The Making of Music, Volume One: The Landmark BBC Radio Series (BBC Audio) Book

There's a lot of amazing stuff in this book to contemplate, but the author tries too hard to make it relevant for readers who listen to the Eagles and Mariah Carey (musicians he specifically sites), and he gets caught up in the most mundane details of his personal interactions with his colleagues at meetings and dinners and such, and who ordered what, and how everybody was dressed, and where everybody got their degrees.

My girlfriend got me interested in it because I found her passionate explanations of the salient neuroscience very interesting, but that information could be contained in a book about a quarter of the length of this one. Read it, because you don't have Stacey to give you the short version, and you'll love learning about how deeply and profoundly music affects human and animal brains, but do yourself a favor and skip a few paragraphs every time Levitin starts to ramble on with his personal anecdotes which usually pertain only very tangentially to the science at hand.