Braintuning Resources
Would you like to know more about the scientific research on music, mind, and body?
- Start with Tune Your Brain, the book, which is documented with extensive footnotes that gather what might be one of the most extensive cross-disciplinary collections of published studies about music in the mind and body.
- Explore the sites below for breaking news and alternate perspectives.
- Check out The Braintuning Blog.
- Contact Elizabeth Miles by sending an e-mail to ElizabethMiles@tuneyourbrain.com.
| MuSICA Research Database | The Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California Irvine has compiled a searchable database collecting abstracts of published research about music and the brain and body from 1992 to 2001. A great first stop, though no longer current. |
| The University of Miami School of Music Research Resources | Links to music research resources. |
| American Music Conference | A rich resource for exploring music's positive effects, sponsored by music manufacturers. Teachers, students, and parents can stop by for friendly research info and ideas for action and advocacy. |
| MIND is the organization administering research by Dr. Gordon Shaw, the University of California physicist involved in discoveries that listening to Mozart can temporarily boost IQ and studying music can help improve math skills. | |
| American Music Therapy Association | The professional organization that established music's powerful role in human health and well-being is the country's authoritative voice on music-based interventions. |
| National Association for Music Education | Connect with the educators committed to helping our children discover music every day. |
| The Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation | Richard Dreyfus starred in the film about the transcendent power of a high school band; eminent film composer Michael Kamen scored it. Both joined together to form a foundation dedicated to donating musical instruments to under-resourced schools. |
| The Society for Ethnomusicology | Your jumping-off point for exploring the role of music in people's lives, throughout history and all around the world |
| The UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive | This leading music archive at Elizabeth's alma mater houses sound-recordings and music-related videotapes, films, photographs, slides, and printed materials from all around the world. |
| Andante | An informational and educational resource for classical music and opera including a worldwide concert calendar, magazine, reference center, artist and composer profiles, directories, and classical music Web links. |
| NPR's All Songs Considered | Discover the sources for the eclectic music "buttons" featured on National Public Radio's daily news program All Things Considered. Audio clips, artist information, interviews, links to related sites—a great way to discover new sounds and the people behind them. |
| Remo's Health Rhythms | Covers the beat on group drumming for health and well-being. Includes research and references on drumming's mind-body effects. |
Did You Know? Mind-Body-Music Factoids
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The Greeks used music to cure hangovers
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When the electrical impulses produced by the brain while thinking are played through a computer model, they make music.
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In Uganda, you spend your wedding night with a musician stationed outside your door singing sexual instructions.
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Olympic Gold medal track star Michael Johnson preps for the 400-meter race with jazz, but fires up for the 200-meter dash with gangsta rap.
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Music has cured kings of depression and was thought to stop the plague.
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Listening to half an hour of soft music is like taking 10 mg of Valium.
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Your singing sounds best in the shower because the tiles reflect the sound.
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The Dalai Lama has recommended music as an agent of world peace in the new millennium.
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People rate musical thrills higher than sex.
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In Wisconsin, they play music to cows to make them give more milk.
Music can:
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Help rats run faster mazes and humans run faster treadmills; boost IQ; and catapult second-graders’ math scores to sixth grade level
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Make strong men weak and weak men strong, as measured by an electromyograph
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Increase levels of human growth hormone
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Conjure up memories in people who don’t even remember who they are
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Grow your corpus callosum
“Music, to me, was—is—representative of everything I like most in life.”
- President Bill Clinton, 1994
