The Heart is a Drum Machine

[2010] buy

What is music? It’s a simple question, but it leads director Christopher Pomerenke in many complicated artistic and scientific directions in his documentary The Heart Is a Drum Machine.

It’s an expansive, inviting film, which embraces everything from Voyager’s Golden Record and aboriginal funeral chants to brain-music therapy and pop music branding. Along the way, Pomerenke’s mostly unassuming movie is enhanced by interviews with artists, scientists and others deeply invested in charting the pathways of the heart, the prenatal vibration that establishes our musical universe, as well as the mind that modifies those vibrations into meaning.

[…]

Dr. Orli Peter’s brain-music therapy is equally interesting. Converting EEGs to musical sounds, Peter and others have found that everyone not only makes their own brain music, but that they all possess unique signatures, like fingerprints. And they work fabulously in therapeutic capacities: Music that thumps at 60 beats per minute, roughly a heartbeat a second, tends to enhance cognitive skills, while music with higher BPM rates releases temporary antidepressant effects. (wired.com review)

Posted in film on October 18th, 2010 by fresh good minimal | 0 Comments