Category: Music Cognition

  • I’m back – with a new book!

    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…

  • Dance, sing, draw

    A few years ago one of my students, who usually played with a great deal of musicality, found herself struggling with a Chopin Mazurka that just didn’t seem to “click.”  All of the notes and rhythms were there, but it sounded stodgy – not at all like a dance.  One day, I suggested that we…

  • Most complex cognitive activity

    In my first post, I wrote that many neuroscientists believe that “making music is the most complex cognitive activity that a human being engages in.”  Some readers wondered why, so let’s talk about it.    After the research that’s been done in the past two or three decades, neuroscientists believe that the processing of music in…