Daniel Levitin

Born in San Francisco, the son of Lloyd Levitin, a businessman and professor, and Sonia Levitin, a novelist. Levitin was raised in Daly City, Moraga, and Palos Verdes, California. He studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and music at the Berklee College of Music before dropping out of college to join a succession of bands. He returned to school in his thirties, studying cognitive psychology/cognitive science first at Stanford University where he received a BA degree in 1992 (with honors and highest university distinction) and then to the University of Oregon where he received an MSc degree in 1993 and a PhD degree in 1996. He completed post-doctoral fellowships at Paul Allen's Silicon Valley think-tank Interval Research, at the Stanford University Medical School, and at the University of California, Berkeley. His scientific mentors included Roger Shepard, Michael Posner, Douglas Hintzman, John R. Pierce, and Stephen Palmer. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and Oregon Health Sciences University.

As a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in music perception and cognition, he is credited for fundamentally changing the way that scientists think about auditory memory, showing through the Levitin Effect, that long-term memory preserves many of the details of musical experience that previous theorists regarded as lost during the encoding process. He is also known for drawing attention to the role of cerebellum in music listening, including tracking the beat and distinguishing familiar from unfamiliar music.

Outside of his academic pursuits, Levitin has worked on and off as a stand-up comedian and joke writer, performing at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco with Robin Williams in 1984, and at comedy clubs in California; he placed second in the National Lampoon stand-up comedy competition regionals in San Francisco in 1989, and has contributed jokes to Jay Leno, Arsenio Hall, as well as the nationally syndicated comic strip Bizarro, some of which were included in the 2006 compilation "Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro" (Andrews McMeel).

In the late 1970s, Levitin consulted for M&K Sound as an expert listener assisting in the design of the first commercial satellite and subwoofer loudspeaker systems, an early version of which were used by Steely Dan for mixing their album Pretzel Logic (1974). Following that, he worked at A Broun Sound in San Rafael, California, building speaker cabinets for The Grateful Dead, for whom he later worked as a consulting record producer. Levitin was one of the golden ears used in the first Dolby AC audio compression tests, a precursor to MP3 audio compression. From 1984–1988, he worked as Director and then Vice President of A&R for 415 Records in San Francisco, becoming President of the label in 1989 before the label was sold to Sony Music. Notable achievements during that time included producing the punk classic Here Come the Cops by The Afflicted (named among the Top 10 records of 1985 by GQ magazine); engineering records by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Santana, and the Grateful Dead; and producing tracks for Blue Öyster Cult, the soundtrack to Repo Man (1984), and others. Two highlights of his tenure in A&R were discovering the band The Big Race (which later became the well-known soundtrack band Pray for Rain); and for having had the chance to, but not signing M.C. Hammer.

After leaving 415, he formed his own production and business consulting company, with a list of clients including AT&T, several venture capital firms, and every major record label. As a consultant for Warner Bros. Records he planned the marketing campaigns for such albums as Eric Clapton's Unplugged (1992) and k.d. lang's Ingénue (1992). He was a music consultant on feature films such as Good Will Hunting (1997) and The Crow: City of Angels (1996), and served as a compilation consultant to Stevie Wonder's Song Review: A Greatest Hits Collection (1996), and to As Time Goes By (2003) and Interpretations: A 25th Anniversary Celebration (1995; updated and released as a DVD in 2003) by The Carpenters. Levitin returned to the studio in 2002, producing three albums for Quebec blues musician Dale Boyle: String Slinger Blues (2002), A Dog Day for the Purists (2004), and In My Rearview Mirror: A Story From A Small Gaspé Town (2005), the latter two of which won the annual Lys Blues Award for best Blues album. He has performed on saxophone with Mel Tormé, Sting, Ben Sidran, and Bobby McFerrin, and on guitar with Rosanne Cash, Blue Öyster Cult, Rodney Crowell, Michael Brook, Gary Lucas, Victor Wooten, Steve Bailey, Peter Case, Lenny Kaye, Jessie Farrell, and David Byrne.

