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On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind
Winner of the Wallace Berry Award, Society for Music Theory
Winner of the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, ASCAP
What is it about the music you love that makes you want to hear it again?
Why do we crave a "hook" that returns, again and again, within the same piece?
And how does a song end up getting stuck in your head?
Whether it's a motif repeated throughout a composition, a sample looped under an electronic dance beat, a passage replayed incessantly by a musician in a practice room-or an "earworm" burrowing through your mind like a broken record-repetition is nearly as integral to music as the notes themselves. Its centrality has been acknowledged by everyone from evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch, who has called it a "design feature" of music, to the composer Arnold Schoenberg who admitted that "intelligibility in music seems to be impossible without repetition." And yet, stunningly little is actually understood about repetition and its role in music.
On Repeat offers the first in-depth inquiry into music's repetitive nature, focusing not on a particular style, or body of work, but on repertoire from across time periods and cultures. Author Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis draws on a diverse array of fields including music theory, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, to look head-on at the underlying perceptual mechanisms associated with repetition. Her work sheds light on a range of issues from repetition's use as a compositional tool to its role in characterizing our behavior as listeners, and then moves beyond music to consider related implications for repetition in language, learning, and communication.
Written in engaging prose, and enlivening otherwise complex concepts for the specialist and non-specialist alike, On Repeat will captivate scholars and students across numerous disciplines from music theory and history, to psychology and neuroscience-and anyone fascinated by the puzzle of repetition in music.
Winner of the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, ASCAP
What is it about the music you love that makes you want to hear it again?
Why do we crave a "hook" that returns, again and again, within the same piece?
And how does a song end up getting stuck in your head?
Whether it's a motif repeated throughout a composition, a sample looped under an electronic dance beat, a passage replayed incessantly by a musician in a practice room-or an "earworm" burrowing through your mind like a broken record-repetition is nearly as integral to music as the notes themselves. Its centrality has been acknowledged by everyone from evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch, who has called it a "design feature" of music, to the composer Arnold Schoenberg who admitted that "intelligibility in music seems to be impossible without repetition." And yet, stunningly little is actually understood about repetition and its role in music.
On Repeat offers the first in-depth inquiry into music's repetitive nature, focusing not on a particular style, or body of work, but on repertoire from across time periods and cultures. Author Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis draws on a diverse array of fields including music theory, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, to look head-on at the underlying perceptual mechanisms associated with repetition. Her work sheds light on a range of issues from repetition's use as a compositional tool to its role in characterizing our behavior as listeners, and then moves beyond music to consider related implications for repetition in language, learning, and communication.
Written in engaging prose, and enlivening otherwise complex concepts for the specialist and non-specialist alike, On Repeat will captivate scholars and students across numerous disciplines from music theory and history, to psychology and neuroscience-and anyone fascinated by the puzzle of repetition in music.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
49 people are currently reading
1180 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 23, 2014
"What a great book! What a great book!" You really didn't need to see that sentence written more than once. But when it comes to music, repetition occurs at all levels and is necessary. This book showed me just how much, and why.
Written in an engaging style, Dr. Margulis’ book offers surprising insights into repetition as a fundamental feature of music. Drawing on diverse examples from across musical genres, the book is at once a well-researched text at the forefront of its field and an accessible answer to some of the music world’s most intriguing questions. The text is artfully woven with examples of common musical experiences (melodies getting stuck in our heads, or why we get tired of a song after listening to it too many times) interspersed with descriptions of clever experiments designed to help explain why these occur. The book underpins a most basic human experience with a multidisciplinary scientific approach that is a joy to read.
Rigorous and engaging, "On Repeat" draws from many disciplines (music cognition, music theory, neuro-science, linguistics, musicology) to shine a welcome light on hitherto elusive truths about how repetition in music works to "play the mind". After reading this (and as a Musician/ Singer of 25+ years), I'll never listen to a piece of music quite the same way again. In fact, as Margulis showed me, I never could have done anyway. If you are interested in understanding how music (all kinds) works, you need to read this book.
Written in an engaging style, Dr. Margulis’ book offers surprising insights into repetition as a fundamental feature of music. Drawing on diverse examples from across musical genres, the book is at once a well-researched text at the forefront of its field and an accessible answer to some of the music world’s most intriguing questions. The text is artfully woven with examples of common musical experiences (melodies getting stuck in our heads, or why we get tired of a song after listening to it too many times) interspersed with descriptions of clever experiments designed to help explain why these occur. The book underpins a most basic human experience with a multidisciplinary scientific approach that is a joy to read.
