Get On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind PDF

Winner of the Wallace Berry Award, Society for tune Theory
Winner of the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, ASCAP

What is it concerning the song you're keen on that makes you need to listen it again?

Why can we crave a "hook" that returns, many times, in the comparable piece?

And how does a music prove getting caught on your head?

Whether it is a motif repeated all through a composition, a pattern looped lower than an digital dance beat, a passage replayed regularly through a musician in a tradition room-or an "earworm" burrowing via your brain like a damaged record-repetition is almost as crucial to tune because the notes themselves. Its centrality has been stated by means of every person from evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch, who has referred to as it a "design characteristic" of song, to the composer Arnold Schoenberg who admitted that "intelligibility in track seems most unlikely with out repetition." And but, stunningly little is basically understood approximately repetition and its function in music.

On Repeat offers the 1st in-depth inquiry into music's repetitive nature, focusing no longer on a specific variety, or physique of labor, yet on repertoire from throughout time sessions and cultures. writer Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis attracts on a various array of fields together with song conception, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, to appear head-on on the underlying perceptual mechanisms linked to repetition. Her paintings sheds gentle on a number of matters from repetition's use as a compositional instrument to its position in characterizing our habit as listeners, after which strikes past tune to think about comparable implications for repetition in language, studying, and communication.

Written in attractive prose, and enlivening in a different way advanced options for the professional and non-specialist alike, On Repeat will captivate students and scholars throughout a number of disciplines from track concept and historical past, to psychology and neuroscience-and someone thinking about the puzzle of repetition in music.