Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing

"A fascinating thesis and a timely synthesis. . . . Becker urges the reader to view certain arcane cultural rituals as being in the mainstream of spiritual development and argues that the resulting trance-like states may relate to the basic fabric of emotions and consciousness, which are our ancestral, animalian heritage. This is both a risky and courageous undertaking that challenges both cultural and neuroscientific studies."
―Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

In Deep Listeners, Judith Becker brings together scientific and cultural approaches to the study of music and emotion, and music and trancing. Becker claims that persons who experience deep emotions when listening to music are akin to those who trance within the context of religious rituals. Using new discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and biology, Deep Listeners outlines an emotion-based theory of trance using examples from Southeast Asian and American musics. A companion CD includes excerpts from several of the musical genres under discussion, and a 16-page color insert presents vivid documentation of the global experience of "deep listening."

Judith Becker is Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music, University of Michigan, where she directs the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the University Gamelan. Her field of expertise is the music of Southeast Asia, and she has conducted research in Burma, Indonesia, North India, and Sri Lanka. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.