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Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing
"A fascinating thesis and a timely synthesis.... Becker urges the reader to view certain arcane cultural rituals as being in the mainstream of spiritual development and argues that the resulting trance-like states may relate to the basic fabric of emotions and consciousness, which are our ancestral, animalian heritage. This is both a risky and courageous undertaking that challenges both cultural and neuroscientific studies."
--Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
In Deep Listeners, Judith Becker brings together scientific and cultural approaches to the study of music and emotion, and music and trancing. Becker claims that persons who experience deep emotions when listening to music are akin to those who trance within the context of religious rituals. Using new discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and biology, Deep Listeners outlines an emotion-based theory of trance using examples from Southeast Asian and American musics. A companion CD includes excerpts from several of the musical genres under discussion, and a 16-page color insert presents vivid documentation of the global experience of "deep listening."
--Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
In Deep Listeners, Judith Becker brings together scientific and cultural approaches to the study of music and emotion, and music and trancing. Becker claims that persons who experience deep emotions when listening to music are akin to those who trance within the context of religious rituals. Using new discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and biology, Deep Listeners outlines an emotion-based theory of trance using examples from Southeast Asian and American musics. A companion CD includes excerpts from several of the musical genres under discussion, and a 16-page color insert presents vivid documentation of the global experience of "deep listening."
- GenresMusicReligionNonfiction
210 pages, Paperback
First published June 28, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 1, 2014
A unique and engaging treatise on humankind's deep, emotional connection to music. Defining trance as "a bodily event characterized by strong emotion, intense focus, the loss of a strong sense of self, usually enveloped by amnesia and a cessation of the inner language", Becker takes a stab at understanding trance by synthesizing ideas from ethnomusicology, neurobiology, affective neuroscience, consciousness studies, and music cognition and perception.
I picked up this book to better understand what we know of the effects on the brain and autonomic nervous system of music-induced trance. Though Becker puts forward an interesting interdisciplinary theory which speculates on the biological origins of trance, I walked away from the book without much more information than I could have guessed at with my previous understanding of neuroscience and physiology. Becker fails to add anything of relevance on top of Demasio's theories of consciousness, rather, she situates trance states into his unproven theories. Moreover, Becker gives us little in terms of proposing actual experiments which could empirically test her speculative theories.
This lack in evidence from the neurobiological side could have been offset by a stronger focus on the ethnomusicological perspective. However, the book's descriptions of contemporary (Pentacostilism; tribal rituals in Bali, etc.) as well as historical cultural accounts of musical trance (tarantulism, mesmerism, etc.) are surprisingly cursory. It also fails to integrate into its examples other relevant "mainstream" Western trance states (e.g. contemporary electronic music & club culture). Discussion of trance with respect to altered states of consciousness and substance ingestion seem to also be of relevance here, but these are barely even mentioned.
In Becker's defense, it may be that the solid research I'd hoped to encounter simply doesn't exist, perhaps because such an approach is a novel research endeavor still in its infancy. On the other hand, maybe the introduction should have forewarned me, where Becker asks: "How can one integrate richly humanistic, first-person descriptions of musical trancing with biological and neurological theories concerning consciousness?". She continues by stating that "many of us have an aesthetic distaste for too much 'scientific' intrusion into the field, and will react instinctively to too many charts, tables, measurements, frequencies and so on." Thus, the main difficulty is that studying trance from a neurobiological perspective comes down to a scientific study of phenomenology (rather than humanistic) and that means we'll quickly run up against the epistemological gap and the classical philosophical problems of reductionism.
Though I spent most of this review railing on what I wished had been in its pages, I can say that Deep Listeners is a fascinating read that is easily digestible (though nicely academically referenced), and a fun read on a fascinating topic. It's definitely worth checking out if you're interested in the concepts, but don't look to it if you're trying to extract specific knowledge or experimental methodologies to study trance and related states of consciousness.
I picked up this book to better understand what we know of the effects on the brain and autonomic nervous system of music-induced trance. Though Becker puts forward an interesting interdisciplinary theory which speculates on the biological origins of trance, I walked away from the book without much more information than I could have guessed at with my previous understanding of neuroscience and physiology. Becker fails to add anything of relevance on top of Demasio's theories of consciousness, rather, she situates trance states into his unproven theories. Moreover, Becker gives us little in terms of proposing actual experiments which could empirically test her speculative theories.
This lack in evidence from the neurobiological side could have been offset by a stronger focus on the ethnomusicological perspective. However, the book's descriptions of contemporary (Pentacostilism; tribal rituals in Bali, etc.) as well as historical cultural accounts of musical trance (tarantulism, mesmerism, etc.) are surprisingly cursory. It also fails to integrate into its examples other relevant "mainstream" Western trance states (e.g. contemporary electronic music & club culture). Discussion of trance with respect to altered states of consciousness and substance ingestion seem to also be of relevance here, but these are barely even mentioned.
In Becker's defense, it may be that the solid research I'd hoped to encounter simply doesn't exist, perhaps because such an approach is a novel research endeavor still in its infancy. On the other hand, maybe the introduction should have forewarned me, where Becker asks: "How can one integrate richly humanistic, first-person descriptions of musical trancing with biological and neurological theories concerning consciousness?". She continues by stating that "many of us have an aesthetic distaste for too much 'scientific' intrusion into the field, and will react instinctively to too many charts, tables, measurements, frequencies and so on." Thus, the main difficulty is that studying trance from a neurobiological perspective comes down to a scientific study of phenomenology (rather than humanistic) and that means we'll quickly run up against the epistemological gap and the classical philosophical problems of reductionism.
Though I spent most of this review railing on what I wished had been in its pages, I can say that Deep Listeners is a fascinating read that is easily digestible (though nicely academically referenced), and a fun read on a fascinating topic. It's definitely worth checking out if you're interested in the concepts, but don't look to it if you're trying to extract specific knowledge or experimental methodologies to study trance and related states of consciousness.
July 10, 2011
I was fascinated by the material that covers neurophysiology and psychology but disappointed by the many open questions, unproven theories and even mythical ideas discussed towards then end of the book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews