Music Psychology Quotes

Music seems hard-wired into our very being. It moves us, stirs us to action, sets us in motion, sticks in our memories and minds.

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

There's a degree to which music bypasses our rational brain and accesses our emotional core in a way that's really visceral and allows you to make a strong impression on people without necessary delivering information.

What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I'm interested in, the thing I'm most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.

I think psychology still has a sway over everything we do, but music, in and of itself, is the therapy.

Music stops you from thinking.

The nature of music is mysterious and so much so that it generates strong emotions within us. It moves along passages that reach the most intimate areas of our psyche without being tried by prejudices or influences of any kind.

The process of repeating a rhythm while it gently evolves has an incredible effect on the brain, or on mine anyway.

One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.

My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that's the right song to not fight the lyric.

I learned that there's no reason why people decide they like music when they do.

I am interested in the study of music and the discipline of music and the experience of music and music as a esoteric mechanism to continue my real intentions.

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

There is no such thing as happy music.

For some reason, the evolutionists have not come up with an evolution-based explanation for why human beings react so powerfully to music. But surely they will.

It was at Juilliard that I realized that being a singer encompasses so many things that I am interested in. Literature, languages, physics, history, art. You really get to explore so many things.

Something about music urges us to engage with its larger context, beyond the piece of plastic it came on-it seems to be part of our genetic makeup that we can be so deeply moved by this art form. Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing.

Music remains the most strange of the materials because we don't understand what happens when music moves you.

A riff can take on the aspect of a chorus in a listener's psyche.

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.

The power of sound to put an audience in a certain psychological state is vastly undervalued. And the more you know about music and harmony, the more you can do with that.

Anxiety projection can and does occur - in myth, in music, in fiction, and in the doctor's office too. That doesn't make it the basis of everything.

It always sounds more right to me when it's detuned. When it's right in tune, it's like there's something slightly off. But at the end of the day, it's all about frequencies and what they do to you. That's the real core.