Power of Sound : How to Manage Your Personal Soundscape for a Vital, Productive, and Healthy Life

Discover firsthand in this book/CD set the powerful effects sound has on you and learn to customize your own soundscape for a better quality of life.

• Sound pioneer Joshua Leeds shows how to use music to reduce stress, enhance learning, improve performance, and address conditions as diverse as dyslexia and depression.

• Includes accompanying CD featuring musical examples designed to induce specific mental states such as relaxation, receptivity, concentration, and creativity.

• Includes detailed guides for musicians and healthcare professionals

What we hear--and how we process it--has a far greater impact on our daily living than we realize. From the womb to the moment we die we are inescapably surrounded by sound, and what we hear can either energize or deplete our nervous systems. It is no exaggeration to say that what goes into our ears can harm us or heal us.

In The Power of Sound Joshua Leeds explores the importance of healthy auditory function. He investigates how noise- or stress-induced auditory dysfunction may result in difficulties in learning, communication, and social interactions, and he explains new techniques designed to invigorate auditory skills. The accompanying CD of psychoacoustically refined classical music provides immediate examples of the benefits of music explained in the book. Readers can experience the effects of a variety of sounds and begin the life-enhancing design of their own soundscapes.

Joshua Leeds is a sound researcher, educator, and music producer with 40 hours of specialized soundtracks used in clinics, classrooms, and animal care facilities worldwide. He specializes in the field of psychoacoustics, the study of the effect of music and sound on the human nervous system, and bioacoustics, how human sound affects other living beings. The author of Through a Dog’s Ear and Sonic Alchemy, he lives in southern Oregon.