Rethinking "trance" -- Deep listeners -- Habitus of listening -- Trancing selves -- Being-in-the-world : culture and biology -- Magic through emotion : toward a theory of trance consciousness -- Postscript : trancing, deep listening, and human evolution.

The Illuminated Leader transforms people, cultures, organizations, and even nations. The illuminated leader models leadership behaviors and traits designed to enlighten others. The behaviors and traits of the illuminated leader include: Courage - they make the right decision even when the decision is unpopular with others. Transformation - they are visionary and fully understand the need for change and innovation. Communication - they effectively practice the art of dialogue and deep listening. Character - they exhibit traits such as passion, exuberance, creativity and harmony. Inspiration - they bring out the very best in others because they see their value and potential. Service - they actively and unselfishly serve the needs of others. Relationships - they network continuously understanding the importance of forming friendships with others.

Music as a narrative drama is an intriguing idea, which has captured explicit music theoretical attention since the nineteenth century. Investigations into narrative characters or personae has evolved into a sub-field—musical agency. In this book, Palfy contends that music has the potential to engage us in social processes and that those processes can be experienced as a social interaction with a musical agent. She explores the overlap between the psychological processes in which we participate in order to understand and engage with people, and those we engage in when we listen to music. Thinking of musical agency as a form of social process is quite different from existing theoretical frameworks for agency. It implies that we come to musical analysis by way of intuition—that our ideas are already partially formed based on our experience of the piece (and what it makes us feel or how it makes us sense it as any other) when we choose to analyze and interpret it. Palfy’s focus on social processes is a very effective way to pinpoint when and why it is that our attention is captured and engaged by musical agents.

In what ways does listening to music shape everyday perception? Is music particularly effective in promoting shifts in consciousness? Is there any difference perceptually between contemplating one's surroundings and experiencing a work of art? Everyday Music Listening is the first book to focus in depth on the detailed nature of music listening episodes as lived mental experiences. Ruth Herbert uses new empirical data to explore the psychological processes involved in everyday music listening scenarios, charting interactions between music, perceiver and environment in a diverse range of real-world contexts. Findings are integrated with insights from a broad range of literature, including consciousness studies and research into altered states of consciousness, as well as ideas from ethology and evolutionary psychology, suggesting that a psychobiological capacity for trancing is linked to the origins of making and receiving of art. The term 'trance' is not generally associated with music listening outside ethnomusicological studies of strong experiences, yet 'hypnotic-like' involvements in daily life have long been recognized by hypnotherapy researchers. The author argues that multiply distributed attention - prevalent in much contemporary listening- does not necessarily indicate superficial engagement. Music emerges as a particularly effective mediator of experience. Absorption and dissociation, as manifestations of trancing, are self-regulatory processes, often operating at the level of unconscious awareness, that support individuals' perceptions of psychological health. This fascinating study brings together research and theory from a wide range of fields to provide a new framework for understanding the phenomenology of music listening in a way that will appeal to both specialist academic audiences and a broad general readership.

Cast your mind back to the last time a sound affected you. Perhaps birdsong that set a positive tone for your day, a child's laughter that lifted your mood or a favourite song that raised your energy. Sound has the power to make our spirits soar but how does it do this? The aim of this book is to demystify this intriguing subject, exploring how and why we respond to sound in the way we do, and reminding us that the innate knowledge for using sound to bolster our everyday lives already lies within us. After an insightful introduction about why the subject of Sound Healing is so worth delving into, each chapter then addresses a key question: What is sound and how do we hear it? including the difference between sound and music, and scientific explanations of factors such as sound waves, frequency, pitch, volume and the wonders of the human hearing mechanism. How does sound healing work? How did our ancestors use sound for health and well-being? Who is sound healing for and what are its many benefits? What does it involve? including an exploration of the different instruments that this can entail. How can we bring sound healing into our daily lives? And, finally, can sound work transform our consciousness? As such, this book brings readers on an exploratory journey through the world of sound healing, uncovering its immense therapeutic power, and showing readers how to tap into this power for the purposes of personal transformation, so that we can all lead more authentic, connected, contented lives.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence, linguistics, and computer science and is concerned with the generation, recognition, and understanding of human languages, both written and spoken. NLP systems examine the grammatical structure of sentences as well as the specific meanings of words, and then they utilize algorithms to extract meaning and produce results. Machine Learning and Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing aims at providing a review of current Neural Network techniques in the NLP field, in particular about Conversational Agents (chatbots), Text-to-Speech, management of non-literal content – like emotions, but also satirical expressions – and applications in the healthcare field. NLP has the potential to be a disruptive technology in various healthcare fields, but so far little attention has been devoted to that goal. This book aims at providing some examples of NLP techniques that can, for example, restore speech, detect Parkinson’s disease, or help psychotherapists. This book is intended for a wide audience. Beginners will find useful chapters providing a general introduction to NLP techniques, while experienced professionals will appreciate the chapters about advanced management of emotion, empathy, and non-literal content.

