Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music, How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.ĭavid Byrne is our great charlatan. His range is panoptic, taking us from Wagnerian opera houses to African villages, from his earliest high school reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio (and all the big studios in between). Byrne sees music as part of a larger, almost Darwinian pattern of adaptations and responses to its cultural and physical context. In it he explores how profoundly music is shaped by its time and place, and he explains how the advent of recording technology in the twentieth century forever changed our relationship to playing, performing, and listening to music.Īcting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns-and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso.

This book reveals things that people who play music should know but often don't, and will help all of us - even if we can't read a note - increase our listening pleasure.How Music Works is David Byrne’s remarkable and buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. He also shows us why a note has a different sound to a normal noise, why Chinese people are more likely to have perfect pitch, and even why Beethoven and Led Zeppelin are musically similar. Here he reveals the often little-known facts and fascinating science behind what we listen to, explaining the basics of harmony, scales, chords, keys and rhythm in a way that's easy for everyone to understand.

John Powell, a classically-trained composer and a physics professor, decided to write this entertaining, pain-free guide to the ingredients of music when he discovered that all the other books on the subject gave him a headache.

Have you ever listened to an incredible piece of music and wondered exactly why it makes you want to dance or cry? Are you mystified by how musicians just 'know' what notes to play next when they're improvising? Or why certain notes sound great together and others clash?ĭiscover the answers in this ear-opening tour of how music works.

How music works book review