Wired For Music: The Visual Companion | Prelude

To celebrate the paperback release of my book Wired for Music, I am posting a series of photos, drawings and videos to illustrate key ideas in each chapter.

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A blurry Polaroid of me playing a plywood loaner cello about six months after I held the instrument for the first time. I was dutifully practicing in front of one of my mom’s paintings.

Prelude [excerpt]

I held a cello for the first time before a panel of stern-looking adults who peered down at me from a conference table, asking questions and taking notes. I was five years old — too young to realize this was an audition of sorts.

My mother, the artist Susan Feindel, was determined that my sister and I receive music training.

Mom was likely inspired by the months she’d spent sketching rehearsals of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa.

In her late 20s, while I was in nursery school, my mother spent her days drawing members of Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

My mother’s drawings of orchestral musicians varied from extremely detailed to wildly abstract. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

Note the gestural conductor and intensity in the orchestra pit. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

Mom often sketched orchestral musicians from unusual angles to capture the physicality of their playing. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

In 1976 — a year after I began playing the cello — a selection of Mom’s musician drawings were exhibited at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. (More than sixty of these drawings are now in the permanent archives of the NAC.)

With my mother’s unwavering encouragement, I went far with the cello. But years later, my adventures in music took me to places she never imagined…

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To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Introduction

A chapter-by-chapter series of images illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Introduction [excerpts]

Riffling through my first homeowner’s insurance policy, I did the math: my most valuable possession was a cello I hadn’t played in years.

When I picked up the bow, a plume of white horsehair fell across my wrist. The wiry hairs had detached from the tip. My throat tightened. I had never seen my bow like this.

By my mid-30s, I hadn’t played my cello in a decade. Seeing my bow like this was a shock.

Some of us sing to Beyoncé when we’re going through a rough patch, or collect vintage synthesizers to play ’80s riffs from Duran Duran.

Collectors of vintage keyboards can get so into ‘80s synth sounds, they paint the walls to match!

Even if we lie perfectly still, music fires up the putamen, a nut-shaped structure at the base of the forebrain that helps regulate our motor movements. When music tickles our eardrums, our gray matter shimmies back.

The nut-shaped putamen — a key structure involved in motor movement — is easily stimulated by music.

Before entering journalism, I spent seventeen years sawing away in a practice room, determined to become a professional cellist.

In university ensembles, I performed at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and once at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, designed by the late Canadian architect Arthur Erickson. I remember being unnerved as spectators peered at the orchestra from the sides of the wraparound auditorium. Photo Creative Commons.

Canada’s National Arts Centre in Ottawa: What a thrill it was to perform in the same auditorium where I’d watched cellists Mischa Maisky and Yo-Yo Ma play.

Photo SamuelDuval, Creative Commons.

Carnegie Hall in New York City looks as magnificent today as it must have on opening night in 1891, when composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducted on stage. Photo Tdorante10, Creative Commons.

My break with the cello coincided with dramatic advances in neuroscience that began in the 1990s, which U.S. President George Bush proclaimed the “Decade of the Brain.”

Official logo created after President George Bush declared the ‘90s the “Decade of the Brain.” (Graphic design has come a long way since then!)

Image U.S. public domain.

In many ways, the flurry of new findings validated a belief long held by Indigenous peoples: music is a strong elixir.

In the lowlands of Siberia, Tuvan healers beat hand-held drums to make disease “fly away.”

Tuvan shamans drumming in the Second All-Russian Congress of Shamans, 2019, Tyva. Photo Irgit, Creative Commons.

In 1945, the U.S. War Department launched an ambitious music program for convalescing soldiers.

An Army Air Forces private, Harold Rhodes, invented a bell-toned therapy instrument using aluminum tubing from wrecked B-17 bombers.

Bedridden veterans learned to play his “xylette,” a lap-sized xylophone rigged to a piano keyboard.

Rhodes went on to found an electric piano company, and in 1971, the Fender Rhodes Piano Bass gave its signature sound to the keyboard riffs in The Doors’ hit “Riders on the Storm.”

Above: Army Air Forces private Harold Rhodes with an early prototype of his “xylette,” photo via Rhodes Super Site. Rhodes with metal tone bars, photo via World Piano News. Rhodes’ bedside “Pre-Piano” for convalescents, photo via Down The Rhodes. The Doors’ Ray Manzarek with a Rhodes Piano Bass in 1968, photo Creative Commons.

Decades later, universities worldwide began to rigorously test music’s capacity to heal.

Songs relieved pain in cancer patients. In surgical wards, music lowered anxiety as effectively as Valium.

Familiar tunes revived memories, pulling the elderly out of the fog of dementia.

Above: Watch the preview from Alive Inside, the 2014 documentary that drew broad attention to the benefits of music for people with dementia.

In organizing material for my book, I took cues from Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” (likely inspired, it turns out, by his experiences on a Blackfoot Reserve in the summer of 1938).

Left: Diagram of Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” Creative Commons. Right: Blackfoot teepee from 1880, photo in U.S. and Canadian public domain.

From a time before memory, our early ancestors pulled music out of wood, seeds, animal skin, bone.

Above: Rattles from Costa Rica (date unknown), photo public domain. Stringed musical instrument from ancient Egypt, photo Creative Commons. Prehistoric flutes and rattle made of wood and bone, photo Creative Commons.

Embedded in primeval rituals, and tucked inside our gray matter, are surprising answers to a simple question: How can music help us heal, and thrive?

Iron Age figurine playing a drum. Photo Israeli National Maritime Museum, Creative Commons.

Click here for the next chapter of Wired for Music: The Visual Companion. Sign up to receive an email alert for each post.

To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Sources for all statements in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.

Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Chapter 1: Strings Attached

A chapter-by-chapter series of photos, drawings and videos illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Chapter 1: Strings Attached [excerpts]

My cello has ribs of maple and a front of soft spruce, bonded together in Germany more than a century ago. Heavy and golden, it has many scars.

A previous owner must have dragged my century-old cello on hard surfaces, roughening the edges on both sides.

When I was twelve, my teacher instructed my mother to find me a proper cello, saying I could no longer develop my sound on one of the conservatory’s loaner models.

My mom, never flush, paid a visit to the Ottawa studio of a Slovak luthier, Joseph Kun.

My mother, the artist Susan Feindel, painted this watercolor of the late Ottawa-based luthier Joseph Kun — inventor of the “Kun” violin rest. His beautifully crafted cello and violin bows became collectors’ items after his death in 1996. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

On Tuesdays after school, I waited for my cello lesson in the drab government building that housed the Conservatoire de musique du Québec.

As a child, I spent three or four nights a week in the grim state-run conservatory (far left) on the campus of l’Université du Québec in Hull, across the river from Ottawa.

My teacher would pull apart the fingers of my left hand as far as they would go, forcing them to play whole tones on an instrument too big for my kindergarten hands.

To this day, although I stopped playing the cello three decades ago, the left pinkie on my fingering hand stretches a full inch farther than the right.

Sometimes my mom would sit in on my lessons and sketch.

In this drawing with my first cello teacher (left), I am about nine years old. I look solemn and melancholy in every sketch my mom did of me playing the cello. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

Mom would say she exaggerated my fingers to emphasize the powerful contortions at work, but I can hardly stand to look at this sketch. It makes playing the cello look painful and unnatural.

Left: Me at age 15, with ten years of cello under my belt. Right: In this sketch by my mom, I have no body, no heart — just contorted fingers and a look of intense concentration. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

For my sixteenth birthday, my mother took me to see Yo-Yo Ma perform Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D, a frothy yet technically demanding piece.

Backstage, my mom pulled out a copy of Ma’s latest album and told him I was studying the cello. He smiled at me and asked, “What are you playing?”

The Saint-Saëns concerto, I replied. On the album, he wrote in bold letters, ‘To Adriana Happy Birthday!!! + good wishes for S.S. etc. etc. YYM.’

But that wasn’t all. “Would you like to try my cello?” he asked.

I still have the vinyl album Yo-Yo Ma signed for me when I turned 16. He wrote: “To Adriana Happy Birthday!!! + good wishes for S.S. etc. etc. YYM.”

Leafing through The Strad [magazine] one day, I spotted a full-page ad for the Cleveland Institute of Music showing a man cradling his cello. He was Stephen Geber, principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra, routinely listed among the top orchestras in the world.

My mom drove me five hundred miles from Ottawa for my audition.

Home of the Cleveland Orchestra: Severance Hall. During my studies in Cleveland, I received regular free tickets to see this magnificent orchestra, led at the time by the brilliant conductor Christoph von Dohnányi. Photo Cbusram, Creative Commons.

At age 18, in my second year of university studies in Cleveland, I dressed as a “vampire victim” for Halloween. I smiled for the camera (left) but inside, my self-doubt as a musician was draining the life out of me.

I spent my first two years of university studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music, built in the late 1950s in University Circle, Cleveland, Ohio. Photo in public domain.

A marble-shaped cyst appeared in my right wrist, followed by another in the left. But I didn’t think to ask myself if my body was trying to tell me something.

Debilitating tendinitis came next.

A ganglion cyst: Mine were larger and in each wrist, erupting near the start of my freshman year as a scholarship student in Cleveland.

Photo GEMalone, Creative Commons.

After abandoning my studies in Cleveland, I decided I should at least finish my degree.

