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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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 | 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.”

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 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.