Brain And Music Quotes

“You have to turn it up so that your chest shakes and the drums get in between your ribs like a heartbeat and the bass goes up your spine and fizzles your brain and all you can do is dance or spin in a circle or just scream along because you know that however this music makes you feel, it's exactly right.”

— Robin Benway

“Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.”

— Loren Eiseley

“The music of the future will not entertain
It's only meant to repress and neutralize your brain”

— Porcupine Tree

“Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.”

— Lawrence Clark Powell

“Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!”

— Milan Kundera

“GENERAL RAGINSKY: Mr. President, in order to exhaust fully the presentation of evidence in regard to the subject-matter of my report, I ask your permission to examine witness Josif Abgarovitch Orbeli- Tatiana dropped the cup of tea she was drinking, and it fell on the tile floor and broke, and Tatiana fell on the floor, too, on her knees, and began to pick up the pieces, every moment or so emitting cries of such distress that Vikki, who was nearby, jumped up, backed away and said in a stunned voice, "What's wrong with you?" Tatiana waved her off with one hand, her other hand holding a ceramic shard which covered her mouth as she continued to listen to the bare echo that was the radio broadcast as it ceaselessly continued. A crash on the road, but the radio still plays music, still transmits sounds no matter how incongruous it is that the ear can somehow hear, that the brain can somehow listen-”

— Paullina Simons

“The modified Mozart used by Tomatis, Paul, iLs, and others over time in an individualized therapy must be distinguished from claims made in the media in the 1990s that mothers could raise the IQ of their children by having them briefly listen to unfiltered Mozart. This claim was based on a study not of mothers and babies but of college students who listened to Mozart ten minutes a day and improved IQ scores on spatial reasoning tests-an effect that lasted only ten to fifteen minutes! Hype aside, different studies by Gottfried Schlaug, Christo Pantev, Laurel Trainor, Sylvain Moreno, and Glenn Schellenberg have shown that sustained music training, such as learning to play an instrument, can lead to brain change, enhance verbal and math skills, and even modestly increase IQ.]”

— Norman Doidge

“His music was direct from his heart and brain in the purest form possible.”

— Joshua Logan

“My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you're still learning language. It's using the same part of the brain.”

— Andrew Bird

“As a composer, I know that all sorts of sounds I hear are making their way into my brain and soul and later sneak into my music.”

— Eric Whitacre

“Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.”

— Antonio Damasio

“I always say this to people: 'If Shaq can be in the NBA for 19 years and dominate for 19 years using his body, why can't I be in the music industry for 50 years using my brain when my brain is way stronger than anyone's body?' I have to have a successful record company, more hit records. I want to dominate the game.”

— Rico Love

“I actually got into music because of art and because of skateboarding: All those graphics and punk bands and fanzines - they were glued together in my brain.”

— Alison Mosshart

“A big part of making music is the discovery aspect, is the surprise aspect. That's why I think I'll always love sampling. Because it involves combining the music fandom: collecting, searching, discovering music history, and artifacts of recording that you may not have known existed and you just kind of unlock parts of your brain, you know?”

— Gotye

“In brain scans, music lights up the medial prefrontal cortex and triggers a memory that starts playing in your mind. All of a sudden you can see a place, a person, an incident. The strongest responses to music-the ones that elicit vivid memories-cause the greatest activity on brain scans.”

— Jodi Picoult

“In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.”

— George Szell

“There's no doubt that there's certain songs and arrangements of music that release a chemical reaction in my brain. This sounds a little goofy, but I really believe that. It's such a euphoric experience that I sort of want to chase that experience as often as possible.”

— McG

“Also, because people like to multitask, in a way if you've got a bit of music on in the background and the lyrical content is making you want to listen to it, then that would probably put you off the texting you wanted to do. I think people like things that just make that right kind of noise, but leave your brain free to do something else.”

— Jarvis Cocker

“I think I got turned onto The Beach Boys for the first time with the 'Endless Summer' album in 1974. The power of that music still, to this day, bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. You don't have to think about it; it's something that you feel.”

— John Stamos

“I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.”

— Daniel Barenboim

“I think hopefully we've got enough brain cells left to decide if our music is really worth something.”

— Will Champion

“I'm a laid-back guy, but my brain is always wrapped up in music.”

— Dustin Lynch

“The human brain can soften as a result of incessant listening to music with an intent to commit prose.”

— Donal Henahan

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”

— Albert Einstein

“I wasn't playing the music, the music was playing me ... and once that went away, and I had the feeling I was playing music, I had to stop. The need to go onstage and get my brain flattened every night left me, and what I didn't wanna do is go onstage and perpetrate a fraud ... You cannot fool an audience.”