I phoned McGill University in Montreal and learned that the cellist Antonio Lysy, an international solo artist, was joining the faculty and looking for students. Three weeks before the start of the term I was offered a spot.

Montreal dazzled me with its Paris-in-North-America flair.

I lived for the high points, like the time my university orchestra [McGill] performed at Carnegie Hall in New York.

All through the dress rehearsal, I kept gawking at the elliptical ceiling and the gilded columns jutting from creamy walls.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.” Photo Wholtone, Creative Commons.

Playing Carnegie Hall was a peak moment. I still have the glossy program with my name printed inside.

Program cover, Nov. 1990

Performers' names inside

Inside a chapel on a dark December afternoon, Montrealers had gathered to mark unthinkable loss.

Two years before, a misogynist gunman had opened fire at an engineering school across town. … I was twenty-one, sitting with my cello to the side of the crowd, waiting for the signal to play.

A contemplative event at Loyola Chapel on the Concordia University campus. In the same chapel, I performed solo Bach in a vigil to commemorate the victims of the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre. Photo via Hospitality Concordia fonds, Concordia University Records Management and Archives, Reference code I0042.

After the vigil, shaky and depressed, I found myself a therapist. She recommended a book, You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay, an American cult figure who claimed to have cured her terminal cancer through loving affirmations and self-forgiveness.

I wrote page after page of lines like “I am a good person. I am a talented musician…”

Louise Hay’s book on positive affirmations was all the rage in the 1990s. But much as I tried, I couldn’t self-help my way out of cello-induced tendinitis and debilitating self-doubt.

Many people describe music as a ‘universal language,’ a tuneful lingua franca. But this metaphor, penned in 1835 by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, assumes the same music speaks to us all.

The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, circa 1850.

In his prose collection Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea, published in the 1830s, Longfellow penned the phrase “Music is the universal language of mankind.” A romantic ideal turned cliché.

To the modern ear, this phrase has colonial undertones. Out of all the world’s music, which did he consider to be the “universal language”?

Photo in public domain.

I quit the cello after 17 years and took the only job I could find, as a receptionist at CHOM-FM radio station, “Montreal’s Home for Classic Rock.”

There I was, a classical-music geek, greeting rock stars I’d never heard of in the waiting area: Good afternoon, Alice Cooper. Hello, Meatloaf.

Two of the rocks stars I greeted as a radio-station receptionist. Left: Alice Cooper, photo Biha, Creative Commons. Right: the late Meatloaf, photo Super Festivals, Creative Commons.

Encountering so many different ways of making music gave rise to an unsettling thought: maybe, despite seventeen years of cello training, I had never really learned what music was all about.

Follow here to view future chapters of Wired for Music: The Visual Companion. Sign up to receive an email alert for each post.

To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Sources for all information in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.

Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Chapter 2: The Music Instinct

A chapter-by-chapter series of photos, drawings and videos illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Chapter 2: The Music Instinct [excerpts]

My first boyfriend after I quit the cello was a brooding drummer who test-drove his songs on street corners.

I followed him and his Gretsch kit to the grimiest bars in town, thrilling to the sound of his pulsing tom-toms and bass.

My punk ex-boyfriend’s Gretsch drum kit looked similar, but far less sparkly!

Photo Drum Crew, Creative Commons.

Although some of us have stronger musical skills than others, the myth of musical talent has been largely debunked.

As the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music, explains, there’s no such thing as a “music gene” or a “center in the brain that Stevie Wonder has that nobody else does.”

Left: Daniel Levitin’s book “This Is Your Brain on Music” (2006) became a perennial hit. Right: Levitin, a neuroscientist, author and musician, has performed with the likes of Bobby McFerrin, Rosanne Cash and Sting.

Photo Creative Commons.

Like other animals, humans evolved in a world thrumming with sounds — whistling winds, cawing crows, chirping squirrels, burping frogs.

Above: Eastern gray squirrel, photo Rhododendrites, Creative Commons. Cawing carrion crow, photo Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart, Creative Commons. Marsh frog, photo Peter Trimming, Creative Commons.

Steven Pinker enraged musicologists worldwide in his 1997 book How the Mind Works, dismissing music as nothing more than “auditory cheesecake.”

Music may be a sweet treat for the ear, but dismissing it as nothing more than “auditory cheesecake” ignores its inherent role in human evolution.

Photo zingyyellow, Creative Commons.

Gary Tomlinson, a musicologist at Yale University, traced the origins of music to a time before language, before human culture — before our ancestors could conceive of a distinct self.

The building blocks of music, he wrote, helped shape the modern brain.

In the video above, Yale musicologist Gary Tomlinson explores music’s evolutionary emergence, “and the connections of musicking to language, cognitive complexity, and the metaphysical imaginary.”

As I waded through Tomlinson’s dense academic text, my thoughts drifted towards my own origins.

Then something dawned on me: without music, I might not be here at all.

From left: My yogi-mathematician father and artist mother met in the mid-1960s through a shared love of music, in the sitting room of a boarding house in Toronto.

While expecting me, my parents lived in a one-room cabin in Carlsbad Springs, a rural area not far from Ottawa.

My parents owned just a handful of records in this cabin, where I came into the world during my older sister’s nap.

I was born — and likely conceived, my mother said — to the chiseled strains of Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

My birthplace

Goldberg Variations: Aria

In an EEG study, researchers concluded that in humans, the ability to perceive a musical beat is “functional at birth.”

But when researchers adapted the EEG experiment on newborns in a study of rhesus macaques (a type of monkey native to Southeast Asia), they found no sign that macaque brains could detect a musical pulse.

Based on EEG experiments, the brains of rhesus macaques do not detect a musical beat the way human newborn brains do.

Photo Charles J. Sharp, Creative Commons.

Snowball, the boogying cockatoo, was the first documented case of an untrained animal that could match a musical beat. (Snowball later hit the big time bopping to “The Piña Colada Song” in a TV ad for Taco Bell.)

Above (video): Snowball bops to the beat in the Taco Bell commercial.

In exchange for bites of herring, Ronan, a California sea lion, would bob her head up and down to the beat of a metronome and switch tempos on a dime.

Above: In this CNN video report, Ronan the sea lion grooves to the Backstreet Boys and Earth, Wind and Fire.

Musical animals give hints that the neurological underpinnings of music might be older and more broadly shared than we ever imagined.

But somewhere down the line, human ancestors stumbled on ways to sharpen [our musicality] for reasons that chimps, our closest relatives, didn’t have.

Chimps and humans separated from our last common ancestor roughly six million years ago.

Illustration The Nature Box, Creative Commons.

Music, like our species, has origins in East Africa.

Along the highway between the Serengeti grasslands and Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater — a meadowy oasis teeming with lions, zebras, elephants, and wildebeest — two colossal skulls of concrete mark the turnoff to the “Cradle of Humankind.”

In Tanzania, the turnoff to the “Cradle of Humankind” — Olduvai Gorge — features six-foot-tall concrete skulls of the hominid species Paranthropus robustus and Homo habilis.

The museum at Odulvai Gorge displays a replica of the Laetoli footprints discovered in 1978 by Mary Leakey.

Replica of the Laetoli footprints discovered in Tanzania in 1978 by Mary Leakey. Photo Momotarou2012, Creative Commons.

Imprinted by feet hardly different from our own, the Laetoli trail proved that our ancestors walked upright, with a human-like stride, at least two million years before the massive growth spurt in the hominin brain.

In these footprints, Anton Killin, an evolutionary theorist, sees traces of rhythm.

But ancient neural connections leave no fossil record. They’re impossible to prove. Paleolithic tools offer more tangible clues.

Tomlinson, the Yale musicologist, believes the building blocks of music emerged from the rhythmic chipping of rock on rock. Homo erectus began chiseling diamond-shaped hand-axes about 1.7 million years ago.

Left: Lower Paleolithic hand axe, roughly 1.2 million years old, taken from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania; currently in British Museum, photo public domain. Right: Bifacial symmetrical pointed hand axe circa 280,000 BCE; photo (cropped) via Portable Antiquities Scheme, Creative Commons.

Neurons that fire together, wire together. Thus, as our ancestors sharpened stones, tool-making sharpened the brain.

Next came fire. Homo erectus learned to harness flames at least 790,000 years ago, and possibly earlier.

Nourished by roasted tubers, hippopotamus, elephant, and boar, early brains doubled in size.

For Homo erectus, fire added leisure time.

Bored and restless around the primeval hearth, they might have bonded by synchronizing their voices and body movements, said [Anton] Killin, “rehearsing” precursors of song and dance.

Prehistoric cooking fires, over centuries, fanned the flames of human imagination. Photo Alasdair, Creative Commons.

Like a moth to a flame, my mother was drawn to music and adventure. Widowed at age twenty-six by my father’s death, Mom hitched a ride from Ottawa to Vancouver with two toddlers in tow.

Within weeks, she fell in with a band of ragtag musicians.

I was in diapers when she got cozy with the Pied Piper of the group, a tall and bushy-haired Californian named Michael Fles.

Though I have no memory of this time, as a toddler, I was surrounded by jamming musicians.

In Vancouver, Michael [Fles] worked the system, applying for a government grant to fund ‘spontaneous music workshops’ for children with special needs.

He got the idea from Christopher Tree, the musical wizard he’d followed to Woodstock the year before, in the summer of 1969.

