Peabody alumna Elizabeth Margulis is a Professor of music and Director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University. Her first book for general audiences is Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams.
Transcript
Judith: My guest on Book Notes this month is Professor of Music and Director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University, Elizabeth Margulis. And she is local in the sense that she got her Bachelor of Music from the Peabody Conservatory at the Johns Hopkins University. So welcome back to Baltimore, Elizabeth, even if it is virtually.
Elizabeth: Thank you so much. It's lovely to be here.
Judith: It's very exciting to have come across your book, Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams. And if somebody were to tune into WBJC for the very first time, and they heard, let's say, Pachelbel's Canon, and they'd never heard it in their life before—with your being a music cognition researcher, what would be going on in their minds at that time?
Elizabeth: Well, one of the things we're discovering is a lot of the time when people are listening, they may not know that they're paying attention to the music. It may feel like their mind has wandered. In the case of maybe listening to Pachelbel's Canon in D, maybe there's some sense of procession or formal occasion, right? They kind of get lost in some kind of mind wandering. And what our research is finding is that music is really providing cues for these kinds of experiences in ways people might not be fully aware.
Judith: Anyone who has tried to meditate is only too aware that our minds are geared to wander off on different paths and imaginings and patterns. What sets aside the imagining that comes with music specifically?
Elizabeth: A couple of things. One is that when people's minds drift and they find themselves somewhere else entirely while listening, we've used machine learning to look at free response descriptions people give of these experiences and found this surprising way that they tend to be shared across listeners. That's one.
And then another one is that if you think about the personal memories from your own life that music can evoke, these are often really rich in sensory detail and immersiveness. It feels like you're really reliving something rather than merely recollecting it.
Judith: I'm wondering what you are hoping that readers will get from your book. How does this idea of daydreaming in the context of music actually impact somebody's life?
Elizabeth: We tend to discount these experiences, especially in the context of a larger attentional crisis. We kind of feel like, "Why can't we just pay attention to the sound?" And one of the things the book is trying to do is get people really curious about the way that these are actually fundamentally musical and consequential experiences that can illuminate things about ourselves, how our mind works, as well as our relationship with others. The book also advocates for talking about and sharing these experiences, which I've found really rewarding with my own parents and with my teenage children.
Judith: It's an intriguing book and concept, something certainly that had not occurred to me before. This is Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams. And you can find out more about this on Elizabeth's website, which is elizabethmargulis.com. And it's been such a pleasure to talk to you about this. Thank you for really delving into such a fascinating area.
Elizabeth: Well, thank you so much. It's been great to be back in Baltimore.
