'To Touch the Soul, Music Must First Engage the Brain' - NY Times article from May 29th, 2011

Cafe Society
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I don’t know why the only link I can get to this so far is a PDF file… However, I found this fascinating and wanted to share. From this Sunday’s New York Times, a great article about the latest studies from Daniel Levitin (“This is Your Brain on Music”) and from Edward W. Large at Florida Atlantic University.

Daniel Levitin was comparing the reactions to a human’s performance of a Chopin Nocturne and comparing them to a computer based performance where the nuances were evened out or exaggerated to see which people found to be more ‘emotional’. I’d love to see the long form of this study.

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That’s very interesting, thanks. I’ve just posted a link to the article on the choir’s noticeboard.

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Definitely sounds very interesting; thanks for sharing, and I am bookmarking it :slight_smile:

ETA…not even two paragraphs in, and I’m really really hoping they studied the brain waves of CHILDREN listening to music. Have you seen how kids react? That’s nothing learned; that’s purely primal, and I think it would be a great bit of evidence if it could be shown that the brain’s engaged without any input whatsoever from social influences.
I’ll keep reading, and hoping :smiley: