Given the vastness of the subject, calling a treatise How Music Works seems intellectually arrogant, but it could also be seen as disarmingly frank, a fresh perspective from a down-to-earth mind. David Byrne's book, although it's a self-conscious art object (backwards pagination, upholstered cover and so on) contains plenty of plain-spoken, sensible observations: a dichotomy typical of the man. "Sophisticated innocent" is the Talking Heads singer's trademark identity.

In the introduction, Byrne lists all the things his book will not tackle, but he ends up tackling most of them regardless. How Music Works is wonderfully wide-ranging, covering the prehistoric origins of music, Madonna's contracts, the musicality of animals, pie charts of earnings from his recent collaboration with Brian Eno, Pythagorean acousmatics, the compositional limitations of Midi software, Algerian pop, the Filipino People Power revolution, the ethics of philanthropy, 16 pages of tips on how to create a happening nightclub, and music's physiological and neurological effects ("not really my brief here", but he sneaks in a few pages anyway).

Anyone familiar with Byrne's song lyrics or spoken-word theatre projects will recognise his artfully artless narrative tone. Ruminating on the 18th century ("back in the day"), Byrne remarks that "meanwhile, some folks around that same time were going to hear operas." At its best, this approach cuts through the metaphysical waffle that often passes for music criticism and helps tease out what is common to punk clubs and La Scala. At its worst, it comes across as a faux-naive shtick that detracts from the content.

Despite the opening disclaimer that "this is not an autobiographical account of my life as a singer and musician", a good half of the book could be described as just that. True, the text is always free to digress into architecture, birdsong and diatonic bone flutes, but we are also shown Byrne's evolution through high school bands, art school busking, Talking Heads' album-by-album rise to fame, and the subsequent solo career. Byrne seems happy enough to revisit the early days but it's an oddly anodyne, airbrushed history. The ego clashes and resentments that led to one of rock's messiest break-ups, complete with public recriminations and lawsuits, are simply absent here, as David, Tina, Chris and Jerry have fun writing, recording and performing their songs about buildings and food. Could this be a coded message to his fellow musketeers, signalling a green light for a ful-blown Talking Heads reunion?

Certainly Byrne comes across an amiable, tolerant soul. Not for him the righteous rants of Luddite oldsters such as Neil Young and Bob Dylan who lament digital technology. MP3s constitute the bulk of his listening nowadays, though he notes that he was immensely moved by music he heard as a kid on "crappy" transistor radios. He quotes "information theory" to prove that hearing is much more than a passive reception by our ears of a non-negotiable amount of data  we shape the sounds in our minds, filling in what's not there, amplifying or remixing what is. But, having appeared to make a stand in favour of MP3s, Byrne retreats to the fence, conceding that some indefinable quality may nevertheless have been sacrificed  "Or maybe not."

Musicologists looking for academic rigour will be unimpressed by some half-baked arguments and creaky assertions (improvisation was invented in the 20th century by jazz bands, lack of percussion is what makes poetry less popular than rap). An indecent proportion of the text is paraphrased or quoted from Greg Milner's superb Perfecting Sound Forever and Mark Katz's Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. But then, this is very much the sort of tour where our guide will mention, out of the blue: "Penelope Gouk of the University of Manchester wrote a wonderful essay called 'Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls: Early Modern Medical Explanations for Music's Effects'." If you accept Byrne as a raconteur with a broad intellect and stellar musical accomplishments, you will find his conversation enjoyable and thought-provoking. It should not be forgotten that he was largely responsible for two of the greatest albums ever made  Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the latter of which gets plentiful coverage here.

But past is past. Everyone knows that the music industry is in terminal decline. Unlike many doomsayers, however, Byrne feels the changed landscape is good for musicians. Even 20 years ago, any artist wishing to make a record needed a huge sum of money to pay for studio time (and thus needed a large corporation to loan it to him). A lucky few shifted the millions of units necessary to repay the industry's investment, but the majority got hopelessly into debt. Nowadays, recording costs are "approaching zero". Distribution costs in the digital era are also negligible compared to the days of physical warehousing. As long as artists can find ways of holding on to a fair percentage of their income (an impossible challenge in the heyday of the record companies), even modest sales can sustain a career.

Indeed, says Byrne, "there have never been more opportunities for a musician to reach an audience." He discusses, in detail, six viable models of doing business, and it's this discussion that makes the book worth buying if you're not a fan of the man's music or his magpie mind.

What? You want me to summarise those six models for you? Ah, but then this review would become like an illegal download of the book. If there's one lesson that musicians have learned, it's that artists can be as arty as they like, but if they're to survive, they must have a secret to sell. And Byrne's secret, which the music industry and the nostalgists have yet to learn, is that although the ecosystem in which Karajan, Led Zeppelin and Joe Boyd flourished is dead and gone, music is in no danger of extinction.

 Michel Faber's The Fire Gospel is published by Canongate.

