When Teri and I went to Maui last June, I made a playlist on my iPod and called it “Beach House” It was a huge list, with everything from Bossa Nova to Down Tempo, Trip Hop to Acoustic Rock. Our time in Maui was almost surreal. This was our second trip – we made the first a year prior, and literally started planning to go back as soon as we got home. When we went in June, Teri was between 6 and 7 months pregnant. The tempo was just right – we’d get up at sunrise, get breakfast, walk on the beach, read a book, swim, take a nap, go back to the beach, eat some lunch, read a book, lounge on the beach, swim, take a nap, eat some dinner, go for a walk, and crash. Now a schedule like this takes practice to perfect – the first time we went, it took us 3 days to get into this rhythm – we showed up and scheduled tourist activity back to back.
Anyway, Bebel Gilberto figured big in the Beach House playlist. I’ve been listening to her as I commute into the city on BART lately. This is dangerous at 7am – the potential to pass out while listening to her soothing voice is pretty substantial, but the reward is too great to pass up. This is perhaps the easiest way for me to recapture the feeling of the trip – photographs are an easy way to remember the events, but don’t necessarily engage the mind in exactly the same way – pulling up emotions, smells, sounds, all through the power of a song is pretty cool.
All this reminiscing got me thinking about why music is so cerebrally powerful, which then got me googling, and I came across a neurologist that appears to have devoted his life to understanding how music interacts with the brain – his name is Oliver Sacks. This passage from an interview with Discover Magazine is enlightening:
Music seems to be involved with so many functions of the brain: It can aid memory, assist movement, and trigger emotions. Why is that?
However music started—and it may be that the evolution of rhythmic sense is quite different from that of tonal sense—it has now taken up residence and demands many, many different parts of the brain, certainly more than language. And by the same token, music is very robust neurally. There are people with a huge amount of cerebral disease who are still responsive to music.
Does that suggest that music is somehow essential to human survival, or at least to social survival?
This is a big question. I can only say that there is no culture without music. There are almost no individuals without music. The lady in the Bronx is a one-in-a-million sort of exception. And in every culture, music forms a social cement for dancing, for singing. It’s invariably part of ritual and religion, and then there are things like work songs and martial music. Steven Pinker said, “Music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.” I strongly disagree with that and I think no anthropologist in the world would agree with that.
You’ve been fascinated with music for so long—why are you only writing about it now?
Going back 40 years, I was very struck by the therapeutic power of music with many of the patients I saw: Parkinson’s patients, patients with aphasia, patients with dementia. But just in the last 20 years, there has grown up an ability to examine the living brain when people are listening to music or imagining music or composing music and to define—in a way which would have been unimaginable 30 years ago—what goes on in many different parts of the brain when one listens to music, imagines music, composes music, et cetera. Although I was experiencing both the power of music and the varieties of musical experience 20 or 30 years ago, I couldn’t have given it the scientific backing which is possible today.
In Musicophilia, you argue that emotional responses to music may be distinct from other emotional reactions. What do you see as the difference?
I think the emotional responses to music can be unbelievably complex and mysterious and deep. You can be sort of agonized, sort of ecstatic, and you don’t know what’s happening. You can’t even say what the feeling is. The usual feelings just can’t begin to match the musical experience. On the clinical side, in some cases, people—maybe after a head injury or a stroke—suddenly cease to enjoy music, while still enjoying everything else, and while perceiving music perfectly well. And then there’s the opposite of this, which gives the title to my book: people who develop an oddly specific need for music—they must have it.
The whole article is a great read. And of course, there's Bebel.
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