The Power of Music
Essays on music, mind, and the lives music shapes. Published by Resonate Music School & Studio in Edmonton.
- Music in Hard Places
The man who returned for three minutes
An 89-year-old in a nursing home, almost entirely silent for years, sat up and sang along when someone placed headphones playing Cab Calloway over his ears. Sixty million people watched the clip. The story behind it is more careful than the headlines suggest.
- What Practice Builds
The OPERA hypothesis: why musicians hear speech differently
A neuroscientist named Aniruddh Patel proposed in 2011 that musical training rewires speech processing under five specific conditions. Each one is mundane on its own. Together they explain why a violinist can hear a conversation in a noisy room more clearly than a non-musician of the same age.
- The Listening Mind
What a chill down your back is doing
When music gives you goosebumps, your brain has just released dopamine in two distinct waves. The same neural circuits that fire for food, sex, and cocaine fire for a violin entrance. The strangeness of this finding is worth sitting with.
- Practice Notes
What music to listen to while you work
A short, useful summary of what the research actually says about music and focus. Some of it lines up with intuition. Some of it does not. Lo-fi beats fans may want to look away.
- The Early Years
Why fourteen-month-olds help the people who bounce them in time
A McMaster researcher bounced infants in time with a stranger across the room. Minutes later, the babies who had been bounced in sync were more likely to help that stranger when they dropped something. The finding rearranges a small piece of what music does.