Speaking about music and the music of speech

As Einstein is often misquoted as saying, explanations in science should be made as simple as possible but no simpler. Aniruddh Patel's book, Music, Language and the Brain , manages to be both admirably readable and also scholarly. Whilst there are other books dealing rigorously with the perceptual and cognitive aspects of language and music as separate topics, few, if any, authors have successfully tackled the task of exploring the overlap between the cognitive and neural mechanisms of these two uniquely human domains. Patel takes on the challenge of providing not only accurate coverage of existing research in the fields of language and music, but also a much needed synthesis that throws new light on the links between the two.In most areas of science, there is some consensus on the outstanding problems, and a range of rival explanations or solutions corresponding to them. This consensus provides a framework within which the exploration of rival theories can take place, and from which advances can be made. The difficulty in tackling the interdisciplinary aspects of music treated in the present book is that no such consensus exists, because few, if any, experts are equipped to take a fully synoptic view of the subject matter. Musicologists, linguists and psychologists have tended to speak in different languages, and to examine different problems. So whilst much has been learned about language and music, it has been inaccessible to most people. However, during the last two decades, the pioneering efforts of researchers such as John Sloboda, Robert Zatorre, Isabel Peretz and Steven Mithen have caused a sea change in the way that psychologists think about music and language, and a body of scientifically rigorous, cross-domain work has emerged. As a result, it is now possible to stand back and take a broad perspective of the …