Hampshire College

Judith Becker, author of Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion and Trancing and professor emeritus of ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan, spoke at Hampshire College on February 11.

Dr. Becker’s talk—titled “Rapture: Religious Ecstatics and Deep Listeners”— focused on her research that merges cognitive science with music, in this case examining the physiological relationship between religious ecstatics and deep listeners.

The lecture was sponsored by the Culture, Brain, and Development (CBD) program and is part of an Art on the Brain lecture series.

In Deep Listeners, Professor Becker proposes that there may be a physiological relationship between religious ecstatics and secular "deep listeners." She defines deep listeners as those who may feel chills or goosebumps, or who may cry, when listening to music they find moving. She proposes that both religious ecstatics and deep listeners experience strong, deep brain emotional responses when listening to music they find deeply moving.

Deep Listeners received the Alan Merriam award from the Society for Ethnomusicology for the best book in ethnomusicology published in 2004.

An authority on Indonesian music, Becker was director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and cofounder and director of the Center for World Performance Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of numerous articles and books.

Through exploring the common ground between the humanistic/cultural/anthropological and the scientific/cognitive/psychological, Becker’s research focuses on the relationships between music, emotion, and ecstasy in institutionalized religious contexts and in secular contexts.

For further information, please contact Paula Harmon at pmhNS@hampshire.edu.