Above: Trailer from the 2018 documentary “Christopher Tree” from Les Blank Films. Tree was a direct influence on the ‘spontaneous music’ scene my mother was part of in Vancouver. In the summer of ‘69, Tree opened each day of the Woodstock festival with a cacophony of Tibetan temple gongs.

Mom followed her musician friends to the mountains of Chiapas, where she tried her hand at Mayan-style pottery.

My mom, a widow in her late 20s, playing one of her clay flutes in Mexico. I was a toddler along for the ride.

My earliest memory is of a bonfire crackling in daylight as a long line of women carry earthen pots to the flames.

Mom said this memory fits a time when I was three, in the Mayan pottery village of Amatenango del Valle.

I found this photo recently while emptying my mother’s house. Imagine my excitement — I had never seen it before! The image fits my earliest memory: women firing clay pots in the village of Amatenango del Valle. Photo Susan Feindel, all rights reserved.

We slept in an abandoned stable in Chiapas, much to the amusement of the Mayan villagers.

Gringos locos, they must have thought.

The abandoned stable in Chiapas where my mom, her boyfriend and my sister and I slept. Photo Susan Feindel, all rights reserved.

A black-and-white photo shows me in pigtails and a handwoven dress, sitting in the dirt. My chubby hands clutch a pottery flute shaped like a child with a round face and curly hair.

The clay figure is me. I am blowing into the hidden mouthpiece, filling myself with sound.

Me in Mexico at nearly three years old, playing one of my mother’s flutes (it is shaped like me).

I have no memory of playing this ocarina, or of the two musicians who inspired my mom to make flutes out of clay.

Photo Susan Feindel, all rights reserved.

Meanwhile, back in Vancouver, two members of the “children’s spontaneous music workshops” regrouped in 1976 to launch Canada’s first training program in music therapy, at Capilano College (now Capilano University).

One of the founders, Nancy McMaster, said the program never strayed from the values of spontaneity and free expression rooted in “Woodstock, the ’60s, and some hitchhikers.”

Above: Music therapist Nancy McMaster in the documentary “Celebrating the Beginnings of the First Canadian Music Therapy Program” founded at Capilano University in 1976. This film features key members of the ‘spontaneous music group’ my mom was part of when I was a toddler.

The budding music therapists encouraged children with special needs, many of them nonverbal, to tune in to their own musical impulses moment to moment, and communicate in ways that transcended words.

While their approach was radical at the time, it was hardly counterintuitive. The earliest humans — also nonverbal — might have made music much like this.

Half a million years ago, in a balmy period in southern England, Homo heidelbergensis hunted rhinoceros and megaloceros (giant deer), leaving a cache of bones and stone tools at Boxgrove in West Sussex.

In southern England, human ancestors hunted megalocerus (giant deer) that stood roughly 6’7” at the shoulder and weighed more than half a ton. Reconstruction of extinct megalocerus at the Prehistoric Park in Tarascon, France. Photo Tylwyth Eldar, Creative Commons.

To divvy up the spoils and reinforce the chains of command without a brawl, the leaders would have hollered, pounded the ground, beaten their chests.

Anatomical changes helped them make themselves clear.

These hunters had lost the air sacs around the larynx that allow other primates to ‘hoot-pant’ without hyperventilating. Without these air sacs, the Boxgrove band could vocalize with close to human finesse.

Our human ancestors lost the laryngeal air sacs (inflatable extensions of the vocal tract) that allow chimpanzees to “hoot pant” and breathe at 10 to 15 times the normal rate. The loss of laryngeal air sacs allowed humans to vocalize with greater finesse. Photo courtesy Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest.

During the last ice age, small bands of sapiens huddled in the caves of Germany’s Swabian Alps, playing flutes fashioned from mammoth ivory and vulture bone.

In this cave, Hohle Fels, in Germany’s Swabian Alps, archeologists discovered flutes dating back more than 40,000 years. Photo Dr. Eugen Lehle, Creative Commons.

These flutes look like penny whistles, with finger holes carefully spaced to play tunes in five notes, similar to the pentatonic scales found in Scottish jigs or Javanese gamelan music.

Ice-age flute made of vulture bone, discovered in Hohle Fels cave in Germany’s Swabian Alps and dated at more than 40,000 years old.

Photo Hannes Wiedmann, Creative Commons.

On a replica of the vulture-bone flute, one experimental archaeologist managed to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Above: Amateur archaeologist Wulf Hein plays melodies on a replica of the vulture-bone flute created during the last ice age and discovered in Germany’s Swabian Alps.

Remarkably, our auditory cortex can rewire itself to process touch as well as sound. The renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie, profoundly deaf since age twelve, often performs shoeless to allow her feet to feel the vibrations from the floor.

The human body, she told The Globe and Mail, is “like a huge ear.”

Percussionist Evelyn Glennie, deaf since childhood, performing at the Moers Festival in 2004. Photo Creative Commons.

Most children can learn to hum in tune and dance to the beat, grinning all the while.

Anyone who doubts this can check out videos of preschoolers wiggling to music in Mexico, Cuba, or Senegal.

Above: Video of a Cuban preschooler dancing salsa in Havana.

As a fledgling journalist, I struggled to pay the bills. Besides my freelance gig writing for a Reader’s Digest coffee-table book series, I cleaned houses and worked as an extra on film sets, wearing everything from zombie makeup to a torpedo bra for the role of a ’50s waitress.

Snapshots from my days as an extra on movie sets in mid-1990s Vancouver.

I was a “background performer” on shows ranging from The X-Files to Happy Gilmor (starring Adam Sandler).

If only I’d known sooner about the deep roots of music in my early life, and in the human brain. I might have had something to hold on to in my late twenties when I tried to reinvent myself as a cellist…

Follow here to view future chapters of Wired for Music: The Visual Companion. Sign up to receive an email alert for each post.

To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Sources for all information in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.

Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Chapter 3: Groove, Interrupted

A chapter-by-chapter series of images illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Chapter 3: Groove, Interrupted [excerpts]

At a beachside festival in Vancouver, I wandered through the crowds for hours…

A recent scene from the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the seaside event that introduced me to the band Cascabulho and led to a trip to Recife, Brazil. Photo Adriana Barton, all rights reserved.

I was thirty, still reeling from another blown-up relationship and moldering as a tourism-magazine editor when what I really wanted was to write.

Just as I was heading for the festival exit, I heard music with a bounce to it — a catchy, hyperactive quality that drew me back in.

The band, Cascabulho, mashed together drums and electric bass with folk songs from Brazil’s Northeast.

I followed them to Brazil. Not for a fling or a stint as a groupie, but with a hope that some of their buoyant energy might rub off.

Original members of Cascabulho, the band that inspired me to check out the music scene in Recife, Brazil. Photo Adriana Barton, all rights reserved.

The ragged metropolis of Recife took me aback.

Beyond the compact colonial district, settled in the 1530s by the Portuguese, the city of more than three million was chockablock with crumbling apartment buildings and hand-built favelas.

A favela at the water’s edge in Recife, Brazil. Photo Elvis Boaventura, Creative Commons.

But wherever I went in Recife, people sang one minute and drummed the next, dancing all the while.

I envied how easy they made it look.

A trio of young women showed me their chops on a two-sided drum called the alfaia, played with thin mallets that made a heavy booming sound. Photo Adriana Barton, all rights reserved.

In Brazil, no one batted an eye if someone played a smidgen before the beat or sang a little off-key. It was all part of the musical texture.

But where I come from, countless people don’t dare sing except in the shower. Others swear they couldn’t carry a beat to save their life.

The deficits we call “tone deafness” or “left-footedness” are largely cultural.

A 1931 report from the magazine Popular Science describes tests designed to separate “musical” children from the supposedly “tone deaf.” Photo U.S. public domain.

The more I learned about our species’ innate musicality, the more my culture’s approach to music struck me as bizarre.

I dusted off my history books, determined to pinpoint the source of these hang-ups.

A Muse with a harp and two others with lyres. Image from a Greek vase in the Munich Museum. Photo public domain.

The ancient Greeks believed everyone could and should have a knack for music, most often blended with poetry and dance.

Writing on fragile papyrus scrolls, they described music as a source of divine wisdom from the Muses, the nine goddesses of literature, science, and the arts.

But playing an instrument wasn’t just for a-Muse-ment.

The nine Muses of Greek mythology, painted by Venetian artist Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594). Image in U.S. public domain.

In the sixth century BCE, Pythagoras convinced his followers that planetary bodies moved according to the same mathematical ratios found in musical scales.

For the Greeks, music mind-body medicine.

Partway through the Roman Empire, however, music was in for a massive upheaval.

Pagan Rome was a rollicking place. Bacchic rites beckoned worshippers to drink wine and let loose to the “howlings” of drums until they entered a state of ekstasis (Greek for being outside one’s self).

In pagan Rome, horn players pumped up the volume in chariot races, carnival trains, gladiator fights. Bas relief from ancient Rome at Museo nazionale d'Abruzzo. Photo Sailko, Creative Commons.

The Church Fathers realized that to triumph over paganism, the new religion would need to sever all ties to dirty dancing.

‘The devious spells of syncopated tunes,’ wrote Clement of Alexandria, in 195 CE, ‘corrupt morals by their sensual and affected style, and insidiously inflame the passions.’

This mindset would eventually give rise to the most austere music I’ve ever heard: Gregorian chant.