Enduring lessons from the desert soundscapes that shaped the Christian monastic tradition For the hermits and communal monks of antiquity, the desert was a place to flee the cacophony of ordinary life in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God. But these monks discovered something surprising in their harsh desert surroundings: far from empty and silent, the desert is richly reverberant. Sonorous Desert shares the stories and sayings of these ancient spiritual seekers, tracing how the ambient sounds of wind, thunder, water, and animals shaped the emergence and development of early Christian monasticism. Kim Haines-Eitzen draws on ancient monastic texts from Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine to explore how noise offered desert monks an opportunity to cultivate inner quietude, and shows how the desert quests of ancient monastics offer profound lessons for us about what it means to search for silence. Drawing on her own experiences making field recordings in the deserts of North America and Israel, she reveals how mountains, canyons, caves, rocky escarpments, and lush oases are deeply resonant places. Haines-Eitzen discusses how the desert is a place of paradoxes, both silent and noisy, pulling us toward contemplative isolation yet giving rise to vibrant collectives of fellow seekers. Accompanied by Haines-Eitzen’s evocative audio recordings of desert environments, Sonorous Desert reveals how desert sounds taught ancient monks about solitude, silence, and the life of community, and how they can help us understand ourselves if we slow down and listen.

Music is a tremendously powerful channel through which people develop their personal and social identities. Music is used to communicate emotions, thoughts, political statements, social relationships, and physical expressions. But, just as language can mediate the construction and negotiation of developing identities, so music can also be a means of communication through which aspects of people's identities are constructed. Music can have a profound influence on our developing sense of identity, our values, and our beliefs, be it from rock music, classical music, or jazz. Musical identities (MacDonald, Hargreaves and Miell, 2002) was unique in being in being one of the first books to explore this fascinating topic. This new book documents the remarkable expansion and growth in the study of musical identities since the publication of the earlier work. The editors identify three main features of current psychological approaches to musical identities, which concern their definition, development, and the identification of individual differences, as well as four main real-life contexts in which musical identities have been investigated, namely in music and musical institutions; specific geographical communities; education; and in health and well-being. This conceptual framework provides the rationale for the structure of the Handbook. The book is divided into seven main sections. The first, 'Sociological, discursive and narrative approaches', includes several general theoretical accounts of musical identities from this perspective, as well as some more specific investigations. The second and third main sections deal in depth with two of the three psychological topics described above, namely the development of and individual differences in musical identities. The fourth, fifth and sixth main sections pursue three of the real-life contexts identified above, namely 'Musical institutions and practitioners', 'Education', and 'Health and well-being'. The seventh and final main section of the Handbook - 'Case studies' - includes chapters which look at particular musical identities in specific times, places, or contexts. The multidisciplinary range and breadth of the Handbook's contents reflect the rapid changes that are taking place in music, in digital technology, and in their role in society as a whole, such that the study of musical identity is likely to proliferate even further in the future.

The new book of essays by poet and publicist Elia Pekica Pagon titled The Wisdom of Aramis talks about real-life treasures as opposed to false ones. It emphasizes all that really matters in life through simple truths from our everyday lives. The Wisdom of Aramis provides us with profound messages drawn from the lessons we can learn from our best friends and most devoted companions, our furry angels. It is a book dedicated to the author’s beloved pug, Aramis Giving of Good, who will always stay in her heart and who will fill the hearts of the readers with such a great sentiment of love, peace, tolerance, and compassion. The book talks about the joy of unconditional love, about deep compassion and inner peace, about the importance of acceptance and sincere kindness, about the magic of patience and miraculous coincidences. The book gives us the chance to discover a better world and a better version of ourselves through our self-awareness through which we can truly get to know ourselves, find our place in this world and beyond, and live in perfect harmony with nature and the entire universe. There is so much to learn from our pets. Everything we love about them is what we miss most in our lives, and that is true friendship—a pair of sincere eyes, a face without a social mask, someone to be here for us when no one else is, someone to understand us and love us unconditionally. We enjoy their company because they help us be who we really are, and they teach us how to enjoy our lives and this world in such a lovely way. Our beloved companions help us find our inner peace, and that’s exactly how we can establish universal peace—by bringing peace into our lives.

Aleppo is regarded as one of the historical centres of an urban Arab art music tradition known as 'tarab'. During the war that followed Syria's 2011 political uprisings, vast parts of the city were destroyed. This Element explores how 'tarab' lives on in new contexts. It does so through a focus on the work of Hello Psychaleppo, one of Aleppo's displaced musicians and the pioneer of 'electro-tarab', an eclectic style of urban electronic dance music that is conceived as a homage to Aleppo's musical legacy. Whether local religious chants, Palestinian poetry, or the image of a yellow man, electro-tarab includes an inventory of audio, visual and literary samples. These samples help conceptualise the role music has played during the Syrian war; they offer insights into Aleppo's musical and diasporic afterlife; and they illuminate some of the socio-aesthetic parameters that characterise contemporary Arab electronic music.