Songs For Beginners: An Introduction

Hello there. Welcome to the younger (and slightly better researched) sister blog to Maybe Dancing Will Help. Through my blogging on Dancing, I've realised there are three main areas that keep piquing my interest: music, writing and psychology. I thought it might be fun to start a new blog, a research project of sorts, where I will focus exclusively on trying to fuse all three together.

I have always been interested in music but what I have realised is that I am not so much interested in it from a technical perspective (a lack of interest that is, unfortunately, accompanied by a lack of ability): I am interested in it from a psychological perspective. Why and how does music work? More specifically, why does it make us feel the way we feel? Although obviously some technical and theoretical understanding of music will help things along a bit.

There are some terrific (and very accessible) books already published on the inter-relationship between music and the mind, including This is Your Brain on Music (Daniel Levitin), Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks) and The Brain that Changes Itself (Norman Doidge) and these are going to be my launchpad.

Each post will be an essay on a song. I am still deciding what the first one will be and no doubt there will be long breaks between posts but I want to put my training wheels on and get this thing rolling. So here we go with Songs for Beginners...