Gregorian singing in the Netherlands. Photo Helena, Creative Commons.

Sung in unison — all the same note — Gregorian chant moves mostly stepwise in small leaps, using only the notes you’d find on the white keys of a piano.

In this solemn chanting of the Latin liturgy, many listeners find transcendent beauty. Even so, this is music stripped to the bone — no harmony, musical instruments, or distinct beat.

Gregorian chant became the official music of the Roman Catholic Church for more than a thousand years. Note the mostly stepwise progression of the melody, and absence of rhythmic notation and harmony. Photo Wasily, public domain.

We take for granted the musical chords we hear in pop tunes. Nevertheless, the entire harmonic system of Western European music developed through the Church, step by step.

Church composers avoided dissonant sounds, especially the Devil’s tritone.

The Devil’s trident inspired the musical term “tritone.” Photo Charles Rodstrom, Creative Commons.

The tritone — the combination of three whole tones — was considered so jarring and difficult to lead into a pleasing harmony that medieval monks were taught not to use it.

As the musicologist John Deathridge explained in an interview with the BBC: “You can read into that a theological ban in the guise of a technical ban.”

In university, I studied counterpoint, the system of relationships between harmonies and musical voices later used by Vivaldi and Bach.

Writing even a short piece of counterpoint was like playing chess, because each era had different restrictions on how one note could move to the next.

In the sixteenth century, for example, the Church’s Council of Trent warned that harmonies “must not give empty pleasure to the ear” and ordered priests to ‘banish from church’ all sounds “that are luscious or impure.”

J.S. Bach

Bach's counterpoint

By the year 2020, classical music accounted for just 1 percent of all music consumed in the U.S.

Yet this antiquated genre clings to its pedestal.

For many of us, the rules embedded in this system continue to shape how we learn to play instruments and think about music — even if we never listen to Beethoven or Bach.

Painting from my mother Susan Feindel’s “Intensive Care” series documenting my brother’s open-heart surgery at the age of 5. The experimental procedure he received in England had never been done in North America. Artwork by Susan Feindel, cover of the Canadian Medical Association Journal in January 1985. All rights reserved.

A year after I began cello lessons, my little brother was born with congenital heart abnormalities that left him battling pneumonia and the constant risk of heart failure.

While my parents drove my brother back and forth to the hospital, the conservatory kept me and my sister busy.

Practicing for our performance exams and orchestra rehearsals was demanding enough, so we never bothered learning extra parts to play in the living room together “just for fun.”

Our family didn’t have a pop-music tradition either, other than the scratched-up Beatles records my British stepfather often played.

The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's 50th anniversary billboard in London, England. As a small child, I loved leafing through the pages of this weird and wonderful album. Photo Kreepin Deth, Creative Commons.

I loved “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and could sing every word of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” by heart. But the thought of teaching myself the cello part from “Eleanor Rigby” never crossed my mind.

Now I understand why. My sister and I didn’t play our instruments. We worked them.

Outside the Conservatoire de Paris, the (all-male) class of composer Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot in 1894-1895. From left: Maurice Ravel, Camille Decreus, Gaston Lévy, Edouard Bernard, Fernand Lemaire, Charles de Bériot (seated at the piano), Henri Schidenhelm, Jules Robichon, Joachim Malats (seated at the piano), Marcel Chadeigne, Ricardo Viñes, Cortes, André Salomon, Ferdinand Motte-Lacroix. Photo Eugène Pirou (1841–1909), Bibliothèque nationale de France, public domain in U.S. and France.

My first cello teacher had studied at the illustrious Paris Conservatory, founded in 1795. My early music-theory teacher studied there, too, under the tutelage of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen.

No wonder their standards were so high.

The word “conservatory” comes from the orphanages of Renaissance Italy, where foundlings known as conservati (the saved) were initiated from an early age into the life of professional musicians-in-training.

In 1535, the original conservatorio opened its doors, in Naples.

Treble clefs mark the locations of Europe’s first four music conservatories (from left): Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini, built in 1583 (still standing), Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo, founded in 1589 (still standing), Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio a Capuana, built in 1578 (still standing) and the oldest — Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Loreto, built in 1535 (demolished). Map adapted from Wikimedia.

Church entrance in the structure that once housed the Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio a Porta Capuana at 36 Piazza Enrico de Nicola in Naples, Italy.

One of Europe’s four original music conservatories, it was founded in 1578 as a charitable institution for orphans, or conservati (“the saved”).

The adjacent church is also known as the Chiesa di Sant'Onofrio alla Vicaria.

Photo Baku, Creative Commons.

Inspired by the style of music instruction in Italian orphanages, the state-run Parisian conservatory set the tone for the great conservatories of Europe and, later, North America.

This model remains the foundation of Western music education to this day.

Parents love sharing videos of their child in a piano recital performing ‘Für Elise,’ but back at home, they’re boogying in the kitchen to hiphop or cranking up Arcade Fire.

The sports equivalent would be to send a child to fencing lessons…

…while everyone else watches the hockey game.

Ice hockey fist bump GIF by NHL via Giphy.

From the very first music lessons, children are expected to learn the smallest units of music: notes, beats, rests.

Ethan Hein, a music-education specialist at New York University, believes this approach starts at the wrong level of abstraction.

Taken out of context, notes and rests don’t register as music.

Around the world, plenty of musicians play beautifully without ever learning the Western music notation taught to kids from day one. Symbols from left: treble clef, 4/4 time signature, a whole note, bar line, half note, half note on a ledger line, bar line, 2/4 time signature, quarter note, eighth note, two sixteenth notes, double bar line. Image public domain.

Standard music education tends to focus on an extremely narrow type of music, said Hein.

Namely, “the aesthetic preferences of Western European aristocrats of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

In the video above, American composer Adam Neely exposes the inherent racial bias in Western music theory as it is typically taught.

The system that gave us musical absolutes, such as metronome rhythm and ‘perfect pitch,’ is presented as the best and most universally valid.

But, in truth, this music reflects the sensibilities of light-skinned people from a certain time and place.

Co-authored by Ethan Hein, Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity aims to motivate kids to make music using digital tools.

Hein believes classical music could become more relevant in today’s multicultural classrooms if teachers approached it the way sampling producers do, “as raw material for new expression.”

In a national survey of U.S. high schools, just a quarter of graduating students had enrolled in a single music course during any of their four years in high school.

I thought of Billie Eilish, the California teen whose 2019 hit “Bad Guy” topped the charts.

Although the media painted her as a natural-born talent, Eilish started singing in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus at the age of eight. Hardly an overnight wonder.

Billie Eilish at the 2019 Pukkelpop Music Festival. Photo Lars Crommelinck, Creative Commons.

Her story made me wonder where future Eilishes will come from.

Today’s kids are more likely to log hours on an iPad than a piano keyboard or electric guitar.

But if music teachers fail to offer them what they want and need from music, said Hein, “should we blame the kids for voting with their feet?”

Live music has morphed too. At most concert venues, you can hardly see the stage through all the smartphones snapping away.

Ever been stuck at a concert behind someone whose smartphone is blocking the show? Photo Pxfuel.

In growing swaths around the world, music has become a product created by specialists and marketed to the rest of us.

Capacities for singing and dancing, evolved over millennia, are getting rusty from lack of use.

Mine got rusty, too.

Cover of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. In this insightful book on creativity, first published in 1992, Cameron coined the term “shadow artist” to describe blocked creatives. Image Wikimedia Commons.

In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron describes the plight of the “shadow” artist, writer, or musician who lives vicariously through others.

As Cameron points out, shadow artists can get nasty towards those with the guts to put themselves out there.

In my mind, this shadow phenomenon helps explain the enormous appetite for TV talent shows that build performers up, only to tear them down.

Fans of American Idol will abandon their vocal champions at the first off-note and then revel in the carnage.

When Simon Cowell, the infamous TV talent judge, smites a quivering contestant with a line like “You’ve just invented a new form of torture,” ratings go up.

The cruelty is part of the point.

Photo Alison Martin, Creative Commons.

In the blood sport of singing, Western societies delight in separating the gifted from the “talentless” masses.

No wonder people shy away from making music.

In my post-cello years, live concerts put me in touch with the physicality of music, if only at arm’s length.

Clockwise from top left: I caught shows by artists including Franz Ferdinand (photo livepict.com), Red Hot Chili Peppers (photo Warner Bros), The Pixies (photo Stefan Svik) and Ben Harper (photo Victor Diaz Lamich).

By my early thirties, I had become a shadow musician.

Listening instead of playing, watching others instead of picking up an instrument myself. Doing my best to convince myself that maybe just listening could be enough.

Click here to view the next chapter of Wired for Music: The Visual Companion. Sign up to receive an email alert for each post.

To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Sources for all information in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.

Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Chapter 4: Mood Music

A chapter-by-chapter series of images illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Chapter 4: Mood Music [excerpts]

One evening at an art gallery, I bumped into a journalist from Canada’s newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail.

The Toronto-based paper was looking for an editor to assign arts stories in Vancouver, she said. “You would be perfect for the job.”

I was hired within days. I could hardly believe my luck.

In my first two years at The Globe and Mail, I assigned and edited more than six hundred articles on visual arts, theatre, music and pop culture for a weekly arts and entertainment section in Vancouver, B.C. Photo Adriana Barton, all rights reserved.

