Books like The World in Six Songs by Daniel J. Levitin

In *Musicophilia* Oliver Sacks explores how music shapes our brains, drawing on case studies of patients with neurological disorders and everyday listeners to reveal the science and magic behind our love of sound.

David Byrne explores how time, place, and recording technology shape music, tracing evolutionary patterns and cultural responses that culminated in the transformative practices of the 20th century.

Exploring the connection between music and the human brain.

Anthony Storr examines how music shapes our psychology and unites mind and body, arguing that the art’s patterns bring emotional structure and heal the human psyche.

These free-wheeling, often exhilarating dialogues--which grew out of the acclaimed Carnegie Hall Talks--are an exchange between two of the most prominent figures in contemporary culture: Daniel Barenboim, internationally renowned conductor and pianist, and Edward W. Said, eminent literary critic and impassioned commentator on the Middle East. Barenboim is an Argentinian-Israeli and Said a Palestinian-American; they are also close friends.As they range across music, literature, and society, they open up many fields of inquiry: the importance of a sense of place; music as a defiance of silence; the legacies of artists from Mozart and Beethoven to Dickens and Adorno; Wagner's anti-Semitism; and the need for "artistic solutions" to the predicament of the Middle East--something they both witnessed when they brought young Arab and Israeli musicians together. Erudite, intimate, thoughtful and spontaneous, Parallels and Paradoxes is a virtuosic collaboration.From the Trade Paperback edition.