Professor Daniel J. Levitin, (December 27, 1957 – ) is an American cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, musician, record producer, and writer. As a cognitive psychologist, he is considered an expert on absolute pitch and on music cognition and perception. As a musician and producer, he is best known for his work as a sound designer for albums by Blue Oyster Cult, Chris Isaak, and Joe Satriani; as a compilation consultant to Stevie Wonder, The Carpenters, and Julia Fordham, and as the discoverer of the Steely Dan remastering scandal. As a writer, he is best known as the music editor of the recording industry magazine REP and for a series of more than 100 in-depth interviews with recording artists and producers about their work that appeared in Billboard magazine, Electronic Musician, Grammy, and other magazines. He is the author of the book "This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession," (Dutton/Penguin, 2006).

Biography

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Born in San Francisco, California the son of Lloyd Levitin, a businessman and professor, and Sonia Levitin, a novelist, he was raised in Moraga, California and Palos Verdes, California. He studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, music at the Berklee College of Music and cognitive psychology at Stanford University (B.A. 1992 with honors and highest university distinction) and the University of Oregon (M.Sc. 1993, Ph.D. 1996). He returned to Stanford for post-doctoral training in neuroimaging at the Stanford University Medical School and in human-computer interaction at Paul Allen's Silicon Valley think-tank Interval Research. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and Dartmouth College. He currently teaches in the Departments of Psychology, Music, the School of the Environment, and the Program in Behavioural Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal.

His experiences as a teenager attending Palos Verdes High School in Southern California formed the basis for the fictionalized lead character in the novel The Mark of Conte; he is also featured in the memoir Reigning Cats and Dogs. As a consequence of his friendship with television screenwriter John Mankiewicz his name has been used for minor characters in the television shows The Marshal and Miami Vice.

Music Producing, Consulting, and E-Music

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In the 1980s, Levitin consulted for M&K Sound as an expert listener assisting in the design of the first commercial satellite and subwoofer loudspeaker systems. 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 achievement 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 music editor Ben Fong-Torres); discovering the band The Big Race which later became the well-known soundtrack band Pray for Rain; and for having the chance to, but not signing M.C. Hammer.

After leaving 415, he formed his own production and consulting company, with a list of a clients including AT&T, several venture capital firms, and every major record label. As a consultant for Warner Brothers Records he planned the marketing campaigns for such albums as Eric Clapton's Unplugged and k.d. lang's Ingenue, and as a music consultant on feature films such as Good Will Hunting and City of Angels. In 1998 he helped to found MoodLogic (and its sister companies, Emotioneering.com and jaboom.com), one of the first internet music companies, sold in 2006 to the All Music Guide group. He also consulted for the United States Navy on underwater sound source separation.

Awards

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• His contributions to the music industry have been recognized by 3 Gold Record and 6 RIAA platinum records.
• 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
• "Top 100 Papers in Cognitive Science" by the Millennium Project for "Absolute Memory for Musical Pitch," Perception and Psychophysics, 1994.

External links

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• Levitin Laboratory for Music Peception, Cognition, and Expertise
• Daniel J. Levitin's homepage
• McGill Department of Psychology
• Steely Dan article
• This Is Your Brain On Music web page

1957 births | Living people | American neuroscientists | Cognitive scientists | Record producers | Academics | Science writers | Music writers | Music journalists | Berklee College of Music alumni | Stanford University alumni