As I scrolled through press releases, a jaw-dropping report about music caught my eye:

“Music releases mood-enhancing chemical in the brain.”

Huh. My classical training had left me anxious and depressed. The opposite effect. I wracked my brain thinking about how the new findings might have been true for me back then.

A devastating memory from my teen years came to mind. Flashing back to the anguish and its long aftermath, I realized for the first time that it was music that had helped me get through it.

The summer I turned fifteen, I loaded my cello onto a bus for a day’s journey from my hometown of Ottawa to a music academy in Charlevoix, Quebec.

I saw many familiar faces as I unpacked my things, but the bunk beds were filling up fast, with no sign of our principal violinist, Aruna, or her whiz-kid sister Rupa from the second violins.

“Didn’t you hear?” someone said. “They died in the Air India crash.”

Oh God.

On June 23, 1985, the bomb exploded while the passenger jet was in midair, sending the bodies of all 329 people — Aruna, Rupa, and their mother, Bhawani, too — hurtling into the Irish Sea.

Aruna Anantaraman

Me at 15

The following spring, at the Ottawa Music Festival, the judges declared me the winner of the trophy for strings. But where was the prize?

Unbeknownst to me, Aruna had won it the previous year. Wordlessly, her father presented me with the trophy. Then he gave me something else: a photo of Aruna holding the golden cup, radiant and beautiful, two months before she fell from the sky.

The Air India bombing was the biggest mass murder in Canada’s history. Yet despite knowing two of the victims, I don’t remember talking about it with anyone.

Instead, I spent my free time barricaded in my room, lonely and depressed. Whenever I had the house to myself, though, I’d lie on the couch listening to my idol, Jacqueline du Pré, playing Elgar’s haunting Cello Concerto in E Minor.

Over and over, I’d listen and weep.

Jacqueline du Pré wowed the world in 1962 with her gut-wrenching interpretation of Sr. Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor. When multiple sclerosis forced her to stop performing at age 28, this haunting concerto became the anthem of her tormented life.

People struggling with depression often gravitate to melancholy music. And it turns out we have healthy reasons for choosing sad songs when we’re down.

Jonathan Rottenberg, director of the mood and emotion laboratory at the University of South Florida, and a graduate student, Sunkyung Yoon, conducted a study using music rated by Western listeners as neutral, happy, or sad.

Overall, people with clinical depression showed a strong preference for somber music, saying it made them feel calmed, soothed, and “even uplifted.”

Certain songs always make me misty-eyed, such as Tracy Chapman’s “The Promise.” When she sings the words, “I’ll find my way back to you,” she gets me every time. Photo Hans Hillewaert, Creative Commons.

Like an empathic friend, melancholy music meets us where we’re at.

And when songs make us weep or put a lump in our throat, music can trigger a cathartic release.

The late neurologist Oliver Sacks had deep appreciation for music, a passion he explored in his bestselling book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Photo Maria Popova, Creative Commons.

Music reaches at a level beyond conscious thought. More than any other artform, it is both “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” wrote the late neurologist Oliver Sacks:

“Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”

Early psychiatrists had an intuitive grasp of music’s mood-enhancing effects.

Image from a 1865 lithograph depicting the Illenau asylum in Baden, Germany, where music and nature were considered vital agents of healing in recovery from mental illness. Image U.S. public domain.

In the mid-nineteenth century, specialists in Baden, Germany, believed individuals with mental illness healed best in a pastoral setting with plenty of music— especially Mendelssohn.

The local asylum, Illenau, urged patients to sing in the choir, join the in-house band, and try writing their own musical compositions.

The structures that housed the 19th century Illenau asylum — an early adopter of music as medicine for mental illness — still stand today. Photo Gerd Eichmann, Creative Commons.

Near the turn of the 21st century, a critical mass of scientists began to shed light on the mind-boggling chemicals and electrical patterns activated by music.

At the Montreal Neurological Institute, Dr. Robert Zatorre and Valerie Salimpoor, a McGill graduate student, became the first to prove that music triggers the release of dopamine in the brain — stimulating some of the same pathways activated by chocolate, addictive behaviors and sex.

Ball-and-stick model of a dopamine molecule: gray=carbon, white=hydrogen, blue=nitrogen, red=oxygen.

Image Ben Mills, worldwide public domain.

When music builds to a peak moment during, say, a drawn-out drumroll, we get a surge of dopamine.

Then, if the climax exceeds our expectations — with, perhaps, a spectacular crash of cymbals — dopamine spikes again.

Activating the brain’s dopamine pathways, music stimulates the putamen (involved in motor movement), the nucleus accumbens (involved in pleasure), and the body’s descending analgesic response via the spinal chord. Illustration adapted from image by Patrick J. Lynch, Creative Commons.

Dopamine isn’t the only chemical involved in musical pleasure.

The brain makes its own versions of heroin, morphine, and cocaine. Known as “endogenous opioids” (“endogenous” meaning “of internal origin”), these neurochemicals give us everything from a “natural high” to a mild tranquilizing effect.

Dr. Zatorre, along with colleagues in Spain and France, theorizes that music gives us two kinds of delight: intellectual enjoyment and physical pleasure — goosebumps, chills, prickles down the spine.

Goosebumps, one of the physical pleasure responses elicited by music. Photo Ildar Sagdejev, Creative Commons.

While the roles of dopamine and endogenous opioids remain “very much under debate,” said Zatorre, he believes dopamine may be responsible for our aesthetic enjoyment of music, while our endogenous opioids enhance our physical pleasure in music.

Pleasure is life-affirming. On the flip side, a lack of pleasure in normally enjoyable things is a hallmark of mood disorders including clinical depression.

Early in our evolution, physical pleasures including sweet foods and sex helped keep us alive. But the human brain developed, we learned to find pleasure in activities that required higher-level thinking, such as basking in Brahms. Neuroscientists refer to hits of bliss from art or music as “aesthetic” or “cognitive rewards.” Photo Stefano Mortellaro, Creative Commons.

Pleasurable music can take the edge off anxiety.

The evidence comes from surgical wards, where patients with acute anxiety end up with more pain, a higher risk of infection, and longer recovery times. Although sedatives calm most patients, they also carry the risk of breathing problems, blurred vision, dizziness, and agitation.

Anesthesiologists searched for alternatives.

Artwork entitled “Anxiety” by the artist Bhargov Buragohain, Creative Commons.

In a Barcelona hospital, for example, one group of surgical patients received a standard dose of Valium. A second group listened to half an hour of classical or new-age music, both the day of the procedure and the night before.

Just before the surgeries, researchers measured patients’ blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol, and anxiety levels.

They found no difference between the two groups.

As a treatment for preoperative anxiety, the researchers concluded, music was “as effective as sedatives.”

Music dials down chronic stress, as well.

A Dutch review of 104 clinical trials concluded that listening to slow-paced music for just twenty to thirty minutes has “a direct stress-reducing effect.”

Throughout history, however, superstitious beliefs about the “power of music” have taken bizarre forms.

Page from an extensive chapter published in 1641 on “tarantella” music as an antidote to tarantula venom, from the text Magnes sive de Arte Magnetica by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. Image scanned by Feldkurat Katz, U.S. public domain.

In the Middle Ages, fast-paced “tarantella” music was the go-to remedy for a nebulous illness that plagued the Mediterranean for several hundred years.

While tending rows of tomatoes and spicy peppers, peasants developed sudden breathing problems, melancholy, and a “sensation of dying.”

They blamed their symptoms on the venom of the European tarantula spider (although many “victims” showed no sign of spider bite). Frenetic dancing to tarantella music was the only “cure.”

I’ll bet the peasant remedy actually worked — but not as a direct antidote to spider venom.

Belief in the mysterious spider sickness gave depressed peasants a socially acceptable culprit for their miseries under feudalism. More importantly, it gave them an excuse to get out of the field ruts and join in a mood cure that put a spring in their step.

There’s even some science to back up this approach.

In a large 2017 review, German researchers noted “highly convincing” evidence that music improves symptoms of depression and quality of life.

The poet Emily Dickinson aptly described depression as “a funeral” in the brain.

Clinical depression brings persistent feelings of sadness and low self-worth, along with sleep problems, lack of energy, and in many sufferers, thoughts of suicide.

Photo Amherst College, public domain.

People with clinical depression often improve with antidepressants and talk therapy. But in a Cochrane review, music therapy offered an extra boost compared to standard treatments alone.

Of course, music therapy isn’t the same thing as moping around listening to sad cello concertos.

Depending on the condition, from brain injury to debilitating grief, people working with a certified music therapist might show improvements beyond what other treatments can offer.

When it comes to clinical depression, however, it’s unclear whether music therapy relieves symptoms any better than music listening alone.

Music-therapy session for cancer patients in Bristol, U.K.

Registered music therapists have extensive university-level training in using music to treat physical, cognitive, and emotional issues.

Photo Creative Commons.

In a study of cancer patients with low mood, music therapy and solitary listening offered similar benefits.

Some patients preferred working with a music therapist, saying they liked the feeling of camaraderie and support. But others felt anxious or even hostile when a therapist handed them an instrument or asked them to sing.

Left alone with headphones, one patient said, “You can concentrate more on your music, and it’s like it relaxes you more.”

Just about any music may offer temporary relief from depression, as long as we enjoy the music. Studies have shown benefits using everything from European classical to Indian ragas, Irish folk to reggae.

