Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Question about the book "Music, language and the brain" by Aniruddh Patel

Dear teachers,

I've already posted this on the "Musicians welcome" forum, but as the book I'm interested in is about the the relationship between learning music and languages, there's nobody better than a teacher to give a comment on it

I've always been interested in the process of learning foreign languages, and also in the possible parallelism with music.
Finally found a book which explores the mental and neural foundations of music and language.
It's titled Music, language and the brain, by Aniruddh Patel.
My expectations on the book are quite high, the only drawback is its price.

Has anybody of you read it?

I find 50 USD a bit expensive.
Can anybody tell me if it's worth its price?
If it's as good as it looks, I'm ready to put my amazon account to work. If it's not, please somebody tell me I'm about to make a mistake.

Thanks in advance!

You can find the review here

Sounds interesting. Is he a neuroscientist? I don't think I'd be interested otherwise.

Lazy me. I just googled. I'll check out the price here. Why don't you inter-library loan? I just have.

That was my concern, too.
I'm not impressed by nor interested in pseudoscientific garbage or empty words full of rethorics but lacking any rigour.
What I'm looking for is the result of serious and professional investigation.

I checked both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, being the UK price a bit higher.
never thought about the inter-library loan! That's a good tip, thanks!
I'll try to get it that way.

Here is a 51 minute lecture by Anirudh Patel A. Patel, lecture, "Music language & the brain"

Thank you for the link, Keystring. I'll have a look at it as soon as I get home (now I'm at work)

After a little more web search, I've found that Anirudh Patel belongs to The Neurosciences Institute, in San Diego.

Now I can't wait to put my hands on the book, it surely is promising!

I found the part I had time to listen to quite interesting. There's a section in the middle about the relationship between motion, rhythm, speech which is interesting on a number of fronts. All those teachers who want us to march around to get the beat may have more sound reason than they know. The operatic bird is a must-hear (the talk is serious, though).

Great lecture keystring. I've listened to about 17 minutes of it so far.

Rich

This is an academic book, not pseudoscience. That's the upside. The downside is that it's written for an academic audience and hence doesn't have the same readability quotient as, say, the Levitin book.

I hope to be offering a senior seminar in 2010 on the psychology of music and may use a chapter or two from it in the syllabus.

Monica, I read the Levitin book some months ago and I didn't like it one bit. I expected for so much more.
When I found Patel's book review, it looked different, rigorous and more academic, but I preferred to ask on PW fisrt because I didn't want to make the same mistake twice.

Now that I re-read my prevoius comment about the pseudoscience again, it sounds quite harsh. It wasn't directed to Patel's work! My communication skills are getting worse every day...

This afternoon I found this pdf file from an article Patel wrote for a neuroscience journal in 2003.

Yes, he is.

Enjoyed the video, thanks for the links.