In 1998, Levitin helped to found MoodLogic.com (and its sister companies, Emotioneering.com and jaboom.com), the first Internet music recommendation company, sold in 2006 to Allmusic group. He serves on the Science team for Signal Patterns, leading the development of its online music preferences survey. He has also consulted for the United States Navy on underwater sound source separation, for Philips Electronics, and AT&T. He served as an occasional script consultant to The Mentalist from 2007–2009.

Levitin began writing articles in 1988 for music industry magazines Billboard, Grammy, EQ, Mix, Music Connection, and Electronic Musician, and was named contributing writer to Billboard′s Reviews section from 1992 to 1997. He has also written op-eds, reviews and essays for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.

Levitin is the author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, (Dutton/Penguin 2006; Plume/Penguin 2007) which spent more than 12 months on the New York Times and the Globe and Mail bestseller lists. It was nominated for two awards (The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Outstanding Science & Technology Writing and the Quill Award for the Best Debut Author of 2006), named one of the top books of the year by Canada's Globe and Mail and by The Independent and The Guardian, and has been translated into 16 languages.

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (Dutton/Penguin 2008) debuted on the Canadian and the New York Times bestseller lists, and was named by the Boston Herald and by Seed Magazine as one of the best books of 2008; it was also nominated for the World Technology Awards. His book sales have made Levitin the #1 bestselling scientist of the last ten years.

The Organized Mind was published by Dutton/Penguin Random House in 2014 debuting at #2 on the New York Times Best Seller List and reaching #1 on the Canadian best-seller lists.

In The Listener TV series, actor Colm Feore says his performance of the character Ray is based on Daniel Levitin.

From September 2006 to April 2007 he served as a weekly commentator on the CBC Radio One show Freestyle.

Two documentary films were based on This Is Your Brain on Music, The Music Instinct (2009, PBS), which Levitin co-hosted with Bobby McFerrin, and The Musical Brain (2009, CTV/National Geographic Television) which he co-hosted with Sting. He appeared in Artifact (film), a 2012 documentary film directed by Jared Leto. His television and film appearances have reached more than 50 million viewers worldwide.

Levitin had a cameo appearance in The Big Bang Theory at the invitation of the producers, in Season 8, Episode 5, "The Focus Attenuation," during the opening scene, sitting at a table in the Caltech cafeteria over Sheldon's right shoulder.

In January 2015 he was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week programme, alongside cognitive scientist Margaret Boden.

• Finalist, Donner Prize (2017), A Field Guide to Lies.
• Winner, National Business Book Award (2017), A Field Guide to Lies.
• Silver Medal, Axiom Business Book Awards, Ethics category (2017), A Field Guide to Lies.
• Winner, Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction (2016), A Field Guide to Lies.
• Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2006), This Is Your Brain on Music, Best Book on Science and Technology.
• Cine Special Jury Prize for Arts & Culture, The Music Instinct (Daniel Levitin, co-host, co-writer and Chief Scientific Consultant), 2010, Washington, D.C.
• Banff World Television Festival, Rockie Award Nominee, The Music Instinct (Daniel Levitin, co-host, co-writer and Chief scientific Consultant), 2010.
• First place, Pariscience Film Festival, The Music Instinct (Daniel Levitin, co-host, co-writer and Chief scientific Consultant), 2009.
• Winner, Gemini Award, Best Sound in an Information/Documentary Program or Series, The Musical Brain (Daniel Levitin, Host and Scientific Consultant), 2009.
• Hugo Television Award, Science/Nature Documentary, 45th Chicago International Film Festival, The Musical Brain (Daniel Levitin, Host and Scientific Consultant), 2009.
• European Acoustics Association (EAA) Award for Outstanding Scientific Results Published in Acta Acustica United With Acustica (with co-recipients C. Guastavino, J-D Pollack, D. Dubois and B. Katz), 2008.
• Nominee, Quill Award, Best Debut Author (2006), This Is Your Brain on Music.
• Awarded sixteen RIAA gold and platinum records.
  • Stevie Wonder, Song Review: A Greatest Hits Collection
  • Eric Clapton, Unplugged
  • Steely Dan, Can't Buy A Thrill
  • Steely Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy
  • Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic
  • Steely Dan, Katy Lied
  • Steely Dan, The Royal Scam
  • Steely Dan, Aja
  • Steely Dan, Gaucho
  • Steely Dan, Two Against Nature
  • Steely Dan, Gold (Steely Dan album), expanded edition
  • Steely Dan, A Decade of Steely Dan
  • k.d. lang, Ingenue
  • Midnight Oil, Diesel and Dust
  • Chris Isaak, Heart Shaped World
  • The Crow: City of Angels (soundtrack)
• Best Film Soundtrack award, Sundance Film Festival, 1985, for Architects of Victory
• Gold Medal, Venice Film Festival, 1985, Film Soundtrack Production, for Architects of Victory
• Lys Award, Best Blues Album, 2005, Dale Boyle: In My Rearview Mirror: A Story From A Small Gaspé Town
• Lys Award, Best Blues Album 2004, Dale Boyle and the Barburners: A Dog Day for Purists
• "Top 100 Papers in Cognitive Science" by the Millennium Project for "Absolute Memory for Musical Pitch," Perception and Psychophysics, 1994.

