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

In a recent USA Today interview, Yo-Yo Ma noted that 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.”

Self-teaching has been linked to higher motivation to play music. Less restrictive musical environments, noted a 2013 study, “tend to enhance creativity.”

are ready to sing different parts as a group. Rehab for “bad singers” has taken off in England as well. Shy warblers can join one of several “can’t sing” choirs, or take a class at London’s Morley College called “Tone Deaf? No Way.”

encouraged the chanting of hymns to open hearts to God’s teachings. But they urged believers to reject all dancing and elaborate singing, lest their souls be tainted by “diabolical choruses.”

We don’t expect kids to know about grammar and spelling before they can talk, but from the very first music lessons, children are expected to learn the smallest units of music: notes, beats, rests. Ethan Hein, a music-education specialist at New York University, believes this approach starts at the wrong level of abstraction. Taken out of context,

IN HER BOOK The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron describes the plight of the “shadow” artist, writer, or musician who lives vicariously through others. Some end up as gallery owners who secretly long to paint. Others become music critics instead of singing their own

reframe our musical dabbling as “neuroplasticity building” instead of “mistress of none.”)

Only at six months old do infants use their pitch and beat perception to recognize components of language. In infant development, wrote Honing, the Dutch music-cognition specialist, “musicality precedes both music and language.”

tight control over musical talent goes against our evolutionary history. Each of us comes from a long line of music-makers, even if we’ve never sung or played an instrument ourselves. And yet, inhibitions run deep.