Bibliography

Here are some of the best books on how making music affects us. Some of these are well worth a read in themselves. I'll be drawing on them as sources for some of these posts. Often books like these don't give great references to the detailed science, but they're a good place to start.

I've also listed some books on general aspects of how the brain works, which are important references and often have useful snippets on music.

(Note: Links are to bookshop.org rather than to certain other hyperscale online booksellers. If you do choose to buy one of these, bookshop.org allows you to nominate a local bookshop to benefit from the sale. The world needs local bookshops.)

Books on how music affects us

This is your brain on music, Daniel Levitin, Penguin, 2019.
Music Advantage: How learning music helps your child's brain and wellbeing, Dr Anita Collins, Allen& Unwin, September 2021.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Dr Oliver Sacks, Pan Macmillan, 2018.
The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It, Philip Ball, Vintage Publishing, 2018.

Books on how the brain works

How the mind works, Steve Pinker, Penguin, 1997.
The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults, Frances Jensen, Harper Collins, 2015.
Welcome to your child's brain, Sandra Aamodt & Sam Wang, One World, 2011.
The river of consciousness, Dr. Oliver Sacks, Picador, 2017.
Mechanics of the mind, Colin Blakemore, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Comments

Feeling stressed? Try making music!

If you’re not used to it, making music may seem like an odd way to combat stress. You might imagine the nerves of performance and the risks of getting it wrong. Yet there’s plenty of evidence that, appropriately tailored, programmes of music making can be a really effective route to reducing the everyday episodes of stress that we are all subject to, treating the symptoms of chronic stress, and even effective as part of a range of therapies for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And you don’t need to be a highly accomplished musician to get these benefits. We think of stress in many ways, but from a biological viewpoint stress is a source of changes to the way the brain regulates hormonal activity in the body, i.e. between the nervous system and the endocrine system via the neuroendocrine system . This system regulates many processes in the body including the immune system. In particular, secretion of neurohormones regulates the hypothalamus , which is altered by physical an...

You don’t need perfect pitch to benefit from music making

Music making does you good at any level, from beginner to pro. A recent study (Leipold et al., 2021) examined a large (n=151) group of both musicians and non-musicians. They confirmed previous results that making music strengthens the connectivity between the hemispheres of the brain (see Practice that piano for a collosal callosum ). Interestingly these effects were consistent between the groups of musicians and non-musicians. Even better news, while half of the musicians studied had absolute pitch (commonly known as perfect pitch), there was no significant difference in the effects of music making on the brain functional and structural networks between the two groups. Incidentally, did you know that most birds only have absolute pitch? This sounds like a good thing, but in fact it means that if you train them to recognise a tune, and then play the same tune in a different key, they no longer recognise it. By contrast, primates (humans are primates) have been shown to have specialist...

Study says learning a musical instrument increases your IQ by 10 percent (?)

A study of more than 4,600 volunteers has been reported recently . The volunteers chose a new hobby from a list including knitting, exercising and learning an instrument. Apparently the "highest IQ increase came from the music-makers, averaging a score increase of 9.71 percent." and this was achieved after just six months. I'll be digging into the details of this study to establish its robustness.

Music Making Does You Good

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