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I thought it would be interesting to talk about this topic. What role does music play in your life? How does music effect the way you think? In which emotional state do you listen to what kind of music?

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Music is in my head constantly one way or another, even when I’m not listening to it. I’d say it affects all my day to day activities in one way or another. There’s a constant soundtrack, though it’s not always what I want. Actually playing or listening to some music gives some degree of control over that.

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I was thinking about this topic again. Also about music as a means for healing. Does anyone know about good books about music and the mind from a philosophical and psychoacoustic perspective?

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I’d say it’s more of a “pop neuroscience” book than philosophy, but I thought Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks was a pretty fascinating book about music and the brain. On the subject of “healing,” it does include sections on music therapy for parkinson’s and dementia, although that may not be exactly what you had in mind. I remember coming away from this book feeling kind of awestruck by how “magical” music can seem, in terms of the phenomena that Sacks describes which often doesn’t have any clear scientific explanation.

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There is a thread entitled ‘Pictures of our sound-making …spaces’, but could we have an idea of ‘musical space’? Something we could never hope to take a photograph of.

I recently read a review of an electronic album that proposed that great producers create a ‘room’ in our imagination. I like that as a picture of what happens when we listen to a song, any song.

At the beginnings of recorded sound, that would be one, real room. The studio space. These days I think it would often be a bit like a trick. Because the room is not real. Or, there may be multiple rooms. A mess of spaces warping the mind, pulling the music and rhythms in multiple dimensions.

I mean, regardless of the beats, melodies, discord, tones or timbres the music has to live and breathe, exist in a space. Is this THE essential element to something sounding alive*? Another way of thinking about the ineffable ‘atmosphere’?

(*in lieu of any voice, which I would argue makes a world of its own, in the space of the mouth and lungs.)

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