• Music in the NICU

    A friend who is a chaplain in a nearby hospital often sings to the premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).  She does this because it just feels like the right thing to do. Don’t we always sing to babies to soothe and comfort them? And she notices that the babies immediately calm…

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    Music in the NICU
  • The brain – and finding the beat

    I attended a spring concert a few weeks ago that prompted me to think about rhythm, movement, and the brain. The concert was at a very small private school (pre-school through grade 4) and was titled “Poetry Everywhere.” It was a mix of absolutely charming poetry written and read by the students and songs they…

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    The brain – and finding the beat
  • I’m back – with a new book!

    The Musician’s Brain isn’t defunct, although you may wonder where I have been for the past 2 years.  Actually, I spent the Covid years writing a book, and The Musical Brain: what students, teachers, and performers need to know, will be released by Oxford on March 3.  (Oxford is offering a discount to my blog…

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    I’m back – with a new book!
  • Inauguration Fanfares

    Many of us feel a need to begin celebrating the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamela Harris sooner rather than later.  As we are all too well aware, inaugural events will be virtual due to the pandemic as well as to security concerns following the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6.  That doesn’t…

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    Inauguration Fanfares
  • Reimagining opera during the pandemic

    In the current issue of The New Yorker, music critic Alex Ross writes about the multiple ways orchestras have found to reimagine their 2020-2021 seasons (“What Does It Mean to ‘Reimagine’ an Orchestra Season?”; online Nov. 30; print issue Dec 7).  Performances have ranged from outdoor chamber concerts, to streamed concerts of live music played…

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    Reimagining opera during the pandemic
  • Learning and memory: the role of sleep, exercise, and nutrition

    There was a recent article in my local newspaper about students, stress, and learning.  Unfortunately, the article didn’t mention sleep, because sleep is a crucial factor both for alleviating stress and for the encoding and consolidation of memory.  Exercise and good nutrition also play a role in learning and memory.  So  while we tend to…

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    Learning and memory: the role of sleep, exercise, and nutrition

The Musician’s Brain

The Musician’s Brain is a blog by Lois Svard, a musician who has written and lectured extensively about the applications of neuroscience research for the study and performance of music. She is Professor Emerita of Music at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and is the author of the book The Musical Brain about music, the brain, and learning.

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Absolute Pitch (3) Alzheimers and music (1) Amusia (1) Beat-deafness (1) Benefits of studying music (7) Brain Hardwiring for Music (2) Brain Patterns (1) Celebrate music (1) Cognition (1) Cognitive bias in music (1) Compulsion for music (2) Emotion (1) Exercise (1) Hearing (1) Hearing loss (1) Improvisation (1) Infants and language (1) Infants and music (5) Learning and memory (10) Medical problems of musicians (1) Memory (1) Mirror Neurons (8) Miscellaneous (1) Music and teamwork (1) Music as therapy (1) Music Cognition (3) Music Education (1) Musician's Brain Webinar (1) Musicians' Anatomy (1) Music in times of crisis (3) Musings (2) Neuroplasticity (1) Origins of music (2) Performance (9) Practice (5) Rhythm (1) Sensory Information (0) Sleep (2) Synesthesia (5) Vision (1)