# Quote — Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

> 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...

- Author: [Daniel Levitin](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin.md)
- Book: [This Is Your Brain on Music](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/this-is-your-brain-on-music.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Levitin#This_is_Your_Brain_on_Music_(2006)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/this-is-your-brain-on-music/when-a-musical

## More from this book

> The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/this-is-your-brain-on-music/the-power-of-art.md)

> Music's evolutionary origin is established because it is present across all humans; it has been around for a long time; it involves specialized brain structures... and it is analogous to music making in other species.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/this-is-your-brain-on-music/musics-evolutionary-origin.md)

> 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).

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/this-is-your-brain-on-music/during-the-first.md)