Psychology of Music

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Book review: Phillip Ball. The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't
Do Without It. London: The Bodley Head, 2010. 452 pp. 20.00 ISBN 9781847920881
John Sloboda
Psychology of Music 2010 38: 506
DOI: 10.1177/03057356100380040802

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The book is likely to be of interest to a wide readership. It is likely to be of interest to music

therapists, music educators, students and researchers. It is also likely to be of interest to any
professionals working with teenagers, such as youth workers or after-school club leaders.
References
McFerran, K. and Sawyer, S. M. (2003). From recreation to creative expression: The essential features of
an adolescent inpatient psychosocial support program. ANNALS: Journal of the Singaporean Medical
Association [Special issue on Adolescence], 32, 6470.
McFerran-Skewes, K. and Grocke, D. E. (2000). What do grieving young people and music therapy have
in common: Exploring the match between creativity and younger adolescents. European Journal of
Palliative Care, 7(6), 227230.
Wigram, T. (2004). Improvisation: Methods and techniques for music therapy clinicians, educators and students.
London: Jessica Kingsley.

Tiija Rinta
Westminster Local Authority, UK

Phillip Ball. The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Cant Do Without It. London: The Bodley Head,
2010. 452 pp. 20.00 ISBN 9781847920881

What goes on in our heads when we listen to tonal music? How and why does it engage our
emotions? Why does music seems to make such sense to us, and what does this tell us about the
origins and biological purpose of music? These are the main questions addressed in this wellconstructed book by the respected British science journalist Philip Ball.
The Music Instinct is a contribution to a small but growing group of books about psychological
aspects of music that are aimed not at researchers, professional musicians, or students, but at
interested lay people (e.g. Levitin, 2006, 2009; Sacks, 2008). Such books have a number of
shared characteristics. Most important among them is a strong narrative, held together by a
sense of personal excitement and discovery conveyed by the author. It really is possible to read a
book such as this from beginning to end (say on a long train journey) in a way that would be
both taxing and possibly counterproductive when applied to a scholarly text. To assist this, the
style is informal, veering towards journalistic; referencing is light; and there is a minimum of
footnotes or technical details of research studies, although sufficient to point the reader to major
scholarly studies should they be interested. Researchers are introduced by first and last name,
suggesting personal acquaintance, which in this authors case has some genuine underpinning
he has indeed met and interviewed several of the psychologists whose work he discusses.
This book shares another feature of the best examples of this genre, which is the conveying
of a sense of intellectual discovery, as the author engages with, grapples with, and occasionally argues with, the scholarly material, to produce something that is neither an uncritical or
effusive summary nor a tetchy and nit-picking demolition, but a thoughtful and stimulating
invitation for a reader to engage in mental debate with the author and those scholars whose
work he lays before the reader. Conclusions are suggested rather than nailed down and closure
on a thorny issue is not imposed where no such closure is possible.
A very striking feature of this enterprise is the highly detailed treatment of musical materials, at a level that would be more common in a book on music theory or music analysis. This
author is highly musically literate and knowledgeable, and is very capable of rolling his sleeves

