Discover the impact of music on your health
Discover the ancient relationship between music and medicine. Learn how the brain works when you listen and make music, the relationship between rhythm, movement, and health, between pleasure, emotion, and music, and the many ways in which music improves your health, slows down the aging process, increases your creativity and produces happiness and a sense of purpose in life.
In this groundbreaking union of art and science, soprano, musicologist, and physician Patricia Caicedo explores the connection between music—its performance, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it—and health.
Drawing on the latest research and musical examples, Caicedo reveals:
- How the brain works when you listen to and make music.
- The relationship between rhythm, movement, and health.
- The relationship between pleasure, emotion, and music.
- How music has been a crucial element of the human experience since the beginning of the species and how it is fundamental for maintaining communities.
- The importance of music in pain and death.
- How music increases your creativity and produces happiness and a sense of purpose in life.
We are what we listen to: the impact of music on individual health will attract readers of Oliver Sacks and David Byrne, as it is an unprecedented, transdisciplinary investigation that contextualizes the music and its effects on historical, scientific, and social levels. It is an essential book for music lovers and everybody seeking to improve their mental and physical health.
Learn the connection between music and health
Read the review published in Music Therapy Perspectives, the American Music Therapy Association journal.
READ THE PROLOGUE AND THE PRELUDE
REVIEWS
“What is the soundtrack of your life? Which music gives you goosebumps? How can a song, like Proust’s proverbial madelaine dipped in lime-blossom tea, effortlessly and involuntarily, bring back a hundred memories? Have you thought about which music attracts you and why? Do you lose yourself in music or listen to it with a conscious desire to understand it? Or both, depending on circumstances, on the moment in time? How is it that music seems to be able to express our deepest emotions without need for words? Can we ever really know how music works its magic? These are just some of the questions posed by the singer and musicologist Patricia Caicedo in her new book Somos lo que escuchamos.”
“This thoroughly researched book is the result of a lifetime of careful study and wide experience. It contains revelations on virtually every page concerning the therapeutic benefits of music. ”
“As President of the International Music Council (founded by UNESCO in 1949), I have dedicated myself to safeguarding every individual’s fundamental right to access music, by explaining its values.
I can’t think of better help in this quest than with the very inspirational book written by Patricia Caicedo. It gives us confirmation on the many benefits we have felt that music has given us but without understanding how, something the reader wants to increasingly explore as they read on. ”
MEET THE AUTHOR
Patricia Caicedo is a soprano, a musicologist and a physician. Her scholarship and performances center on Latin American and Iberian art song. She has released eleven albums and published numerous scholarly editions of scores and books, including The Latin American Art Song: Sounds of the Imagined Nations, the go-to history on its subject.
She is also an avid performer of these works, having performed at important halls in Europe and the Americas in addition to founding and directing the Barcelona Festival of Song, which focuses on the performance and study of Latin American and Iberian art songs in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese.
She is the host of the podcast, Latin American and Iberian Art Song, in which she interviews composers and leading experts from across the world.
Patricia holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a Medical Doctor’s degree from the Escuela Colombiana de Medicina. She is an Executive Board Member of the International Music Council a UNESCO partner organization.