Classical violinist

Ravi Shankar

Irish musician

Ziggy Marley

Researchers in North America and Europe have described music as an “emerging treatment option” for mood disorders that “has not yet been explored to its full potential.”

Yet in many parts of the world, this aspect of music is blatantly obvious.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s insightful book emphasizes treatments that address the insidious effects of trauma beneath conscious awareness. Photo Adriana Barton, all rights reserved.

Renowned psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk emphasized this point in his bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score:

“The capacity of art, music, and dance to circumvent the speechlessness that comes with terror may be one reason they are used as trauma treatments in cultures around the world.”

In recent years, Western aid organizations have made efforts to provide culturally sensitive programs.

In 2012, for example, a group called Musicians Without Borders launched Rwanda Youth Music, offering drop-in drum circles, therapeutic music sessions, and music camps for youth coping with trauma, poverty, and HIV.

Approaches like these, depending on the person, can be more helpful than talk therapy.

To quote the Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen, “Where words fail, music speaks.”

Musicians Without Borders (video from January 2020): Emir Hasani from the Republic of Kosovo visited Rwanda to share innovative band coaching approaches with youth in the capital city Kigali. Five bands were formed from scratch; within a week, each band wrote, recorded and performed two songs.

Delving into the neurochemistry of music helped sharpen my understanding of its powerful influence on human emotions and mood. At the same time, I had to ask myself, once again, how I became so unraveled.

If music lifts anxiety and depression by stimulating pleasure chemicals, then playing the cello day after day should have made me the picture of mental health. Instead, it drove me to burnout and despair.

Did I have a glitch in the pleasure pathway in my brain?

A conversation with Barry Bittman, an American neurologist, offered more insight.

Bittman conducted some of the first studies demonstrating that music can strengthen our immune response. But under the wrong conditions, he added, music can have the opposite effect.

Beginners playing djembes in a drum circle. Image worldwide public domain.

Bittman divided non-musicians into three groups. The first joined a drumming circle for half an hour. The second sat in a circle and listened to drumming music, while the third read newspapers and magazines.

Initially, he found no differences in their blood samples. “Not a damn thing.”

Bittman was nonplussed. Then he figured out that most of these non-musicians had either had a negative experience with music earlier in life or were convinced they weren’t musical.

Being asked to drum on the spot was stressing them out.

Bittman scrapped his approach. Next, the beginner drummers pounded out the syllables of their names, played with shakers, and jammed however they liked.

This time, participants showed a surge in natural killer cells, the specialized white blood cells that seek and destroy pathogens and cancer cells.

Natural killer cell from a human donor (colorized electron micrograph). Natural killer cells perform vital immune functions, targeting and killing aberrant cells including virally infected and tumorous cells.

Photo National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Creative Commons.

Given the freedom to make their own music, Bittman said, participants loosened up and embraced a spirit of fun and camaraderie.

“That’s when the magic happens.”

With these words, everything clicked. My music training was almost guaranteed to induce a stress response — enough to dampen my immune system, along with my pleasure pathway.

I loved music, loved the sound of the cello. But I almost never played with a sense of creative freedom or fun.

This realization hurt. I had done it all wrong.

Click here to view the next chapter of Wired for Music: The Visual Companion. Sign up to receive an email alert for each post.

To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Sources for all information in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.

Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Chapter 5: A Musician's Brain

A chapter-by-chapter series of images illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Chapter 5: A Musician’s Brain [excerpts]

Reaching into a wicker basket, my mother pulled out a clay flute shaped like a pair of breasts.

My mother designed this flute for two people to play, altering the sound with every slosh of water poured through a little hole in the side. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

She held it for a moment, admiring its curves, and then placed it on the table next to a dozen other flutes she’d made in the Mayan pottery village of Amatenango del Valle when I was small.

These flutes had been wrapped in newspaper, squirreled away, until I pressed Mom for details about her spontaneous music phase in the early 1970s.

Flutes made by my mother Susan Feindel include two “Moses” flutes, an ocarina resembling a flying saucer, and another shaped like a spotted slug. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

Improvising with music catapulted her to a new level of creativity, she said, allowing her to break free of her formal art training as well.

I’d never known that spontaneous music-making had jump-started her creative life.

My mother, Susan Feindel, playing a clay flute modelled after my stepfather’s face. Photo Adriana Barton, all rights reserved.

The more I thought about her blissful immersion in flower-power sounds, the more mystified I was by the rigid musical path she’d chosen for me.

Wouldn’t going without music lessons have been better than subjecting a child to the draconian classical training I had received?

“I didn’t think so,” Mom replied, because “you learn different combinations of sounds, and how to distinguish them from one other, and rhythms — and on and on,” she said. “In my mind, that’s huge, valuable mental training.”

It all boiled down to her conviction that music was good for the brain.

Many people share this belief.

Carl Sagan

NASA's Golden Record

Music is so closely tied to higher thought that Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, convinced NASA that the Voyager space probes should carry songs to the stars.

Both spacecraft, launched in 1977, contain a gold-plated copper record emblazoned with the words “The Sounds of Earth.”

Each record offers ninety minutes of music — from Mozart to Chuck Berry to Peruvian panpipes and Senegalese percussion.

A Voyager space probe carries songs into interstellar space. Artist’s rendition via NASA, U.S. public domain.

But here on Earth, neuroscientists are still unraveling the mysteries of music and human cognition. Does music truly enhance our intelligence?

Around the time I quit the cello, three dozen college students filed into a lab in Irvine, California, to take part in an unusual experiment.

Just ten minutes of listening to Mozart seemed to improve their spatial reasoning by the equivalent of eight to nine IQ points. In 1993, the researcher, Frances Rauscher, revealed her findings in a two-page letter in the journal Nature.

The media went wild.

Her results — dubbed the “Mozart effect” — inspired a best-selling book and a cottage industry of “brainpower” products, including a slew of Baby Genius CDs.

The music educator Don Campbell, author of “The Mozart Effect” books, was an early adopter of the controversial hypothesis that listening to Mozart boosted IQ.

However, when stringent follow-up studies failed to replicate Rauscher’s results, it was clear the Mozart myth didn’t hold up.

Listening to Mozart does not raise IQ. But can playing an instrument make us smarter?

People with extensive music training tend to outperform non-musicians on tests of working memory, attention, and executive functioning.

Moreover, learning an instrument at a young age has been linked to stronger auditory processing, emotional perception, and “stick-to-itiveness,” all of which may contribute to future success.

But pegging better life outcomes to a single activity or personality trait is a tall order. Other valiant attempts have ended in failure.

Take the “marshmallow test,” the famous 1972 experiment developed at Stanford University.

In the “marshmallow test,” children at around age five were given the choice to either eat one marshmallow right away or wait fifteen minutes to receive two marshmallows instead of one. Photo (altered) Mk2010, Creative Commons.

Early studies using the “marshmallow test” found that the ability to delay gratification in childhood led to better life outcomes, from lower body mass index to higher education.

However, when the test was repeated in larger and more diverse populations, researchers concluded that better life outcomes had to do with affluence, not self-control.

Can music training alone explain why children who play instruments show stronger reading skills and academic achievement?

I was one of those kids. But how to separate nurture from nature? My father, a non-musician, had the highest grades in mathematics in the Soviet town where he grew up.

My artist mother, no slouch herself, worked with scientists on research expeditions in the Arctic and the deep seas.

Me in my early teens learning to crochet at a family friend’s house. Photo Andrée Pouliot, all rights reserved.

Then there’s the nurture side. TV was mostly off-limits, so I’d pound clay on the dining table, sneak off with my parents’ books, and learn how to sew and crochet.

I met many of my social needs through my parents’ entourage of artists, musicians, philosophers, paleontologists, federal bureaucrats, and a depressive poet or two.

Given all these influences, I can’t see how a researcher could tease out the effects of classical-music lessons on my report cards.

The notion that playing an instrument increases scholastic ability remains disproven.

In a 2020 study, a team of statisticians analyzed fifty-four studies of music training published from 1986 to 2019. After crunching the numbers, they found no relationship between music lessons and enhanced cognitive skills or academic, regardless of the children’s age or amount of music training.

Who sticks to music lessons? Children with personality traits such as conscientiousness and openness to new experience. Pre-existing differences, concluded a separate study, likely explain the link between music training and higher grades.

Playing an instrument does not make us smarter. Yet it can alter the very structure and density of our brain.

The corpus callosum (red) is typically thicker in people who receive intensive music training starting at a young age. Image generated by Life Science Databases, Creative Commons.

The brains of highly trained musicians reveal startling differences: namely, a thicker corpus callosum — the fibrous nerve bundle that sends signals back and forth between the two brain hemispheres — and more gray matter in the auditory, sensory, and motor areas.

Music wires the brain in specific ways, depending on the instrument we play.

In classical string players, for example, the left digits used for fingering notes take up extra space on the brain’s cortical “map” for processing touch in distinct body parts.

This cortical “map” shows the sensory distribution of major body parts in the brain’s cerebral cortex. Most of us sense far more from our fingers than from larger body parts, but this phenomenon is especially pronounced in the left fingers of string players. Illustration OpenStax College, Creative Commons.

What does it take to sculpt the structure of a musician’s brain? It’s not just a matter of practice, practice, practice.

Timing is everything.

