The Music Instinct : How Music Works and Why We Can't Do without it

Why have all human cultures - today and throughout history - made music? Why does music excite such rich emotion? And how do we make sense of musical sound? These are questions that have, until recently, remained mysterious. Now "The Music Instinct" explores how the latest research in music psychology and brain science is piecing together the puzzle of how our minds understand and respond to music. Ranging from Bach fugues to nursery rhymes to heavy rock, Philip Ball interweaves philosophy, mathematics, history and neurology to reveal why music moves us in so many ways. Without requiring any specialist knowledge, "The Music Instinct" will both deepen your appreciation of the music you love, and open doors to music that once seemed alien, dull or daunting, offering a passionate plea for the importance of music in education and in everyday life.

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and a consultant editor for Nature, where he previously worked as an editor for physical sciences. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media, and his many books on scientific subjects include The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature, H2O: A Biography of Water, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, and Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another, which won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. His latest books are The Sun and Moon Corrupted, a novel, Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind, and Nature's Patterns. Philip obtained a PhD in physics from the University of Bristol - where he also played a lot of music.