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Book reviews

up and digging right down into the technical details of the use of scales, melodies, chords,
rhythms and other musical elements, operating in their musical context (which is predominantly the context of 18th- to 20th-century classical music). There are more than 100 musical
examples, and most are available for free as open-access soundfiles on the publishers website
(http://www.bodleyhead.co.uk/musicinstinct/index.asp). This website also contains very
useful summaries of each chapter of the 13 chapters, which means that a potential reader
can get a very good sense of both style and content prior to deciding whether to obtain a
copy to read. This is exemplary practice, which one hopes is spreading more generally in the
publishing world.
In reviewing the book, I had two questions in mind. The first and, for this journal, more
important question is: could this book be useful for scholars, researchers or classroom teachers,
despite these not being its primary intended audience? The second question is: does it represent
current scientific knowledge fairly to a lay reader. Would I recommend this to a musically interested friend as an introduction to the field? The answer to both questions is a qualified yes.
Let me deal firstly with possible scholarly uses. There is not much in here for the serious
postgraduate or postdoctoral researcher. Scholarly sources cited and discussed are generally
well known in the literature (e.g. Krumhansl, Meyer, Peretz, Patel) and although the author
views the material through a thoughtfully critical lens, there is nothing sufficiently new to
cause one to imagine that future scholars would cite this book as an original source in its own
right. However, I could imagine this book being very useful to a teacher, either in a psychology
department, or in a music faculty, particularly in conjunction with some of the primary
sources cited. What students quite often need (and sometimes fail to get from designed teaching
texts) is a sense of excitement and discovery and the sense that these issues matter intensely
to someone. What they also need is the opportunity to interact with and discuss real musical
examples, of the sort that are provided here in profusion. There is sufficient musical and
scientific sophistication here for students from both sides of this divide to learn something
from across the divide. Finally, students need an integrating source to hold together a set of
specific topics that might be covered week by week. I could imagine this book being the integrative backbone of a 12-week course on music perception and cognition. The main topics
would be, in chapter order as they appear:
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The origins of music

Musical scales and tuning
Melody
Grouping and stream segregation
Harmony
Rhythm
Timbre
Emotion and affect
Style
Music and language
Musical meaning

Now to the lay person. My sense is that the book provides a very sound and accurate portrayal
of some of the main themes that have emerged from the cognitive sciences of music over the
last few decades. In particular, it shows how the act of listening to music is a complex process
where memory and anticipation operate on sound materials unfolding over time to deliver a

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highly structured cognitive representation, a representation that is deepened and sharpened

through experience with materials that share underlying features. Such experience does not
depend upon, though may be assisted by, formal musical education or the knowledge of musical
vocabulary to describe these structures and elements.
Ball also deals deftly and sensitively with some of the most contentious and often overblown
controversies in the field. His treatment of the origins of music debate is a judicious cutting
down to size of some of the more overblown and speculative propositions with which this field
is rife. He rightly concludes that you dont need to prove that music serves a unique evolutionarily programmed need for it to nonetheless have profound and widespread value to human
beings. Likewise, his no-nonsense treatment of the much-hyped Mozart Effect makes it laudably clear what one can and cannot conclude from the research studies. He makes a well-argued
case for concentrating his attentions on western tonal music, while pointing out that all music
operates in a cultural context, of which one must be fully aware before trying to generalize.
There are sufficient cross-cultural references to cash in this insight, and allow it to be pursued
by those who have interest. All of this means that a lay reader would be enlightened rather than
misled, and would engage with precisely those issues that have engaged some of the best minds
in the discipline.
Where I would want to issue a slight warning is in relation to Balls coverage of the field at
large. There is very little in the book about music performance, and virtually nothing about
musical education, training, talent or development. One might also be tempted, after reading
this book, to imagine that music engagement was primarily a matter of listening. A broader
cultural and historical perspective would probably place song, dance and generative activities
(improvisation and composition) as equally primary. In many cultural contexts musical enactment comes first, and the listening finds its place as one of the necessary feedback loops
(alongside, for instance, motor proprioception). Listening without enacting would be a strange
concept in many cultures. Perhaps, therefore, this book reflects somewhat accurately the state
of affairs in early 21st-century developed countries, where most people dont make music to
any significant degree, but have become largely passive consumers. Philip Ball does indeed
show that behind this physical passivity there is a lot of mental activity. However, he might
have done more to suggest that, for full engagement of those cognitive and affective capacities
that music draws on, his readers probably need to get out of their armchairs and pick up an
instrument, or join a choir or dance class.
References
Levitin, D. (2006). This is your brain on music: Understanding a human obsession. New York: Dutton.
Levitin, D. (2009). The world in six songs: How the musical brain created human nature. London: Aurum Press.
Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia: Tales of music and the brain. London: Picador.

John Sloboda
Keele University, UK

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