Books

• The Billboard Encyclopedia of Record Producers (1999). New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, E. Olsen, C. Wolff, P. Verna, Editors; D. J. Levitin, Associate Editor.
• Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings (2002), Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press
• Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings, Second Edition (2010), Boston: Allyn & Bacon/Pearson Publishing
• This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, (2006), New York: Dutton/Penguin. (Released in the U.K. and Commonwealth territories by Atlantic, 2007). (Appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List both in hardcover and paperback)
• The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008), New York: Dutton/Penguin and Toronto: Viking/Penguin. (New York Times Bestseller)
• The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age Of Information Overload (2014), New York: Dutton/Penguin Random House and Toronto: Allen Lane/Penguin Random House and London: Viking/Penguin Random House.
• A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (2016), New York: Dutton/Penguin Random House; Toronto: Allen Lane/Penguin Random House; London: Viking/Penguin Random House

Scientific articles (selected)

Discography

• Diane Nalini, Songs of Sweeet Fire. 2006. (Mixing Engineer, Production Consultant).
• Dale Boyle, In My Rearview Mirror: A Story From A Small Gaspé Town. 2005. (Production Consultant)
• Dale Boyle and the Barburners, A Dog Day for the Purists. 2004. (Producer).
• Dale Boyle and the Barburners, String Slinger Blues. 2002. (Producer).
• The Carpenters. As Time Goes By. A&M Records/Universal, 2000. (Consultant on song selection, liner notes writer.)
• Various Artists. Original motion picture soundtrack, Good Will Hunting. Hollywood/Miramax Records, 1998. (A&R Consultant. )
• Stevie Wonder. Stevie Wonder Song Review: A Greatest Hits Collection. Motown, 1996. (Consultant on song selection. Liner notes writer.)
• Steely Dan, Gold, Decade, Gaucho, Aja, The Royal Scam, Katy Lied, Pretzel Logic, Countdown to Ecstasy, Can't Buy A Thrill, MCA, 1992. (Consultant on CD Remastering.)
• kd lang, Ingénue, Reprise, 1992. (Consultant.)
• Eric Clapton, Unplugged, Reprise, 1992. (Consultant.)
• Chris Isaak, Heart Shaped World, Warner Brothers, 1989. (Engineering (Asst), Sound Design (Contributed Guitar Sounds)).
• Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Rockin' and Romance, Twin/Tone (U.S), Sire (U.K.), 1986. (Engineer).
• True West, Drifters, Passport/JEM Records, 1985. (Co-Producer).
• The Big Race, "Happy Animals," from the Soundtrack of the Paramount Film Repo Man, 1985. (Producer, Engineer)
• The Afflicted, Good News About Mental Health, Infrasonic, 1984. (Producer)