Rigorous and engaging, "On Repeat" draws from many disciplines (music cognition, music theory, neuro-science, linguistics, musicology) to shine a welcome light on hitherto elusive truths about how repetition in music works to "play the mind". After reading this (and as a Musician/ Singer of 25+ years), I'll never listen to a piece of music quite the same way again. In fact, as Margulis showed me, I never could have done anyway. If you are interested in understanding how music (all kinds) works, you need to read this book.
probably-not
June 9, 2017sampled: not for me
October 12, 2016
Very interesting subject. In parts a very interesting book. Margulis knows a lot about music and about scientific psychology and also a bunch of other stuff.
My rating is a bit stingy, but I couldn't give it 4 stars. What I see as its defects are:
1. it aims for a semi-popular appeal - the title, and the fact that it is not original research but a review or collation of, primarily, the academic psychology literature on the subject of repetition in/and/as music - but it is too demanding and dry, and frankly not well enough written, to work as popular science/musicology, even a high-end version thereof. For me.
2. She sometimes goes a bit speculative and personal (in the sense of expressing thoughts and suggestions that go beyond the findings the research she reports. Again, this is fine in principle, more than fine, but she doesn't quite engage the reader (meaning me, of course).
3. It's not very enjoyable as a read. It's not a pleasure to read.
Carping done with, there is a lot of interesting material in here and I would say it's well worth returning to for the content. I was a bit disappointed because I was hoping for something that, like its subject, was artful and enjoyable; it's not that; but it is genuinely stimulating and informative, and - just about - manageable without much specialist knowledge.
My rating is a bit stingy, but I couldn't give it 4 stars. What I see as its defects are:
1. it aims for a semi-popular appeal - the title, and the fact that it is not original research but a review or collation of, primarily, the academic psychology literature on the subject of repetition in/and/as music - but it is too demanding and dry, and frankly not well enough written, to work as popular science/musicology, even a high-end version thereof. For me.
2. She sometimes goes a bit speculative and personal (in the sense of expressing thoughts and suggestions that go beyond the findings the research she reports. Again, this is fine in principle, more than fine, but she doesn't quite engage the reader (meaning me, of course).
3. It's not very enjoyable as a read. It's not a pleasure to read.
Carping done with, there is a lot of interesting material in here and I would say it's well worth returning to for the content. I was a bit disappointed because I was hoping for something that, like its subject, was artful and enjoyable; it's not that; but it is genuinely stimulating and informative, and - just about - manageable without much specialist knowledge.
August 14, 2019
Excellent content, but dense
Want to read
June 9, 2017I suspect it's only worth borrowing from a library (rather than purchase). Kindle's opening sample is not that special, and it invites a lot of skimming.
Thesis: "My claim is that part of what makes us feel that we’re a musical subject rather than a musical object is that we are endlessly listening ahead, such that the sounds seem almost to execute our volition, after the fact. This sense of superexpressive voice (see Juslin, 2001) can be pleasurable in and of itself. It is the pleasure of expansion, of movement beyond limits, of increased power—all characteristic of strong experiences of music as chronicled by existing experimental work (Gabrielsson, 2011). Repetition, I would argue, encourages embodiment. And this embodiment contributes to musical pleasure."
Thesis: "My claim is that part of what makes us feel that we’re a musical subject rather than a musical object is that we are endlessly listening ahead, such that the sounds seem almost to execute our volition, after the fact. This sense of superexpressive voice (see Juslin, 2001) can be pleasurable in and of itself. It is the pleasure of expansion, of movement beyond limits, of increased power—all characteristic of strong experiences of music as chronicled by existing experimental work (Gabrielsson, 2011). Repetition, I would argue, encourages embodiment. And this embodiment contributes to musical pleasure."
February 8, 2018
I do not recommend this book because the writing style is too technical, dense, and hard-to-read. It reads like an extended academic paper. I much preferred the books Why You Love Music and How Music Works because they explained the same concept in a more casual, understandable manner.
I did like some parts of the book:
1. A study of musicians found that even great musicians didn't really identify as musicians. This is interesting to me because I play ukulele with a lot of beginner musicians, and they all think they're terrible. They're not.
