This is a fascinating and unique book about the parallel development of, and occasional interactions between, modern physics and contemporary classical music. It’s also a far easier and more enjoyable read than its narrowly academic-sounding title might suggest. If it had been called ‘Music and Quantum Physics’ then I suspect far more people would be motivated to check it out – and, for the most part, I think they’d get exactly what they were looking for. I deliberately moved the word ‘music’ to the front of my version of the title, because that’s what the book is primarily about – with physics being a background thread, rather than vice versa. Equally, Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin is essentially a professional musician with a sideline in the history and philosophy of science – a far less common combination than the other way around. He also seems to have been something of a musical prodigy, mentioning physics-inspired compositions that he wrote as far back as 2013, when he was just 14 years o...

A remarkable book exploring the nature of music, how it's written and how it affects us. It was published back in 2010, but I've only just come across it, and it hasn't aged at all. I suspect I am in many ways the perfect audience - I have sung for many years and read music, but have no formal musical training. At the same time, I find the science behind it all fascinating. However, Philip Ball's analysis is of far more than how music works physically and how it influences the brain - though that's all in here. To an extent this is a love letter to music. It shows us why music is so important to our lives. How it fulfils far more than simply to act as auditory cheesecake (as Steven Pinker described it) both in terms of the mechanics of music itself and the ways that it insinuates itself into so many spheres of activity. I challenge anyone with an interest in music to read this book and not come away with new and interesting insights. If you are a music expert, the s...

If you had to write a description of the target audience for this book - interested in science, science fiction and serious music - I am such a perfect match that I confess my rating of it may be slightly inflated. Andrew May takes on the whole gamut of the interaction between science fiction and music, from the use of music in science fiction films to the influence of science on music which gave it a 'sci-fi' feel. Along the way we get a whole host of revelations, and though May makes it clear that there will be very limited consideration of the theory of music itself, even there for many there will be discoveries. We begin with 'alien sounds' - what makes music sound in some way alien or spacey. This mixes musical ideas and the move away from classical techniques in serious composing. From the 1950s, music for science fiction movies had a tendency to look to both electronics (for example in the downright weird soundtrack of the classic Forbidden Planet ) to using ...

At first glance this might just be another 'What AI is good at and not so good at' title. And in a way, it is. But, wow, what a brilliant book! Marcus du Sautoy takes us on a tour of what artificial intelligence has achieved (and possibly can in the future achieve) in a range of fields from his own of mathematics, through game playing, music, art and more. After a little discussion of what creativity is, we start off with the now very familiar story of DeepMind's AlphaGo and its astonishing ability to take on the hugely challenging game of Go. Even though I've read about this many times before, du Sautoy, as a Go player and mathematician, gives a real feel for why this was such a triumph - and so shocking. Not surprisingly he is also wonderful on what mathematicians actually do, how computers have helped them to date and how they have the potential to do far more in the future. After all, mathematics is by far the closest science to game playing, as it has strict...

If you wanted to classify this book, you might guess ‘music’ or ‘mathematics’ from the title. Actually, ‘history of science’ is a better fit than either of those. Roughly half the book deals with various ways in which music influenced the development of science. These weren’t always to the good, either. For example, we’re told that Pythagoras – who tried to shoehorn musical and cosmic harmonies into an over-simplified geometric model – ‘impeded the progress of science for the next two millennia’. There are some surprises, too. Fourier analysis, which might top many people’s list of musically-relevant mathematical techniques, was originally developed in the context of the propagation of heat in solids. On the other hand, the world’s first partial differential equation – courtesy of  d’Alembert in 1746 – really did come out of music theory. Personally I found these insights fascinating, but readers who aren’t sure what Fourier analysis and partial differential equations are migh...

This book conjures up distinctly mixed feelings. The title feels rather misleading, as it is primarily a book about musical polyphony. The 'minds' part comes in during the final 10% of the book, where we do have some consideration of the relationship between polyphony and the way the brain works - but it's certainly not the main focus here. As it happens, in covering the development of polyphony in the West through the ages, with particular reference to church music, it covers something I am very interested in - so I found it highly engaging (if rather stodgy in writing style). However, without that interest it doesn't have enough on the mind and brain to interest a purely popular science reader (it is classified as music/science). What we get is a thorough exploration of the way musical structures have changed in time, from what we can deduce about Ancient Greek music, through the earliest recorded church music as it moved from primarily being monophonic chant to...

Although there’s quite an industry now in debunking claims that something or other is what makes us human, I’ve some sympathy with the slightly different twist in the subtitle of Victoria Williamson’s book: ‘how music reveals what it is to be human.’ You may not have to be human to be musical, but it certainly gives us some interesting insights into our brains. In a detailed exploration of the psychology of music, Williamson takes us into the fact and fable of claims like the old chestnut that listening to music (particularly Mozart) can improve your child’s intelligence. The simple answer is that listening doesn’t, but learning to play an instrument or sing does make a small difference in some very specific brain functions, like being able to distinguish sounds. However it’s worth pointing out that, unless the real aim is to learn how to play or sing, the amount of effort required is totally out of proportion to the gain. And if children aren’t young enough for our voyage into the ...