Hacker News Books

Books that are currently nearby: Art of Electronics, The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design, The Intelligent Investor, Fooled by Randomness, Front Panel, SICP, TPU Microcoding for Beginners, Planar Microwave Engineering, This Is Your Brain on Music, three of the Tufte books, etc.

This is the perfect minimalist introduction to music theory. A similarly good explanation is in Daniel Levitin's "This is Your Brain on Music". It's first few chapters explain music theory to beginners in a really elegant way.

I previously thought music was composed without any rules.

I highly recommend reading 'This is your brain on music' by Daniel J. Levitin if you're interested in learning more about the neuroscience side of music.

Daniel Levitin has also written a book (This is Your Brain On Music) that explains recent interesting discoveries dealing specifically with sound and music cognition. Awfully interesting stuff.

Simple book rec: This is Your Brain on Music.

There's a nice 5 minute video by neuroscientist Anil Seth here: https://aeon.co/videos/on-the-beholders-share-how-past-exper... and I was going to link to Schmidhuber too - I like this page on his site: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html There's also a chapter about these sort of ideas in the context of music in Daniel Levitin's book This is Your Brain on Music.

I'm still trying to make sense of this all myself - you've got Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle essentially saying that the brain is trying to minimise surprise. And yet if you look at the explore-exploit dilemma then 'optimism in the face of uncertainty' is a possible strategy. I'm sure there is a way to reconcile these - I don't understand the Karl Friston stuff properly yet.

I have seen it being referred various times that musical interest and emotional connection to it really develops and peaks around the age 14

E.g.:
https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/is-14-a-magic-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-s...

I think the book "This Is Your Brain on Music" also talks about it, but I haven't read it yet.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Brain-Music-Obsession/dp/04...

I have never dug deeper on it, but it rings very true for my own case and friends I talked with about it. To the music that awed me when I was a teenager, most intensely so Scandinavian melodic death metal, I still to this day have a stronger emotional reaction than anything I listen to before or after that period of my life. Even tough I don't listen to those songs anymore that often and there are plenty of modern songs in similar styles that I do think are better in many aspects, that just don't have the same goosebumps effect anymore.

And I think the main difference here is me, not the music that has changed, that has gotten better or worse.

> Daniel Levitin: what makes each musical era distinctive: timbre was, in his opinion, the single most important factor

That's a fascinating idea; I googled and found what might be the story you're looking for:

[quote]

In the best seller “This is your brain on music” by Daniel Levitin, he talks about John R. Pierce (inventor of the travelling wave vacuum tube and the first telecommunications satellite) who, interested to discover rock music, asked him to summarize the genre in a concise list of six songs. Levitin ended up with a list of songs from Little Richards, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Prince and the Sex Pistols.

Interestingly, while listening, Pierce was not really interested by the songs themselves, their melodies, their harmonic structures or their rhythm characteristics, but he said he found the “timbres” to be remarkable and described them as being new, unfamiliar, and exciting.

Levitin concludes his story by saying: “The way in which instruments were combined to create a unified whole - bass, drums, electric and acoustic guitars, and voice – that was something he (Pierce) had never heard before. Timbre was what defined rock for Pierce. And it was a revelation for both of us.”

Quoted from "An Overview of the Concept of Timbre and its Use in Contemporary Music and Record Production" by Mathieu Bedwani

Read "This Is Your Brain On Music" by Daniel Levitin.

Some interesting points/arguments that I remember from reading it several years ago:

- In many languages, the word "sing" is the same as the word "dance".

- It's relatively recently in our history that the majority of people have become only listeners of music, instead of creators.

- As humans evolved, one's ability to sing, dance, and play instruments well displayed good physical, intellectual, and emotional health to the opposite sex, and so gave you an evolutionary edge.

- Something about how even the most non-musically-inclined people can extract the beat from a song better than a computer and repeat it later perfectly (memory is hazy on this one...I'm probably saying something stupid here).

That's all I remember for now...references are in the book of course. Very good read.

Right now I'm reading:

Fiction-
- Reamde (Bought it when it came out, but had to wait to start until I finished some other stuff on my list)

- The Big Blowdown by George Pelecanos

Nonfiction-
- Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Volume 1) -- primarily for research, but it's fascinating.

- Dark Markets by Misha Glenny

- How to Live on Mars by robert Zubrin

- The Lightness of Being by Frank Wilczek

- This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

- Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier

- and Strange Things Happen by Stewart Copeland

Technical-
- Tangled Web (I saw someone else mention it, and it's really really good so far)

- Skiena's Algorithms book (making slower progress than I'd like).