2. I like thinking about music as "auditory cheesecake."
I did like some parts of the book:
1. A study of musicians found that even great musicians didn't really identify as musicians. This is interesting to me because I play ukulele with a lot of beginner musicians, and they all think they're terrible. They're not.
2. I like thinking about music as "auditory cheesecake."
November 7, 2017
Un libro muy completo (quizás, demasiado completo) sobre las implicaciones, estéticas y perceptivas, de la repetición en música.
Es interesante pero muy académico, denso, difícil de leer... con demasiadas referencias de todo. Está bien para documentarse a conciencia, no para disfrutarlo.
Es interesante pero muy académico, denso, difícil de leer... con demasiadas referencias de todo. Está bien para documentarse a conciencia, no para disfrutarlo.
February 29, 2024
[4.5 stars] This beautifully written book is a love letter to music. It posits that repetition, or repetitiveness, an essential feature in music that is sometimes overlooked, or considered less important by music theorists (compared to, e.g., developmental trajectory or structural complexity) is worth taking another look-at, as it is precisely repetition that marks music as unique amongst all time-based arts. Repetition in music shifts our attention towards music's "lower level features." Similarly, repetition shifts language "away from what is directly captured by words, and towards what is revealed by the structure, prosody, rhythm, and tempo of the utterance ... towards a musical way of listening." Her approach, which draws upon neuro-science and psychology, but also engages with musical analysis and music theory, is as rare as it is convincing. Musical examples abound; the author makes virtuosic uses of musical excerpts to illustrate how repetition does the thing she proposes that it does.
The chapter on repetition and overt participation sounded to me suspiciously like a case for the democratic aspiration (?) of American musical minimalism that warrants serious musical-theoretical consideration, which, was a tad odd (shared experience of musical repetition give rise to a shared / participatory internal soundscape when silence befalls...). It did make me wonder if that was the project all along. That aside, this book was thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening. It made me listen to a bunch of music in a whole different way. The book is dense and has many technical details, but if you are not a musician you can skip all the score excerpts, you will still understand the core of her argument. Highly recommended, even for general readership.
The chapter on repetition and overt participation sounded to me suspiciously like a case for the democratic aspiration (?) of American musical minimalism that warrants serious musical-theoretical consideration, which, was a tad odd (shared experience of musical repetition give rise to a shared / participatory internal soundscape when silence befalls...). It did make me wonder if that was the project all along. That aside, this book was thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening. It made me listen to a bunch of music in a whole different way. The book is dense and has many technical details, but if you are not a musician you can skip all the score excerpts, you will still understand the core of her argument. Highly recommended, even for general readership.
December 1, 2020
A very technical book on musical theory and the human mind. A bit hard to read, dry, and somewhat boring in some places, the book nonetheless does a great job of answering why we enjoy repetition in music.
The links to all the websites listed in the book were all still active at the time I read it.
The links to all the websites listed in the book were all still active at the time I read it.
July 29, 2019
not what I expected. Totally scholarly book. Outside of classical music little modern music is mentioned. I was looking for an analysis of song lyrics and the feelings they evoke. Oh well.
June 5, 2022
Interesting content, but wowie was this ever written by an academic.
April 26, 2024
This book is more insightful after repeated readings and if you know sheet music, western classical music, and philosophical jargon related to aesthetics.
October 17, 2024
We read the music in you! It was really good!
April 5, 2014
This book was very interesting, although I wasn't expecting it to be quite so technical when I picked it up. The language is very dense and specific, so any non-scientifically trained layperson might have a lot of difficulty following some of the ideas and concepts in this book, but from what I could tell, it was really well put together. I had never thought of some of these things or the relevance of repetition for learning and enjoyment of both music and the basic building blocks of language.
Some of it was a little over my head, but I did enjoy it and it was worth muscling through. Great book, probably not interesting to most people, but anybody who is into music and/or neuroscience will probably get a kick out of it.
Some of it was a little over my head, but I did enjoy it and it was worth muscling through. Great book, probably not interesting to most people, but anybody who is into music and/or neuroscience will probably get a kick out of it.
March 26, 2015
Good material, but far more technical than I was hoping for. I wanted a better understanding of why I so often have a repeating song in my head, and the answer might have been there, but if so, it was too technical for me to understand.
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June 13, 2014781.11 M331 2014
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews