CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS · 2026
An exploration of the human mind
through the music it makes.
THE SCIENCE OF MUSIC.
THE ART OF MEDICINE.
THE VOLUME
Music moves through the brain, the body, and the stories we tell about ourselves.
This interdisciplinary volume brings physicians, psychologists, neuroscientists, and musicians into conversation. It explores how the brain perceives and creates music, how illness changes artistic expression, and how the arts can become part of clinical care.
From auditory-motor interactions and the genetics of musicality to epilepsy, dementia, poetry, and narrative medicine, the chapters connect biological inquiry with lived experience. Medical portraits of Mozart, Beethoven, the Schumanns, Ravel, Shostakovich, Smetana, and the masters of jazz illuminate the lives behind the music.
Accompanying studio recordings by the volume editors carry the inquiry from the written page into sound.
THE LISTENING ROOM
Franz Schubert
Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D.960
Written in the final year of Schubert’s life, this sonata offers a space for sustained attention. Its long melodic lines, interruptions, and returns invite us to hear memory and change within musical form.
Listen as you explore, or stay with the music. David H. Porter, piano. This listening selection is separate from the volume editors’ accompanying recordings.
FOUR MOVEMENTS · 36 MINUTES
THE EDITORS
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
MD, FAES, FACNS
Director of Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology | Boston Children’s HospitalWilliam G. Lennox Chair and Professor of Neurology | Harvard Medical SchoolMember | Music and Health Institute, Berklee College of Music
Harvard Medical School · Boston Children’s Hospital
Neurologist, researcher, and musician. William G. Lennox Chair and Professor of Neurology.
Visit Phillip L. Pearl’s websiteMCGILL UNIVERSITY
MD, CM
Neurology Resident Physician | McGill University Health Centre (MUHC)MSc Candidate, Integrated Program in Neuroscience | McGill University, Montreal Neurological Institute (The Neuro)
McGill University · University of California, Berkeley
UniversityNeurology resident physician, neuroscience MSc candidate, classical pianist, and writer.
Visit Saman Arfaie’s website
INSIDE THE BOOK
From the neural foundations of creativity
to music at the bedside.
PART I
PART II
PART III
PART IV
PART V
PART VI
CONTRIBUTORS
Meet the clinicians, scientists, musicians, and scholars behind the volume.
THE PHYSICIAN–MUSICIAN
Director of Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology, Boston Children’s Hospital
William G. Lennox Chair and Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School
MD, FAES, FACNS · Pianist & conservatory-trained percussionist
Music has remained a second professional life alongside Professor Pearl’s work in child neurology. He attended the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, where his major was percussion, and performs on jazz piano, vibraphone, and drums.
He is involved in the Music and Health Institute at Berklee College of Music and previously held an appointment as Professor of Music alongside Neurology and Pediatrics at George Washington University. His musical recordings include two CDs; the first debuted at Washington’s Blues Alley and supported care for children in need.
THE PHYSICIAN & PIANIST
Dr. Saman Arfaie is a neurology resident physician and scientist for whom music takes a central role in both intellectual inquiry and creative life. His musical studies include training with Tatiana Dardykina, Jui Sheng Li, and Dane Ko, alongside musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. His performances and writing explore how attentive listening can deepen our understanding of illness, creativity, and the inner life.
MAY 3, 2026 · AMERICAN OSLER SOCIETY · TORONTO
A lecture-recital exploring memory, musical time, and human experience through Schubert’s late piano works.
NOVEMBER 2021 · TEDxMcGILL
Through Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48, No. 1, Dr. Saman Arfaie brings medicine, neurosurgery, brain tumour biology, and philosophy into dialogue with performance. He considers suffering, personal transformation, and the insights that art offers when questions extend beyond the reach of a single answer.
Watch the TEDxMcGill lecture-recital on YouTube ↗
Filmed and edited by TVM, Student Television at McGill.
THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK & JAZZ
Performances by
Accompanying resources for the volume, including selections listed in its Appendix: Links to Music Recordings. These performances accompany Pearl’s presentations on the Great American Songbook and jazz, developed with faculty collaborators.
George Gershwin
Written for Girl Crazy (1930), this George and Ira Gershwin song grew from Broadway into a jazz standard. Its sustained melodic line invites a pianist to make a sung phrase audible through touch, pacing, and the release of each note.