David Byrne was not like other boys. When he first heard Purple Haze, aged 14, the precocious future leader of Talking Heads informed his father that "the electric guitar has broken free from history". Two years later he was performing Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran on the ukulele. At 18 he travelled from Rhode Island to the Bath festival but "exhausted after hours of listening to music I fell asleep on the damp ground". Rudely awakened by the main attraction, Led Zeppelin, he returned to his slumbers only to be roused by the appalling discovery that Dr John, playing his New Orleans "funky voodoo jive in full carnival drag", was being pelted with beer cans  "the most original act on the bill and he was completely unappreciated".

Ever against the grain, the now 60-year-old Byrne explores a whole symphony of argument in this extraordinary book with the precise, technical enthusiasm you'd expect from the painfully bright art school-educated son  born in Scotland, raised in the States  of an electrical engineer, occasionally mopping his fevered brow in the crestfallen manner of a 19th-century poet. The title is perfectly chosen. Music doesn't just work because of its effect on the senses; every aspect of its sound and construction has an emotional impact, right up to the way it's distributed, even marketed, and the machines on which it's consumed. It's fascinating.

Even before you hear music, Byrne points out, it has been shaped by the environment it was designed to be heard in, and by the equipment employed to make or record it. Much of the slow, stately western music of the middle ages sounds the way it does because it had to work within the four-second reverberations of stone-walled cathedrals (Bach's was more agile because he mostly wrote on a small church pipe organ). Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby capitalised on the arrival of the microphone as it allowed them to reach their predominantly female following with a whisper not a shout.

Arena rock of the early 70s evolved as a way of reaching the back of the sonically unsuitable sports stadia that the expanding market now required its bands to perform in. Talking Heads themselves fashioned their angular funk partly because it suited the acoustics of CBGB, the box-like New York club that launched them. Byrne no longer plays at Carnegie Hall, he explains, because it's designed for opera and thus deadens his current brand of highly percussive "groove music".

No amount of detail seems too much, especially in the section about recorded sound. The arrival of the phonograph in 1878 meant people no longer wrote just for live performance. There's the philosophical issue that "recording uproots music from its place of origin", and the "blasphemous" moral issue of technicians being brought in to hit the high notes that 1940s opera stars could no longer reach. There's a lovely description of the staff employed in early jazz sessions to physically shift the singer so the soloist could get near the only microphone (Louis Armstrong was so loud he stood 15 feet behind anyone else, Byrne marvelling at the logic that "the main guy in the band was stuck at the back!").

American boffins gradually realised the Germans must have cooked up a new recording device  surely their orchestras couldn't be actually playing at three in the morning on Hitler's morale-boosting broadcasts? When this futuristic new secret was uncovered  tape machines!  Bing Crosby insisted his label invest in one as he wanted to spend his daily "live radio shows" on the golf course.

Byrne applies his piercing analysis to each successive format, from the wax cylinder to the shellac and vinyl disc, the cassette, the CD and today's MP3 (about which he is fairly scathing: certain music has a calming and therapeutic influence on psychotic patients when on vinyl but apparently has the reverse effect when played off a computer). He confirms that fewer grooves on a disc allow a greater recording volume which gave shorter pop singles a powerful advantage on the radio and jukebox. He's intrigued by "compression"  like the taste-amplifiers now poured into food, you can make some digital recordings artificially louder than others, Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and most Oasis albums being classic examples. "They seemed amazing on first listen but rapidly wore on the ears."

No aspect of the musical experience is left unexplored, even its political dimension. The teenage Byrne felt Bob Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man opened a door he never knew existed and convinced him "music not only sounded different, it was socially different". The philosopher Theodor Adorno took the opposite view, essentially that "pop music was a drug pacifying and numbing the masses so they could be easily manipulated", and the Soviets had announced in 1928 that anyone caught listening to American jazz would get six months in jail. (The current Pussy Riot controversy suggests things haven't advanced a great deal.)

One word of warning: those looking for personal insights into Talking Heads will be wasting their time. They lived in a flat with no shower, toilet or heating on the Lower East Side in the 70s, Burroughs and Ginsberg over the road, and "you could never tell whether a comatose body on the sidewalk was drunk, high or dead". And that's pretty much all you get. Every other time the band is mentioned it's about the practical application of Byrne's musical philosophy.

But in a strange way this is an advantage too. Anyone can read this book  though, like me, they may tend to skip pages with pie charts on them, and their blood may run cold at chapter headings such as "iTunes Album Revenue" or "Physical Royalty Breakdown". Ignorance of the author and his catalogue won't stop you enjoying it. It may be academic  in fact its photographs are all lettered like footnotes  but Byrne's theories are robust and original, and his writing lucid and even self-mocking. Who wouldn't be gripped by the idea that Pythagoras noticed that the ping of a blacksmith's hammer was exactly an octave higher than the sound of one weighing twice as much? Or that our brains are so confused by certain frequencies that we can't tell the direction of an ambulance siren?

It was wildly ambitious to try and turn this galaxy of theory into a readable work of scholarship but Byrne has done it, and done it with style. Brian Eno might as well cancel that book deal now.

Mark Ellen is a magazine editor and broadcaster