In the reading of “Living with Music”, Ralph speaks of the importance music has in someone’s life. His first experience with music recalls the deafening noises he made with the brass horn and he gave up on playing it at a young age. It was later in life where the music came into his life when an up room neighbor would continuously sing and have her notes off. To get back at her annoyance, he would have a speaker and blast music to drown out her music. It was when he moved away to another apartment where he realized that he missed the music he heard from her. He realized that music is a remembrance of one’s past and aspirations in life. He realized that music helped get him through his frustrations of not being able to write. Before he saw it as nothing more than just chaos and nosiness.

Oliver Sack’s “A Bolt from the Blue” defines music and identity in a more neurological sense, exploring a range of psychological ailments and their connection to music. He provides severe cases of accidents/diseases in which changes in the brain lead to a sudden abnormal craving for music. The reason for the musicophilia is due to the degeneration of the front part of the brain. This is also called Frontotemporal lobar degeneration which exhibits loss of grey matter in the brain. A theory that was debunked was that degeneration makes patients sometimes develop an emergence of musical talent or passions because they lose the powers of abstraction and language. Another idea was that near-death experiences have a neurological basis of their own that profoundly alters one’s consciousness itself. The consumption of their near-death might have led to a conversion that changed their orientation of life. Just like that woman with the tumor who after the surgery went from a conservative person to a more caring person, even stated by herself that she changed her outlook on life to which she cherishes every minute.

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