Indre Viskontas - How Music Can Make You Better

Text copyright 2019 by Indre Viskontas.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN: 978-1-4521-7192-0 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-7227-9 (epub, mobi)

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When I tell people Im an opera singer, they are surprised to meet a modern-day unicorn: mysterious, rare, and, lets face it, pretty archaic. Who in their right mind would devote all that time to training an operatic voice when the art form is irrelevant for most people? I can understand this reaction.

But it breaks my heart when the now duly impressed person tells me that they love music but know nothing about it. They ask if their favorite singerAdele, Bono, Bob Dylanhas a good voice. They seem ashamed of their musical taste, doubting that the music they enjoy is objectively great. Music has become caged in a caste system where even the most passionate admirers question their ability to distinguish nobility from commoners. And the performance of music has been ripped from the clutches of amateurs and reserved for the privileged class of professionals.

How did we get here? Music has always been for the masses. Even opera, whose first audiences played cards, smoked, drank, and conversed loudly throughout the show, challenged the singers to capture their attention with emotion and vocal acrobatics. These humble beginnings are a far cry from the elitist reputation opera now enjoys. Today, many people avoid it altogether, embarrassed because they just dont find the music moving.

Why do I find opera sublime while others find it boring? As both a singer and a cognitive neuroscientist, I like to combine art and science to help answer this and other questions.

Many of us think music exists in the etherwhile it defies definition, we know it when we hear it. But the truth is that we only hear it when we know it. Music isnt music until our minds make it so. Sound can be noise in one context but music in another.

Like many aspects of our personalities, we can thank our parents and our raging teenage hormones for much of our musical tastes. Two forces that shape those tastes are early exposure, when we first develop a relationship with sound, and the roller-coaster emotional ride of adolescence.

But no matter where you came from and where that ride ultimately took you, music has almost certainly left its indelible mark. Whether you have perfect pitch or cant hold a tune, whether you have B-sides that you cant let go of or guilty pleasure music reserved for road trips, music has shaped your mind. And neuroscience can show you how.

Humans are bizarre creatures: We value many things that dont ensure our survival or propagate our genes. Perhaps then its not so surprising that we spend our money and time listening to and creating meaningful sounds. But for curious extraterrestrial visitors, our love affair with meaningful sound would be baffling.

Music is essential to so many of our activities: watching movies, shopping, working out, eating out, cheering on sports teams, commuting to work. Music has the power to connect people, to change brains, to incite violence and tame beasts, to give us energy or heal our pain. But its our minds that turn noise into this panacea.

Each way of consuming or creating music has a unique neural signature and leads to a unique subjective experience. Music affects us in so many different ways that, when they are all taken together, few brain regions are left untouched. Thats why music can be a lifeline in the face of devastating brain conditions, be it Alzheimers disease or a traumatic brain injury.

In this guide, well first find out what music actually is and how it works. Then well explore how it can help or heal our minds and bodies. Finally, well turn to how music can change society. This book will show you just how ethereal and magical music is, that there is no one right way to listen or play, and that extracting meaning from sound is one of the greatest gifts that natural selection has given us.