Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres

An exploration of polyphony and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains.Polyphony - the interweaving of simultaneous sounds - is a crucial aspect of music that has deep implications for how we understand the mind. In Polyphonic Minds, Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of "polyphonicity" - of "many-voicedness" - in human experience. Pesic presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains.

When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience - all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences.

After tracing the development of polyphony in Western music from ninth-century church music through the experimental compositions of Glenn Gould and John Cage, Pesic considers the analogous activity within the brain, the polyphonic "music of the hemispheres" that shapes brain states from sleep to awakening. He discusses how neuroscientists draw on concepts from polyphony to describe the "neural orchestra" of the brain. Pesic's story begins with ancient conceptions of God's mind and ends with the polyphonic personhood of the human brain and body. An enhanced e-book edition allows the sound examples to be played by a touch.

Read more Continue reading Read less REVIEW
The pianist and physicist Peter Pesic, whose fascinating book Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres traces the role musical polyphony has played in man's understanding of the mind.
--Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim,The New York Times

Unusually engaging and stimulating... One senses that Pesic is right, that there is something in the relationship between, on the one hand, music that has several but mutually dependent lines and, on the other hand, minds that are tangles of simultaneous thoughts and perceptions. --Paul Griffiths, Times Literary Supplement

In a series of distinctive books published by MIT, he has looked at, thought about, and listened to the world. Wandering between the sciences and the arts, he has addressed fascinating questions such as why the sky is (seen as) blue.... Not only philosophy, but also social history plays its part in the complex mix that is this book.
--Svetlana Alpers, The Key Reporter

Polyphonic Minds convinced me that thinking about music, and polyphony in particular, can help us to understand what the brain does... Pesic's purview is almost without precedent in musicology, and concerning polyphony it stands alone.
--Ellen Lockhart, Isis --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. REVIEW
Fascinating and opinionated, Peter Pesic's new book will change your concepts of how our species creates music and perceives it.

-- David Sulzer, a.k.a. Dave Soldier, Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry, Pharmacology, and Sound Arts, Columbia University --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Pesic, writer, pianist, and scholar, is Director of the Science Institute and Musician-in-Residence at St. John's College, Santa Fe. He is the author of Abel's Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability; Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature; Sky in a Bottle; and Music and the Making of Modern Science, all published by the MIT Press. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more Continue reading Read less