A composer with synesthesia sees specific colors when he hears music in different musical keys: G minor, for instance, is not just “yellow” but “ocher” D minor is “like flint, graphite” and F minor is “earthy, ashy.” A virtuosic pianist who for many years bizarrely lost the use of his right hand, finds at the age of 36 that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand have started to curl uncontrollably under his palm when he plays.ĭr. A musical savant with a “phonographic” memory learns the melodies to hundreds of operas, as well as what every instrument plays and what every voice sings. A composer of atonal music starts having musical hallucinations that are “tonal” and “corny”: irritating Christmas songs and lullabies that play endlessly in his head. Sacks focuses on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers - “musical misalignments” that affect their professional and daily lives. Throughout the case studies Oliver Sacks intervenes and provides commentary and explanation for each case.In books like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” the physician Oliver Sacks has given us some compelling and deeply moving portraits of patients in predicaments so odd, so vexing, so metaphysically curious that they read like something out of a tale by Borges or Calvino. He died but was resusscitated and 3 weeks later developed an insatiable desire to hear, play and compose piano music - we watch his first public performance of his first symphony. Tony Cicoria, a 42-year-old orthopaedic surgeon was struck by lightening while speaking on the phone during a storm. Anne Barker can't recognise any musical patterns at all, she has the musical equivalent of colour blindness, a condition called amusia. Yentob has an MRI scan while listening to different types of music to see how his brain activity alters. Next we meet Derek Paravicini, a young blind man with severe autism who is also a musical savante. Archive footage is shown from the documentary 'Awakenings' and he describes how the people he worked with who had sleepy sickness were brought back to life not just when given el dopa but also when hearing music. Sacks also talks about his own family and how important music was to them. Matt Giordano has severe Tourette's and uses drumming to ease his ticks. Alan Yentob goes to meet some of the people who feature in Sacks' work.
Sacks' research has been into how people who have extraordinary medical conditions use music to help them. This documentary follows up on ideas put forward in Oliver Sacks' latest book 'Musicophilia'.
0 kommentar(er)
