Listened to this one, which I think really added to the experience. When the author described things, he included little snippets/examples. You could tell the author was really passionate about music. There's some interesting things here - what is music? How does it relate to the mind? How do we categorize music? How does it relate to emotions? Why do we like the music we like?
Music is universal, and whenever humans get together, there's music. The most interesting chapter to me was about how we form our preferences - it begins with exposure. We prefer music we've heard before, and on the whole, our music taste is formed by 19 or so. But if we hear a radically different piece of music enough times, we develop landmarks and can learn to like that thing. It all depends on your own experience - we don't like music that's too simple compared to what we heard before, or if it's too complex. We need to have some sort of grounding. He also goes into the social component of music, and how it relates to our evolution as a species. There's some research on how we can recognize music even if the tempo, pitches, and affectation changes - or the opposite - we can sing at the same tempo, pitch, and affection to our favorite songs by playing it in our heads. And he talks about how we categorize music (he likens it to a family resemblance - genres don't have to have a characteristic that all things in that genre share). Really interesting read/listen!