A pivotal study found stark differences between musicians who began training before the age of seven and those with similar years of experience who got started between eight and eighteen.

The early learners had greater connectivity between brain hemispheres and stronger ability to time their movements to rhythms.

This study identified the years before age seven as “the developmental window” for a musician’s brain.

How much of Mozart’s genius had to do with his early start? Mozart began playing chords on the harpsichord at age 3. In this painting commissioned by his musician father, Leopold Mozart, he is 6 years old. Portrait in the Mozarteum, Salzburg. Image public domain.

Other researchers expanded the developmental window to around age nine. But regardless of the precise age, neurologists believe a musician’s brain is shaped through “synaptic pruning.”

Synapses are tiny pockets between neurons that relay electrical and chemical messages, allowing neurons to communicate.

Synapses relay electrical and chemical messages between neurons. Image by Воробьёв Владислав Константинович, Creative Commons.

When these connections get too little use, the brain “prunes” them to increase efficiency.

Constant stimulation strengthens our synapses and neural pathways. This process, known as neuroplasticity, occurs throughout life, but never as dramatically as in childhood and adolescence.

Even so, I don’t see much point in declaring “last call” for a musician’s brain.

Having the brain of an early learner might help a violinist achieve Paganini speed, but performing music isn’t an Olympic sprint in which the athlete either beats the clock or not.

The Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) played with such virtuosity, it was said he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for dazzling technique. Drawing circa 1842 by A. Ashley, Creative Commons.

The finest musicians aim for artistry. And in the story of musical talent, brain imaging gives us a fuzzy outline at best.

While it’s true that music training molds young minds, I would add a strong caveat: Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, especially if it means hours of mindless scales, arpeggios, and finger drills.

Endless repetition makes children zone out. When kids go on autopilot, they end up practicing the same mistakes and stiff hand positions over and over.

After years of doing this myself, I’d argue that ossified approaches to training may increase the risk of injury instead of building technique.

Jimi Hendrix in 1967, fingering his guitar strings with his right hand instead of his left. Photo public domain.

I often envy the self-taught rock stars whose yen for music carries them through the learning curve.

Self-taught musicians might end up with atrocious technique — Jimi Hendrix’s wacky ambidextrous style would make a guitar teacher shudder — but at least they never get their passion for music beaten out of them.

Over the past century, pedagogues have tried to make classical-music training more intuitive. Various approaches include the Suzuki method, Kodály method, and more recently, Music for Young Children.

Children learning to play cello in the Suzuki method, which emphasizes playing by ear from an early age. Photo Stilfehler, Creative Commons.

Each method has its strengths. But in my view, the pedagogical approach matters less than the warmth of the teacher, the expectations of parents, and the temperament of the child.

Here’s what gung-ho parents and teachers should keep in mind: Neuroplasticity is neutral. It can reinforce negative habits just as much as positive ones.

My early training not only gave me a musician’s brain, but also ingrained a set of damaging thought patterns that have shadowed me since childhood.

When perfectionism strikes, I can spend hours staring at paint chips, analyzing undertones and the way they shift in different lights. Then I’ll snap out of it, bewildered by the time I’ve spent agonizing over details that don’t matter. Photo (cropped) Vyacheslav Argenberg, Creative Commons.

On a bad day, I am rigid and uptight. No matter what’s in front of me, I will fixate on getting it right.

It’s as if a switch has been flipped in my brain, short-circuiting the part of me that would normally say “This might work” or “Let’s give it a try.”

Perfectionism boxes me in and stresses me out. Meanwhile, my Little Miss Perfect side whispers that I’ll never live up to my wildly creative mother.

“Herring,” 2014, by my mother Susan Feindel. Acrylic and charcoal on paper. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

I grew admiring my mother’s vibrant frescoes, breathtaking landscapes, and glittering mosaics.

My mother has always indulged her curiosity and delight in doing things her own way. Unlike me.

“Spring Dow’s Lake,” 1982, by my mother Susan Feindel. Acrylic on paper. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

In our chaotic home, with no one steering the ship, classical music gave me a much-needed source of order, structure, and predictability. But the rigid conventions of classical music also bred control-freak tendencies.

My classical training left no room for experimentation, body awareness, or exploring the age-old connections between music and dance. The goal was not to enjoy myself or be in flow, but to get it right.

Even as a teenager, I could see how this tradition encouraged a mechanical approach.

Some classical music students perform like robots, like this automaton playing piano at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. Photo (cropped) Jakub Hałun, Creative Commons.

While attending a masterclass, I took notes on a violinist my age: “He shows not a flicker of emotion and doesn’t even twitch when criticized or complimented. He plays very well, but he doesn’t put his soul into it. His playing is impersonal, like a robot.”

None of this rigidity comes from the music itself. Rather, it’s the harsh teaching methods and soulless motivations behind classical training that often trip people up.

Maybe, instead of giving kids music lessons to make them smarter, we could pay more attention to the links between music, personal expression, creativity, and problem-solving.

Albert Einstein with his violin “Lina” at a charity concert in Berlin, January 29, 1930. Photo (cropped) Creative Commons.

As Albert Einstein, a lifelong musician, said in a legendary interview in the Saturday Evening Post, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Einstein added, with a wistful smile, that if he had not been a physicist, “I would probably be a musician.”

The mastermind behind E=mc2 rarely traveled anywhere without Lina, his trusty violin.

He adored Mozart and Bach, describing their compositions as the epitome of balance and clarity — qualities he strove for in his mathematical work.

“Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful,” Einstein said, “that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.”

Einstein likened Mozart’s compositions to the order and beauty of the universe. Behold the spiral Andromeda Galaxy (above) about 2.5 million light-years from Earth. Image taken using a hydrogen-alpha filter. Credit Adam Evans, Creative Commons.

Although Einstein never claimed that music shaped his scientific work, Elsa Einstein, his second wife, noticed a pattern:

“Music helps him when he is thinking about his theories,” she said. “He goes to his study, comes back, strikes a few chords on the piano, jots something down, returns to his study.”

Music wasn’t just a means to an end. As Einstein told his interviewer, “I get most joy in life out of my violin.”

High achievers in fields ranging from entertainment to information technology credit musical activities for sharpening their capacities to listen, collaborate, and think outside the box.

The late Paul Allen of Microsoft with his band The Underthinkers, performing at a gala in 2013. Photo Jameswlarsenjr, Creative Commons.

Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, played in a rock band called The Underthinkers. In the early days of Microsoft, after hours of writing code, he’d mellow out by strumming chords on his guitar.

Nobel Prize winners, too, often moonlight as musicians.

After tracking the leisure pursuits of Nobel laureates from 1901 to 2005, researchers at Michigan State University discovered that nearly a quarter of them had either conducted or composed music, or played an instrument.

Frances Arnold

The Nobel medal

Long before earning a Nobel for her work on enzyme evolution, the chemical engineer Frances Arnold played piano, pipe organ, and guitar.

Richard Feynman, winner of the 1965 Nobel for physics, played the bongos.

Press play (above) to watch Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman playing the bongos in a home video from the 1960s.

But as a burned-out musician, I could not easily access a musical outlet for creative inspiration.

I went into therapy with a world expert in perfectionism. Week after week, for five years, I talked about my issues. I had no way of knowing if these sessions were doing any good — they certainly didn’t bring me any closer to music.

But in hindsight, I credit these sessions for opening me up to something else.

Nuzzling up to my future husband. All rights reserved.

Enter Scott, a tall, bright-eyed Albertan who had just returned to Canada after two years of traveling.

Scott had little in common with any guy I’d fallen for in the past. A mechanical engineer, he was outdoorsy, entrepreneurial, and dedicated to preserving the natural world.

Scott didn’t play an instrument, or even sing in tune, but he ticked too many boxes for me to dwell on this area of mismatch. After all, I wasn’t making music either.

And I couldn’t imagine a time when that might change.

Follow here to view future chapters of Wired for Music: The Visual Companion. Or sign up to receive an email alert for each post.

To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Sources for all information in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.

Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Chapter 6: More Than Meets the Ear

A chapter-by-chapter series of images illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Chapter 6: More Than Meets the Ear [excerpts]

On a snowy day in January, when I was around ten, a couple of kids came to school after the holidays wearing a blue-and-silver metallic gadget.

Best friends got to try the foam-covered headphones. The rest of us stood and stared as they mouthed riffs from Billy Joel and Air Supply. Riffs no one else could hear.

The original Sony Walkman: Launched in 1979, this Japanese invention had an asteroid-like impact on how we listen to music.

This TPS-L2 model was the first portable music player without an external speaker. Before the Walkman, hardly anyone wore headphones (other than extreme audio geeks). Photo Binarysequence, Creative Commons.

“Everyone knows what headphones sound like today,” wrote the late Sony designer Yasuo Kuroki, “but at the time, you couldn’t even imagine it, and then suddenly Beethoven’s Fifth is hammering between your ears.”

Sony took this unique acoustic experience and made it mobile.

Downtown Vancouver in 1981 — the cityscape author William Gibson explored with a post-punk soundtrack playing on his first Walkman. Photo CVA 779-E11.33, City of Vancouver Archives.

The novelist William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, bought his first Walkman in the summer of 1981.

As he roamed downtown Vancouver listening to Joy Division, he imagined a future where machines delivered data with the same “under-theskin intimacy” of the new music player.

A year later, Gibson named this virtual world “cyberspace.”

