You Are the Music (Paperback)
How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human
Victoria Williamson
'You are the music / While the music lasts' T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
Do babies remember music from the womb? Can classical music increase your child’s IQ? Is music good for productivity? Can it aid recovery from illness and injury? And what is going on in your brain when Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht or Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’ transports you back to teenage years?
In a brilliant new work that will delight music lovers of every persuasion, music psychologist Victoria Williamson examines our relationship with music across the whole of a lifetime.
Along the way she reveals the amazing ways in which music can physically reshape our brains, explores how ‘smart music listening’ can improve cognitive performance, and considers the perennial puzzle of what causes ‘earworms’.
Requiring no specialist musical or scientific knowledge, this upbeat, eye-opening book reveals as never before the extent of the universal language of music that lives deep inside us all.
With a clear and conversational style, Williamson shares anecdotes as a springboard to discussing a range of experimental evidence for such intriguing uses. The reader gains considerable insight into how music can modulate emotional experiences.
You Are the Music demonstrates how much the music within us matters. Remaining practical and thoughtful throughout, Williamson incisively places music in a biological context.
