Musicophilia

Perhaps it is not just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about it—its beat, its melodic contours, so different from those of speech, and its peculiarly direct connection to the emotions.

Half of us are plugged into iPods, immersed in daylong concerts of our own choosing, virtually oblivious to the environment—and for those who are not plugged in, there is nonstop music, unavoidable and often of deafening intensity, in restaurants, bars, shops, and gyms. This barrage of music puts a certain strain on our exquisitely sensitive audito

Melodies which run through your mind…may give the analyst a clue to the secret life of emotions that every one of us lives…. In this inward singing, the voice of an unknown self conveys not only passing moods and impulses, but sometimes a disavowed or denied wish, a longing and a drive we do not like to admit to ourselves…. Whatever secret message

“The inexpressible depth of music,” Schopenhauer wrote, “so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain…. Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.”

I tend to fall in love with a certain composer or artist and to play their music over and over, almost exclusively, for weeks or months, until it is replaced with something else.

What they do share is the fact that I have bombarded my ears and brain with them, and the musical “circuits” or networks in my brain have been supersaturated, overcharged, with them. In such a supersaturated state, the brain seems ready to replay the music with no apparent external stimulus. Such replayings, curiously, seem to be almost as satisfyi

Listening to music is not just auditory and emotional, it is motoric as well: “We listen to music with our muscles,” as Nietzsche wrote. We keep time to music,

Steven Pinker has referred to music as “auditory cheesecake,” and asks: “What benefit could there be

But for virtually all of us, music has great power, whether or not we seek it out or think of ourselves as particularly “musical.”