Daniel Levitin

media release: Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival

Across cultures, sound and rhythm have been used to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind. In his new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.

“How can we scientifically study something as magical, ineffable, and as spiritually moving as music?” Levitin writes. “If we try to pin down the slippery thing that is art, will we demystify it or ruin it?” The interaction of music, mood, health, and the biology of our brain is yielding ever more clues about how it all works. In Levitin’s telling, the science of music reinvents and reinvigorates its mystery, power, and beauty. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord will show you what we know, how it can be explained, and how we can harness the potential of music for healing and for help in staving off disease in the first place; for relieving pain; for helping us look forward and reimagine our lives.

Levitin is not your typical scientist―he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today’s most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

“Music can calm our brains, our hearts, our nerves,” Levitin writes. “We like music that strikes the sweet spot between novelty and familiarity, simplicity and complexity, and between predictability and surprise. Loving music requires that we be receptive to it, that we make the mental space and time to allow ourselves to give into it, to be won over by it. If our defenses are up it may simply not work. Or it can catch us by surprise, evoking some of our deepest memories or deepest feelings, and in the process, help us through almost anything.”

In conversation with Ben Sidran.