Chapter2 of the book “This is Your Branin on Music” focuses on some musical concepts that can be quite confusing, like rhythm, loudness and harmony. Each of the seven main elements(loudness, pitch, rhythm, melody, harmony, tempo, meter) is well-explained with lots of examples visualizing music pieces. For people who have few knowledge of musical theory like me, the way the author explains helps a lot with understanding, of interpreting the concepts in terms of human brain. For example, rhythm is what we used to recognize the music, tempo is the times we are likely to tap feet in one minute while listening to a piece of music, and meter is related to the strongness or weakness we percerive a note. By playing tricks with the seven elements, musicians successfully engaging their audience.
The chaper also talks about how some sort of “unexpectation” can actually helps to make the rhythm. Rather than lining up lyrics according to each downbeat, using syncopation(drop ahead of the note) or pickup notes(drop after the note) would excite the audience a lot. Backbeat in a typical rhythmic rock music is another example.
In addition to all these above, I found surprisingly the fact that how much music actually relys on human perception to be powerful, as loudness and pitch “doesn’t exist in the world” and “only exists in the mind”. It is also interesting to know that whether a chord sounds good or not really depends on individuals. All these give valuable clues for my future instrument development.