• How old is music?

    Early Music When musicians or music lovers talk about early music, we’re usually talking about Renaissance music, so roughly between 1400 – 1650, if you extend into the early Baroque.  So for us, early music goes back a few hundred years.  If you speak to an archaeologist, however, early music takes on a totally different […]

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  • Music in a frame

    On a cold Friday morning in January 2007, a young man in jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap entered the Washington Metro at the L-Enfant Plaza station during the middle of rush hour, opened a violin case, took out his violin, and began to play – nothing unusual about that scenario since musicians frequent Metro stops […]

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  • Musicians and hearing loss

    No doubt you have, on occasion, noticed teenagers congregating (some would say loitering) in shopping malls, outside of movie theaters or convenience stores, or in parking lots.  In 2005,  after his 17-yr old daughter was bullied and harassed by a gang of teens outside a local convenience store, a man in Wales named Howard Stapleton […]

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  • 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, […]

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  • Executive functions: Why study music, part IIIa

    It’s been a long time since my last post and this one is a continuation, so if you’re new to this blog, or if you don’t remember the previous post about the importance of learning a musical instrument for developing executive function skills, you may want to re-read it before continuing here. Briefly, the three […]

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  • Executive functions: Why study music, part III

    Most of us have more to do than time to do it.  We juggle family and job responsibilities, friends, household management, social media, errands, plus a great deal more.  And for those of us who are musicians, we’re always trying to find practice time at our instrument.   How well we’re able to manage the […]

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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 (4) 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) Sensory Information (0) Sleep (2) Synesthesia (5) Vision (1)