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bodily state of musical awe: Konečni, Vladimir J., Rebekah A. Wanic, and Amber Brown. “Emotional and Aesthetic Antecedents and Consequences of Music-Induced Thrills.” American Journal of Psychology 120 (2007): 619–43.
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their brains synchronize: Abrams, Daniel A., Srikanth Ryali, Tianwen Chen, Parag Chordia, Amirah Khouzam, Daniel J. Levitin, and Vinod Menon. “Inter-subject Synchronization of Brain Responses during Natural Music Listening.” European Journal of Neuroscience 37 (2013): 1458–69. Trost, Wiebke, Sascha Frühholz, Tom Cochrane, Yann Cojan, and Patrik Vuilleumier. “Temporal Dynamics of Musical Emotions Examined through Intersubject Synchrony of Brain Activity.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 10, no. 12 (2015): 1705–21. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv060.
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shared brain activation: Henry, Molly J., D. J. Cameron, Dana Swarbick, Dan Bosnyak, Laurel Trainor, and Jessica Grahn. “Live Music Increases Intersubject Synchronization of Audience Members’ Brain Rhythms.” Presentation to the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Conference, Boston, March 27, 2018.
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Some 2,500 years ago: NASA has transformed the patterns of energy emitted by different planets into sounds that you can hear, and there are devices that transform the very slow sounds that plants emit into songs.
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She feels touched: To read of Oliver Sacks’s speculations about the underlying neurophysiology of bright lights and out-of-body experiences in musical and mystical awe and that of near-death experiences, see: Sacks, Oliver. “Seeing God in the Third Millennium.” Atlantic, December 12, 2012. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/seeing-god-in-the-third-millennium/266134/.
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purpose is to objectify feeling: Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Macmillan, 1953, 374.
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“the pattern of life”: Haidt, Jonathan. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Taiclass="underline" A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–34. https://doi.org/10.1037//0033-295X.108.4.814. Graham, Jesse, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, and Peter H. Ditto. “Mapping the Moral Domain.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101, no. 2 (2011): 366–85, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021847.
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our experience of aesthetic emotion: Immanuel Kant called the realm of aesthetics the “free play of the imagination.” Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press, 1951, 190. By “free,” he meant that in the arts we are free from the constraints of society and the demands of the default self. By “play,” he meant that we can explore and try out ideas; we can imagine what might be at the safe distance that art forms allow us.
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The realm of meaning: Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, 27.
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Swiss emotion scientist Klaus Scherer: Banse, Rainer, and Klaus R. Scherer. “Acoustic Profiles in Vocal Emotion Expression.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 (1996): 614–36. Scherer, Klaus R. “Vocal Affect Expression: A Review and a Model for Future Research.” Psychological Bulletin 99 (1986): 143–65.
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These bodily changes alter: In studies in this literature, scientists focus on different parameters of sound. This includes the pitch, or frequency, of the sound wave, which is perceived as notes in a piece of music; joyful music, for example, has higher pitches, while sad music has lower ones. Rhythm refers to the duration of the notes and how they group into units of sound. Tempo is the speed of the piece of music; is it fast like the Ramones or a high-spirited polka, or slow like Brian Eno’s ambient music? Contour refers to the shape of the sound; does it rise toward the end of notes, in moments of exhilaration, or fall in acoustic movements of despair? Timbre refers to the particular sounds of different instruments or singers’ voices. Great singers—Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Drake, David Byrne, and Nicki Minaj—have timbres that you can detect within a note or two. Loudness refers to the amplitude, or energy, of the sound waves, and how much sound one perceives. Beat is where the song places percussive emphasis, and is registered in where you are inclined to tap your foot, sway your body, bump, or, if you are a teenager and the chaperones aren’t looking, twerk.
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when in an anxious state: Cowen, Alan S., Petri Laukka, Hillary A. Elfenbein, Runjing Liu, and Dacher Keltner. “The Primacy of Categories in the Recognition of 12 Emotions in Speech Prosody across Two Cultures.” Nature Human Behaviour 3 (2019): 369–82.
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The musical expression of joy: Historians have likewise noted how the sounds of music convey the life patterns of the times. During the era of slavery, African Americans transformed Christian psalms and hymns into songs about the conditions of slavery and their hope for freedom. Many songs were deep and slow in their pitch and rhythm, symbolizing the disempowerment and suffering of slavery. The contours of these songs lifted upward, stirring hope, inspiration, empowerment, and awe in imagining a new Black collective identity. This chapter in African American music represented the life patterns of subjugation, resolve, protest, and transformation of identity at the very heart of U.S. history. See: Barker, Thomas P. “Spatial Dialectics: Intimations of Freedom in Antebellum Slave Song.” Journal of Black Studies 46, no. 4 (2015): 363–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934715574499. See also: Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Michael Eric Dyson has charted how rap emerged in the 1980s in urban areas like Philadelphia and the South Bronx, expressing a pattern of social life. Rap originated out of the rhythms, beats, pitches, and contours of the street corner banter of young African American men, known as “playing the dozens,” which allowed young men to cultivate a toughness and a voice of protest in a racist culture. Rap transformed the sounds of this life pattern into an art form that billions of people around the world turn to in order to understand their own sense of oppression, freedom, identity, and power. Dyson, Michael E. Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip Hop. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007.