Musicophilia

Melodies which run through your mind…may give the analyst a clue to the secret life of emotions that every one of us lives…. In this inward singing, the voice of an unknown self conveys not only passing moods and impulses, but sometimes a disavowed or denied wish, a longing and a drive we do not like to admit to ourselves…. Whatever secret message

Music drawn from memory, he writes, “has many of the same effects as real music coming from the external world.”

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

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.

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,

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

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

Steven Pinker has referred to music as “auditory cheesecake,” and asks: “What benefit could there be

I tend to fall in love with a certain composer or artist and to play their music over and over, almost exclusively, for weeks or months, until it is replaced with something else.