliant upon the most intricate and fragile mechanical structures in the body. It was forged through hundreds of millions of years of natural selection as countless lineages perished from detecting a predator too late, finding no mate, or overlooking a meal hidden nearby. Hearing was a late bloomer, following upon already well developed vision and touch and taste and smell. Yet we take for granted the experience our ears provide. For us, sound is self-evident, complete, inevitable. But for most of nature's countless billions of ears, sound is some thing much less than it is to us. Less? But doesn't sound exist independently of the ears that listen to it? It depends on what you mean by "sound." In physics, sound is indeed nothing more than vibrations. But in psychology, sound is a kind of experience a brain extracts from its environment. Where the physicist finds energy, the psychologist finds information. A physicist can precisely measure a volume of sound, but no psychologist would have the faintest idea how to assay a quantity of music. Although both professions lay claim to the study of sound, it is actually the sensation of sound that concerns the psychologist. A physicist will tell you that the rattlings of air molecules are much the same to any ears, whether those of a frog or a cow or a human. But a psychologist will warn that the sensations derived from those vibrations vary greatly among species.  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