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Mirror neurons and music, part II: the discovery
I know. You’re waiting to hear about mirror neurons and music and we’ll get to that. But the story of the discovery of mirror neurons is really too good to pass up because it was one of those serendipitous discoveries that has sometimes happened in the history of science. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin is probably the best-known,…
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Mirror neurons and music, part I
You are at a concert and find that you are becoming increasingly tense, uncomfortable, and nervous as the performer experiences several memory lapses. You know by the look on a student’s face as he comes to your studio that he hasn’t practiced during the past week. A stranger smiles at you as you walk…
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Should everyone be able to make music if we’re hardwired for it?
I thought I had finished writing this post when a fascinating new study appeared in my Inbox, and I simply had to incorporate it. Researchers at the University of Helsinki have discovered that, for several months after birth, infants can recognize a melody that they have heard in utero. In a study of 24 women…
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Are we hardwired for music?
Music has usually been studied as a cultural product – specific to a certain time and place. We associate different kinds of music, tuning systems, qualities of the sound and kinds of instruments with different ethnic groups or different cultural societies. And we attribute different structural forms, harmonic systems and (again) instruments to various time…