How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond
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What makes a musical note different from any other sound? How can you tell if you have perfect pitch? Why do 10 violins sound only twice as loud as one? Do your Bob Dylan albums sound better on CD or vinyl? John Powell, a scientist and musician, answers these questions and many more in HOW MUSIC WORKS, an intriguing and original guide to acoustics. In a clear, accessible, and engaging voice, Powell fascinates the reader with his delightful descriptions of the science and psychology lurking beneath the surface of music. With lively discussions of the secrets behind harmony, timbre, keys, chords, loudness, musical composition, and more, HOW MUSIC WORKS will be treasured by music lovers everywhere. Publishers Weekly In this enlightening book, Powell, a British scholar and professor, sets out to explain how we experience music. He selects examples from all manner of disciplines--music composition, simple mathematics, physics, engineering, history--and offers his insights, such as how Bach’s Prelude in C Major is similar to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” In the first half, he defines the elements of music like pitch, frequency, harmony, rhythm, and decibel. Building on this foundation, Powell hits his stride in the book’s second half as he demonstrates, using both classical and pop music, how musicians create sound and how we listen to it. Some of the information can get scientific but Powell conveys the material with enough humor (“I think the decibel was invented in a bar, late one night, by a committee of drunken electrical engineers who wanted to take revenge on the world for their total lack of dancing partners”) and cocktail party facts (“when we listen to Mozart’s music nowadays, we are hearing it a semitone higher than he would have intended”) to keep the book light and fun. Included in the book is a 10-track CD. (Oct.)
1 So, What is Music, Anyway? 12 What is Perfect Pitch and Do I Have It? 113 Notes and Noises 204 Xylophones and Saxophones: Same Notes but Different Sounds 395 Instrumental Break 486 How Loud is Loud? 817 Harmony and Cacophony 1018 Weighing Up Scales 1189 The Self-Confident Major and the Emotional Minor 14110 I Got Rhythm 18211 Making Music 20312 Listening to Music 230Fiddly Details 244A Naming and Identifying Intervals 244B Using the Decibel System 246C Tuning an Instrument to the Pentatonic Scale 248D Calculating Equal Temperament 250E The Notes of the Major Keys 253Bibliography 255Acknowledgments 259Index 261
