Lois Svard

Tag: music cognition

  • Making music with brain waves

    Imagine that you have been singing all your life.  You’re not a professional, but you sing with the elementary school students in your fifth-grade class, you conduct a church choir, and you’re good.  You have a nice voice, you can sing in tune and finding the right pitch is never a problem.  Suddenly one day,…

  • Why study music, part I

    Albert Einstein, at or near the top of anyone’s list of “greatest scientists of the twentieth century,” revolutionized science with his theory of relativity.  And what did he have to say about this discovery? The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition.  My parents had…

  • Why Am I Doing This?

    My favorite photography collection is Contemporary Musicians in Photographs by Louis Ouzer.  This 1979 Dover publication contains 119 photos of some of the world’s most famous musicians, from Rubinstein to Ellington, taken at the Eastman School of Music between 1940 and 1979.  Ouzer, whose studio was a few doors down the street from Eastman, was a…