Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound

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.

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

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,

William James referred to our “susceptibility to music,” and while music can affect all of us—calm us, animate us, comfort us, thrill us, or serve to organize and synchronize us at work or play—it

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

“Every memory of my childhood has a soundtrack to it,” one correspondent wrote to me; and she speaks for many of us here.