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 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.

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 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.

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