The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Greatness in music is not a fixed quantity you can measure once and shelve. Rolling Stone’s ranking of 500 albums, stretching from Elvis Presley’s 1956 debut to Billie Eilish’s WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? in 2019, takes that idea as its founding premise. The question behind every entry isn’t how many copies an album moved or how flawless it sounds. It’s whether the record changed something — a sound, a genre, a sense of what was possible. Judged that way, a barely-selling blues session and a chart-topping pop machine can end up neighbors.

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Music moves you because your brain never stops guessing what comes next. We’re wired to detect patterns and forecast the future, and a piece of music is a running series of predictions about which chord, melody, or rhythm should arrive. Composers understand this intuitively and play with it. When the music sets up an expectation and then bends it—resolving in a way that’s surprising but somehow feels right—the brain rewards the moment with a hit of dopamine, the same neurotransmitter that fires for food, drugs, and sex. That’s the whole trick behind why a chord change or a held pause can raise the hairs on your arm. The emotional force of music isn’t mystical; it’s a prediction machine being surprised in exactly the right way. And the art of composition, Levitin argues, is keeping that balance—too predictable and you’re bored, too chaotic and you’re lost—by building tension, toying with the melody’s pull back toward its starting note, and then releasing it in a way that feels both unexpected and inevitable.

Music on SummaryShelf

The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession