Tuesday12 Jun 06:19 PM
Out of Ourselves: Spiritual Music, David Byrne, Daniel Levitin
Perched at the collision of yoga with popular culture, Souljerky has spent considerable time contemplating music and spirit and culture. So when David Byrne and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) broached the topic, we had to chime in.
Unfortunately, they're only pussyfooting. They never really dive in completely. In the Vedas, however, all of life and its worlds are sound, vibrating forth from the sacred wellspring of OM. But experiencing phenomena "outside of ourselves" is totally a step in the right direction.
DANIEL LEVITIN: So you're interested in trance states.
DAVID BYRNE: Yeah, I am. I'm interested for a few reasons. One, because there's a lot of popular secular music that I think borrows from sacred music. And because of the way it generates a kind of trance state or a transcendent state in the listener.
DANIEL LEVITIN: Yeah.
DAVID BYRNE: So you see through the crack in the door or whatever—you can see that wow, this music is taking me to a place that generates all those kind of vaguely spiritual feelings—like I've gone outside myself, or I had an out-of-body experience, all these kind of things. And music is often talked about in these spiritual terms. So I feel that there's something going on here. Obviously, these musical experiences are touching another part of the brain that's linked to a kind of spiritual or religious experience. Probably because it takes us out of ourselves in that kind of sense, for want of some better term.
DANIEL LEVITIN: I think that's a perfect description of it: out of ourselves.
DAVID BYRNE: And it's a little bit of ego loss, which, like in Eastern philosophy, is a kind of pleasurable, transcendental experience. You become one with all these other people around you.
DANIEL LEVITIN: Yeah.
DAVID BYRNE: So it's like all of a sudden you're part of the hive; it's this wonderful feeling.
DANIEL LEVITIN: Right, and this isn't unique to music. There are other things that will get you there, chanting, breathing, etc.
DAVID BYRNE: Yes.
DANIEL LEVITIN: And I think what they all have in common—you nailed it when you talked about being out of yourself—is the sense that your thoughts are not under your conscious control, that something else is guiding them, though you're still aware of them and can bear witness to them.
That's what dreams are, in a sense. And why music or rhythm is able to induce this state is a mystery. Nobody knows. We do know a little bit, neurologically, about what's happening. We know there's a suppression of frontal-lobe activity. We can measure changes in alpha waves and gamma waves and things like this. But those are really descriptions, not explanations.
Link. Or start at the beginning.
Souljerky is incubating new audio projects and renovating some old ones, e.g. the Sri Ganesha Tea Stall Bhajan Radio (Standard | Morning). The line between the secular and sacred will be further mined and exploited, and the bounty thusly shared. Stay tuned.
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