William Gibson’s award-winning novel Neuromancer (1984) follows a washed-up hacker who ventures into a futuristic world called “cyberspace,” which Gibson envisioned while wandering around Vancouver with his Walkman.

Years later, in a 1993 interview, Gibson declared: “The Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget.”

Up until the Walkman, noted the writer Matt Alt in The New Yorker, “music was primarily a shared experience.”

Then all of a sudden, the Walkman gave us permission to tune out.

“It’s like a drug,” said Susan Blond, a vice president at CBS Records, in a 1981 interview with the Washington Post. “You put the Walkman on and you blot out the rest of the world.”

Has listening on the fly given us a more intimate relationship to music — or simply a more distracted one?

Riders "tuning out": New York subway on March 22, 1981, two years after the Walkman was released. Photo by Dick Lewis/NY Daily News Archive. Use on this website licensed via Getty Images. (Warning: Do not copy or post without contacting Getty Images re: file #97293754.)

Before the headphone era, no one could jog to Rihanna, let alone listen to a “pump song” just before a job interview.

One morning on Twitter, I spotted this thread: “What’s your favorite hype song?” Most of the comments mentioned high-energy tracks like Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.”

But other picks showed a vulnerable side, such as “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music.

"I Have Confidence" from the 1965 film The Sound of Music. ©Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.

In a study from Northwestern University, college students who listened to an upbeat playlist opted to go first in a debate nearly twice as often as those assigned low-power tunes.

Hype songs had similar effects on other confident behaviors, the study found.

Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, never hit the pool for a race without listening to music “until the last possible moment,” he told The Guardian.

Michael Phelps in June 2011, just before competing in the 100-meter butterfly. The swimmer's pre-race playlist glided from Lil Wayne to Nero to vintage Eminem. Photo JD Lasica, Creative Commons.

And in his memoir, A Promised Land, Barack Obama mentions drawing strength from music during his first presidential campaign.

“It was rap that got my head in the right place,” he wrote, especially Jay-Z’s “My 1st Song” and Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”

Barack Obama

Rapper Jay-Z

For my own hype music, I might choose the Mahotella Queens, a South African trio whose a cappella harmonies and booty-shaking moves exude the message “nothing’s going to keep me down.”

The Mahotella Queens: President Jacob Zuma greets members of the singing group at the 16th Cape Town International Jazz festival. Photo via GovernmentZA, Creative Commons.

Given the choice, though, I prefer my music live.

As Yo-Yo Ma pointed out in a USA Today interview, our largest organ is our skin:

When music moves molecules through the air, the cellist said, “You feel actually touched. It’s that tactile, it’s that personal — that intimate.”

Yo-Yo Ma in 1987 performing for U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, and guests. Photo in U.S. public domain, Creative Commons.

But in recent years, I’ve been talking myself into a headphone habit.

Portable music, it turns out, can take exercise to the next level.

Working out to music makes exercise seem easier and more enjoyable, studies have shown. Photo Nenad Stojkovic, Creative Commons.

A 2020 review of 139 studies yielded key findings about music in exercise and sport:

Music makes exercise seem easier — reducing our perceived exertion by about 10 percent — and more enjoyable, distracting us from the voice inside screaming, “Make it stop!”

In lab experiments, sports psychologist Costas Karageorghis has shown that running in time to music helps regulate our stride patterns, reducing the micro-adjustments needed to maintain a steady pace.

Running in time to music gives athletes an edge — so much so that races including the Boston Marathon have either restricted or “strongly discouraged” the use of portable music players. Pictured: Marathon Rotterdam. Photo Peter van der Sluijs, Wikimedia Commons.

When we run or cycle in synchrony with music, he explained, our bodies use 6 to 7 percent less oxygen than they need to perform the same feat without moving in sync to a soundtrack.

Who could forget Olivia Newton-John singing “Let’s get physical”?

Workouts have come a long way since ’80s aerobics and Jazzercise, but there’s still no such thing as a silent spin class, let alone Zumba. GIF via Tenor.com.

After a race or workout, said Karageorghis, music should start at around ninety beats per minute and gradually bring you to a resting state with a tempo of sixty to seventy beats per minute.

In general, he added, “you have to think very carefully about the exact function that music is serving and select it accordingly so that it serves you well.”

Do the same rules apply to mental exertion?

Many people insist music primes them for peak performance in the cognitive realm. But is it true? Image Darekm135, Creative Commons.

In his book The Organized Mind, the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin breaks the bad news: Listening to tunes while we’re doing other things scatters our attention, making our brains work in a highly inefficient way.

And yet, Stephanie Land wrote her best-selling memoir Maid to a playlist that began with “The Mighty Rio Grande” by the American band This Will Destroy You.

"Maid" memoir (2019)

Author Stephanie Land

Stephen King penned his horror blockbuster Misery to blasts of Anthrax and Metallica. And Jean-Michel Basquiat painted to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. 

Could all these writers and artists be wrong?

My mother, Susan Feindel, working on her large-scale mosaic entitled “Quarry” for a public art installation in Ottawa.

©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

After watching my mother painting in her studio to Franz Schubert and Erik Satie, I have a hunch that in creative fields, too much focus might interfere with the stream-of-consciousness thinking that inspires artists to do their best work.

Of course, this nebulous phenomenon would be tricky for scientists to study, and as far as I know, none has tried.

But there’s no doubt that listening to music alters core physiological systems in our bodies, not just our minds.

Listening to music can dampen the histamine response in people with food allergies after they’ve swallowed an allergen such as peanuts. But (warning!) this effect is unlikely to be strong enough to prevent a life-threatening reaction. Photo by PiccoloNamek, Creative Commons.

Concealed in our eyes, ears, mouth, and nose is a crucial antibody, Immunoglobulin A, our first line of defense against viruses and bacteria.

A meticulous review of sixty-three studies describes fluctuations of this antibody as “particularly responsive to music,” especially when people enjoy the sounds.

The immune boost may be mild and fleeting.

But even the most orthodox of medical professionals acknowledge that our mental and emotional states can influence how sick we become and how well we bounce back.

Music relieves pain by evoking a pleasure-reward response in the brain, which sends signals through the spinal cord instructing the body’s endogenous opioid system to suppress pain.

Image InjuryMap, Creative Commons.

Music can help relieve pain after surgery.

According to a Queen’s University study, music works as a painkiller by evoking a pleasure-reward response that activates the body’s descending analgesia system.

Music can take the edge off insomnia as well.

Music is a mild analgesic compared to opioid painkillers — but it is cheap and free of side effects. Kashirin Nickolai, Creative Commons.

In a rigorous Cochrane review, listening to slow-tempo classical, new age, or jazz improved restlessness, nighttime waking, and problems falling asleep.

In a recent survey, classical music, especially Bach, was the top choice for drifting into dreamland. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.

However, insomniacs may need several weeks of nightly music before its sleep-inducing properties kick in, for reasons not fully understood.

If adding tunes to a bedtime routine was just a matter of conditioning — training our bodies that it’s time to sleep — then audiobooks at bedtime should offer similar results. But they don’t.

There might remain, noted Australian researchers, “mysterious effects of music that science has yet to address.”

Take the phenomenon known as “binaural beats.”

Often marketed as “soundwave therapy,” binaural beats deliver two steady tones at slightly different frequencies, one in each ear.

You’ll start to hear a low beat that sounds like it’s coming from inside your head. But this third sound is just an auditory illusion, the result of “wavelength interference.” Image by Adjwilley, Creative Commons.

On their own, binaural beats are about as tasty as cardboard, which might explain why they are typically sweetened with nature sounds and new-age music.

While more research is needed, in the few studies showing benefits from binaural beats, the music itself might be the special sauce.

But despite all my cello training, it was not until my late thirties that I fully grasped just how potent music could be.

Anyone who has cared for a newborn around the clock knows how exhausting it can be. Photo Fortepan #101602, Creative Commons. 

My baby was born with a dimple in one cheek and a set of lungs that would soon produce blood-curdling screams.

He screamed in his stroller. He screamed on his play mat. He screamed in his car seat, baby swing, crib.

I tried every infant-soothing technique in the book — even even “cry it out.” Nothing worked. I became bone-achingly, brain-numbingly sleep-deprived.

Nine months in, on yet another bleary trudge through the city with my baby, a flyer on a lamppost caught my eye: African Movement Workshop. Something about the beaming drummer in the picture made me sign up on the spot.

Video: Click the "play" arrow and wait for mesmerizing marimba by Kurai Blessing Mubaiwa, the Zimbabwean musician I heard in a Vancouver workshop during my postpartum depression.

Partway through the workshop, the warm tones of a marimba rippled through the air. The gentle currents bobbed around me, mellow and cheery, and I had an almost physical sensation of being lifted by the exuberant melody.

After months of shouldering my baby, it was as if something was carrying me.

That day marked the turning point in my rough transition to motherhood. How could this be?

It got easier: Holding my 10-month-old son about five weeks after the music workshop that lifted my spirits during postpartum depression. ©Adriana Barton. Reproduction in any form prohibited.

As a journalist, I was trained to question all things woo-woo, but I didn’t need a before-and-after brain scan to know something had shifted in me.

From that moment on, I vowed to stop underestimating what music could do.

Follow here to view future chapters of Wired for Music: The Visual Companion. Or sign up to receive an email alert for each post.

To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Sources for all information in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.