You Are the Music (Paperback)

How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human

Victoria Williamson

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‘You are the music / While the music lasts’ T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets Do babies remember music from the womb? Can classical music increase your child’s IQ? Is music good for productivity? Can it aid recovery from illness and injury? And what is going on in your brain when Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht or Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’ transports you back to teenage years? In a brilliant new work that will delight music lovers of every persuasion, music psychologist Victoria Williamson examines our relationship with music across the whole of a lifetime. Along the way she reveals the amazing ways in which music can physically reshape our brains, explores how ‘smart music listening’ can improve cognitive performance, and considers the perennial puzzle of what causes ‘earworms’. Requiring no specialist musical or scientific knowledge, this upbeat, eye-opening book reveals as never before the extent of the universal language of music that lives deep inside us all.

Victoria Williamson is a lecturer and researcher in music psychology who holds academic posts in the UK and Switzerland. She has spoken at TED, the Latitude Festival, the British Science Festival and her writing has appeared in NME. Her academic research has been presented across national and international media including BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky (UK), CNN and MSNBC (USA), CBC (Canada), Radio New Zealand National, and 2SER and the Big Issue (Australia). Victoria also hosts the popular blog musicpsychology.co.uk