— Henry Rollins

“In his entirely personal experience of them, English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was from the streets. Which is to stay, stab his heart and it would bleed French, slice his brain open and its convolutions would be lined with English and German, and touch his hands and they would feel Spanish.”

— Yann Martel

“Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.”

— Dick Cavett

“My brain kind of rolls pretty fast when I'm conscious. It's constantly looking for stuff to do. Like if I'm in my house and I'm hanging out, I tend to be listening to music whilst watching a film whilst sending e-mails.”

— Dominic Monaghan

“There's hidden sweeteness in the stomach's emptiness.
We are lutes, no more no less. If the soundbox is stuffed full of anything, no music.
If the brain and the belly are burning clean
with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire.
The fog clears, and new energy makes you
run up the steps in front of you.
Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.
Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.
When you're full of food and drink, an ugly metal statue sits where your spirit should. When you fast,
good habits gather like friends who want to help.
Fasting is Solomon's ring. Don't give it to some illusion and lose your power,
but even if you have, if you've lost all will and control, they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing out of the ground, pennants flying above them.
A table descends to your tents, Jesus' table.
Expect to see it, when you fast, this table spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages.”

— Rumi

“I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I'm always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with-nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.”

— Rob Sheffield

“The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain.”

— Algernon Charles Swinburne

“As she went on with her labour, she became aware that she had Schubert's Erl-King going around in her head. It wasn't the ideal music for the job. Normally, Pannonique programmed her brain to play symphonies that have her the energy indispensable for such physical labour-Saint-Saens, Dvorak-but now that heart-rending Lied stuck in her skull and sapped her strength.”

— Fabienne-Claire Nothomb

“That's why I'm so passionate about making music for movies because you dive in and find the best ideas to bring tolife a collective piece of art ... [Composing] is not a job for me. And that explains why I never stop. Even though it's tough on your body and your brain and the sacrifices you have to make, what can I do? I'm passionate about it so I never stop.”

— Alexandre Desplat

“It's very hard to understand what's happening in someone's brain and what goes into their experience and their death, and the music has to say a lot.”

— Alexandre Desplat

“Forget all the equipment, forget the music, at the end of the day it's just literally frequencies and their effects on your brain. That's what's everyone's essentially after.”

— Aphex Twin

“Music is indivisible. The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved to a state of unity in which one thinks with the heart and feels with the brain.”

— George Szell

“You know I really don't like to think about the fact that I'm a girl in relation to the music industry. I was just a kid who wrote down thoughts to organize her brain and that turned into music, like any other writer or musician ... so, I happen to be a girl. I don't consider that part of it really.. It may disappoint some feminists out there that I don't want to harp on women and men being equal.”

— Lacey Mosley

“This subject brings me to that vilest offspring of the herd mind
the odious militia. The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls below my contempt; he received his great brain by mistake
the spinal cord would have been amply sufficient. This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism
how intensely I despise them! War is low and despicable, and I had rather be smitten to shreds than participate in such doings.”

— Albert Einstein

“A dissection of music perception and creation that starts slowly and inexorably builds to a grand finish. I loved reading that listening to music coordinates more disparate parts of the brain than almost anything else
and playing music uses even more! Despite illuminating a lot of what goes on this book doesn't "spoil" enjoyment- it only deepens the beautiful mystery that is music.”

— David Byrne

“Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.”

— Adam Gopnik

“The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.”

— Oliver Sacks

“Although I think it is wonderful to have the whole world of music available in something that small and to have it conveyed with such fidelity almost straight into the brain, I think the technology is also a danger.”

— Oliver Sacks

“It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices; they create music.”

— Oliver Sacks

“Making music is like a form of religion for me, because it soothes your heart and increases the pleasure of your brain. Most of all, it's very enjoyable to express something that you can only hear and not see, which is not bad.”

— Ornette Coleman

“When did "sentimental" become a pejorative barb? I do not at all share the notion that a piece of music, or a poem, or a film that bypasses the brain and aims straight for the heart ... should automatically be heaped with scorn. I think it is symptomatic of a sad and dangerous impoverishment of spirit.”

— Bill Richardson

“Some wise being organized my system, and gave me my capacity, put into my heart and brain something that delights, charms, and fills me with rapture at the sound of sweet music.”

— Brigham Young

“Sometimes I observe with curiosity that uninterrupted activity which, independent of the subject of any conversation I may be carrying on, continues its course in that department of my brain that is devoted to music.”

— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

“Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.”

— William Shakespeare