The Science of Opera

Interested in opera and in neuroscience?  You’ll be fascinated by this article merging the two:  Frank Rose’s “Music, Science and Healing Intersect in an A.I. Opera” (The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/arts/music/artificial-intelligence-opera.html).

A taste: “’We’ve started to understand that cognition — that is, the working of the mind — exists far outside our head,’ [Alex Khalil, a former U.C. San Diego researcher who now teaches ethnomusicology at University College Cork in Ireland], said. “We used to imagine that the brain is a processor and that cognition happened there. But actually, we think our minds extend throughout our bodies and beyond our bodies into the world.” With music, he continued, these extended minds can lock onto rhythms, and through the rhythms onto other minds, and then onto yet more. As for the spaces where that happens, Khalil said, ‘You can start to think of them as healing places.’”