How Music Works

*Updated with a new chapter on digital curation*

How Music Works is David Byrne’s incisive and enthusiastic look at the musical art form, from its very inceptions to the influences that shape it, whether acoustical, economic, social or technological. Utilizing his incomparable career and inspired collaborations with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and many others, Byrne taps deeply into his lifetime of knowledge to explore the panoptic elements of music, how it shapes the human experience, and reveals the impetus behind how we create, consume, distribute, and enjoy the songs, symphonies, and rhythms that provide the backbeat of life. Byrne’s magnum opus uncovers ever-new and thrilling realizations about the redemptive liberation that music brings us all.

• Bicycle Diaries
• This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
• How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond
• The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory
• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition
• Sounding Race in Rap Songs
• All You Need to Know About the Music Business: Ninth Edition
• American Utopia
• Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century