When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictab… - Daniel Levitin

" "

When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable—we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity...

English
Collect this quote

About Daniel Levitin

Daniel Joseph Levitin, PhD, FRSC, (born December 27, 1957, San Francisco) is an American cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, best-selling author, musician and record producer. He is James McGill Professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with additional appointments in music theory, computer science, and education; Director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill, and Dean of Arts and Humanities at The Minerva Schools at KGI. He is an elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science and the Royal Society of Canada.

Also Known As

Native Name: Daniel Joseph Levitin
Alternative Names: Daniel J. Levitin
Limited Time Offer

Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Additional quotes by Daniel Levitin

Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems. ...Humans who just happened to find creativity attractive may have hitched their reproductive wagons to musicians and artists, and... conferred a survival advantage on their offspring.

During the first six months or so of life... the infant brain is unable to clearly distinguish the source of sensory inputs; vision, hearing, and touch meld into a unitary perceptual representation. ...inputs from the various sensory receptors may connect to many different parts of the brain, pending pruning that will occur later in life. As Simon Baron-Cohen has described it, with all this sensory cross talk, the infant lives in a state of complete psychodelic splendor (without the aid of drugs).

Limited Time Offer

Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.

In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.

Loading...