How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain

“This book is about the auditory system — its remarkable capabilities, its quirkishness, and its surprising failures, particularly as revealed in our perception of music and speech. Over the last few years, scientists have made dramatic advances in understanding the nature of this system. These have involved research in many disciplines, including psychology, psychoacoustics, neuroscience, music theory, physics, engineering, computer science, and linguistics. I hope to convey to you some of the discoveries and conclusions that have resulted from these findings, from the involvement of different brain regions in analyzing the various characteristics of sound, to the principles by which we organize the patterns of sound we hear and represent them in memory. I will be focusing on my own research, and hope to communicate to you the excitement of carrying out explorations in this field, much of which is still uncharted territory, and where there are so many discoveries still to be made.” (Diana Deutsch)

Table of Contents

1   Music, Speech, and Handedness: How Being Left-Handed or Right-Handed Can Make a Difference
2   Some Musical Illusions Are Discovered
3   The Perceptual Organization of Streams of Sound
4   Strange Loops and Circular Tones
5   The Tritone Paradox: An Influence of Speech on How Music is Perceived
6   The Mystery of Absolute Pitch: A Rare Ability That Involves Both Nature and Nurture
7   Phantom Words: How Our Knowledge, Beliefs and Expectations Create Illusions of Speech
8   Catchy Music and Earworms
9   Hallucinations of Music and Speech
10 The Speech-to-Song Illusion: Crossing the Borderline Between Speech and Song
11 Speech and Music Intertwined: Clues to Their Origins
Conclusion

About the Author

Paperback, 243 pages, published in 2019.