"This moving, incisive book is a great reminder of music's power as a universal connector." —Kirkus ReviewsAn Alzheimer's patient who can't find the bathroom can still sing a hymn she learned in 1963. Infants two days old already prefer consonant intervals to dissonant ones, before culture has had a chance to teach them anything. Every culture we have ever found makes music, independently, without being taught.
We call it entertainment.
Composer and synesthete Ron K. Miller thinks that is the wrong category. Music is a stimulus, like heat, pain, and the aroma of food. It does measurable things to bodies. It competes with pain for some of the same limited internal resources: attention, reward, memory, prediction, autonomic state. It reaches places conversation cannot find and medication cannot reliably produce.
Miller sees music. Literally, not poetically. Synesthesia gave him a fuller sensory picture of sound and, as he is careful to say, no better understanding of it.
Across twenty-nine chapters, RESONANCE moves through neuroscience, acoustic physics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of perception. It goes to a hospital room where a woman who has lost her words learns to sing them back. It goes to a rainforest where a dissonant chord bothers nobody, and to a house in Arkansas where a mostly nonverbal boy with Down syndrome hears a song and his father watches the message land.
This is a work of inquiry rather than dogma. Miller is explicit about where the evidence leads and where it runs out, and he tells you which is which.
Music has been filed under entertainment for a very long time. It belongs on a better shelf.
Praise for RESONANCE"An emotional and informative ode to the sonic connections we form throughout our lives." —Kirkus Reviews
"The result is a fascinating mix of scientific theory, musical analysis, and personal history that never feels dry or didactic." —Kirkus Reviews