02 Sep 2007

The science of music

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article2350325.ece

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Why does music affect us like no other art? An American scientist thinks he can explain these ‘glorious illusions’
Bryan Appleyard [Times Online, 2 September 2007]

In his last, largely barren years on the island of Faro, the great film director Ingmar Bergman listened to music. He saw it, his daughter-in-law said, as “a sort of gateway to other realities, different from those we can immediately perceive with our senses”. Bergman had no religious faith, but in music he heard the only possible evidence that there was something beyond this world. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein described Mozart and Beethoven as “the true sons of God”.