This week’s lecture and reading was fantastic. The reading for this week, The Power of Music, discussed how music is something that is not only heard, but felt with our bodies. As he states in the reading, we listen to music with out muscles, tapping out feet, humming, singing, conducting, moving our faces and body parts to express our feelings associating with a particular piece of music or sound. It was interesting to learn his take on the social (“collective and communal”) aspect of nature, its cohesiveness to turn people in mobs in concerts dancing to the same drum beats, to trance states, in which there is an “altered state of consciousness” in which people dance and sing outside societal norms.
What I related to on a personal level involved the author’s discussion on music and motor and impulse disorders. This section discussed how music can be therapeutic, and discussed how it relates to Parkinson’s disease. My grandfather has Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder in which the neurons in the brain stop communicating effectively. My grandfather has suffered from this disease for over 10 years. It has been sad seeing him deteriorate from walking normally, to walking with a cane, to now being bed bound. Reading the article discuss how music helped Parkinson patients move more freely and overcome their symptoms astounded me. At the same time, it made perfect sense, seeing how music, the muscles, and the mind are seemingly interconnected and have a special bond that cannot be translated into words. When I get home, I hope to experiment with this and see if I can activate some of my grandfather’s muscle neurons by playing some music to him. Maybe some Mozart perhaps? We shall see 🙂