The World in Six Songs

How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

By: Daniel J. Levitin

Narrated by: Daniel J. Levitin

Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

The author of the New York Times best seller This Is Your Brain on Music reveals music’s role in the evolution of human culture in this thought-provoking book that “will leave you awestruck” (The New York Times).

Daniel J. Levitin's astounding debut best seller, This Is Your Brain on Music, enthralled and delighted audiences as it transformed our understanding of how music gets in our heads and stays there. Now in his second New York Times best seller, his genius for combining science and art reveals how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history.

Here he identifies six fundamental song functions or types - friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love - then shows how each in its own way has enabled the social bonding necessary for human culture and society to evolve. He shows, in effect, how these “six songs” work in our brains to preserve the emotional history of our lives and species.

Dr. Levitin combines cutting-edge scientific research from his music cognition lab at McGill University and work in an array of related fields; his own sometimes hilarious experiences in the music business; and illuminating interviews with musicians such as Sting and David Byrne, as well as conductors, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. The World in Six Songs is, ultimately, a revolution in our understanding of how human nature evolved - right up to the iPod.

©2008 Daniel J. Levitin (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“A must-read.... A literary, poetic, scientific, and musical treat.” (Seattle Times)

“Why can a song make you cry in a matter of seconds? Six Songs is the only book that explains why.” (Bobby McFerrin, 10-time Grammy Award-winning artist (“Don't Worry, Be Happy”))

“Leading researchers in music cognition are already singing its praises.” (Evolutionary Psychology)

Interesting take on the World of Song.

I liked Levitin’s analysis of some of the various roles Music has played in the Evolution of Human Society. It may not be comprehensive but it’s interesting nonetheless.

For a subject as incredibly wide-ranging as Song it has to be difficult for a writer to hone in on the point and stay with it till he exhausts it completely. That is the problem with this book. After making his point in the first few paragraphs of each chapter, Levitin wanders all over the lot forcing every possible interpretation of the role into his text, sometimes with relevance, often not.

His result is chapters filled with “food for thought” meditations that get the Reader thinking about Lyrics, Musicians, Anthropology, Psychology or Neuroscience. That can often be satisfying, at other times distracting.

Still a fun read. I’ll give it Four Stars. ****

Scattershot Analysis, Hit or Miss

As a musician and lover of music, I was hoping for more from this disappointing look at how music has shaped society and civilization. The first thing, and this is not a bad thing, just a dashing of my expectations, this analysis is not centered around six songs, it is six *types* of songs -- love, knowledge, friendship, oh I can't remember them all because it's really too subjective to be taken seriously (for one thing, the categories rely totally on the lyrics, but there is so much great instrumental and rhythmic music around the world).

Given the categories, the "analysis" then includes a whole lot of lists of representative songs, and almost all of these are from the popular music of the late 20th century (rock music mainly) -- and that after an introduction that goes on at length about how that type of subjective bias toward one's personal taste in music will skew any attempt to find universal commonality in song, not just around the world but across millions of years of human history. Basically, it feels like name dropping to look cool, an unseemly way to approach this subject. Combine that with way too much autobiographical anecdotes that are not always on subject, and it's too often about the author rather than the subject.

The best parts of the analysis are about how human evolution has favored the musical brain as a tool of natural selection when it came to survival and mating. Although the science presented here is nowhere near rigorous, it seems reasonable and sufficiently well cited to be compelling. The downside is that it gets repetitive as we progress through the categories -- natural selection for knowledge songs is basically the same as natural selection for love songs and religious songs, etc.

The bottom line is that the analysis is scattershot, hit or miss, too thin to warrant a full length audiobook without the author's autobiographical material, which is frankly gratuitous. The author's self-narration is just OK. There is nothing here that makes me want to go back and read his better known prior book, This Is Your Brain On Music. I barely made it through this book.