George Gershwin
From the Gershwins’ film score for A Damsel in Distress (1937), the song turns an unpromising London day into a scene of romantic possibility. Its buoyant melody makes an illuminating contrast with the more spacious ballads in this collection.
George Gershwin
Written for The Goldwyn Follies, this late Gershwin song carries an additional poignancy: Ira completed the verse’s lyrics after George’s death. The piano gives its promise of continuity a voice through recurring melodic phrases and gently unfolding harmony.
Cole Porter
Porter makes the title’s question into a musical argument: short, insistent phrases are answered by a contrasting middle section. The pianist can keep that questioning character alive while following the harmonic changes into fresh melodic possibilities.
Cole Porter
Porter’s melody circles back to repeated notes and persistent rhythmic figures, making desire sound almost inescapable. Listen for how the pianist distinguishes those repetitions through voicing, harmonic colour, and shifts in emphasis rather than simply repeating the same gesture.
Cole Porter
The song’s compact phrases give Porter’s wit a musical counterpart. In a piano interpretation, the melody can remain crisp and conversational while the accompaniment introduces unexpected accents, countermelodies, and harmonic shades.
Charlie Parker
Parker’s tune shows how bebop can make a composed melody sound like improvisation: phrases turn rapidly, accents move across the beat, and lines press toward the next harmonic change. At the piano, those saxophone-like gestures become a conversation between the hands.
Charlie Parker
This shorter selection isolates the quick melodic turns and displaced accents of Parker’s tune. Compare it with the longer recording to hear how a brief phrase belongs to a larger harmonic journey.
Charlie Parker
Parker’s long, airborne melodic lines demand both precision and flexibility. Listen for the difference between the steady underlying pulse and the solo line’s changing accents, and for the way a melodic fragment can be extended through successive harmonic changes.
Bud Powell
Powell’s bebop piano language gives the right hand the agility of a horn while the left hand supplies compact harmonic punctuation. This piece makes their independence audible: the melody travels quickly while the accompaniment selects moments that sharpen its rhythmic profile.
Thelonious Monk
Monk’s ballad is built from expressive intervals, chromatic tension, and phrase endings that resist easy resolution. Rests and sustained notes are part of its architecture; a piano interpretation must decide not only how to sound each harmony, but how long to let it remain.
Charles Mingus
Mingus combines a memorable, blues-inflected theme with a sense of urban movement. The recurring melody acts as an anchor while rhythm, register, and improvised detail change around it, keeping recollection and forward motion in play.
Cole Porter
This studio version returns to Porter’s repeated melodic gestures and persistent pulse. Compare its phrasing and balance between the hands with the video interpretation: a familiar song can acquire a different character through small decisions of timing and touch.
Cole Porter
In this studio interpretation, Porter’s musical question becomes material for development rather than a fixed statement. Compare the placement of accents, the space between phrases, and the treatment of the contrasting middle section with the accompanying video.
Recordings © 2026 Phillip L. Pearl. Recorded at Berklee College of Music. Phillip Pearl’s YouTube channel
A WORLDWIDE COMMUNITY
Academic homes, formative institutions, and the publisher behind the volume.
Cartography: Natural Earth · Locations shown at campus or city scale.
THE PUBLISHER
Publisher · Cambridge University Press
Commissioning for psychology, creativity, neuroscience, and mental health.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Research on the processes behind the creation and practice of music is reaching maturity, and so, finally, is the study of the medical applications of music. Dr. Phillip Pearl and Dr. Saman Arfaie bring you up to date in their new volume.”
READERS & DISCIPLINES
Choose a path through the volume that speaks to your questions.
FOR MUSIC LOVERS & CULTURAL READERS
Hear familiar works with a different understanding of their creators. Medical portraits revisit Beethoven’s deafness, Ravel’s neurological illness, the Schumanns, Smetana, and the masters of jazz, examining how illness intersects with artistic life.
Begin with Beethoven →FOR CLINICIANS & TRAINEES
Bring music into neurological discussion with evidence and care. Explore musicogenic seizures, musical hallucinations, interventions for neurocognitive disorders, and research on Mozart’s K.448 in epilepsy, attending to the limits as well as the possibilities of the evidence.
Examine the epilepsy research →FOR RESEARCHERS & MUSICIANS
Connect musical experience with mechanisms of perception and creativity. Chapters on auditory-motor interactions, musicality, rhythm, and creative networks offer foundations for interdisciplinary research and informed musical practice.
Explore musical creativity →FOR EDUCATORS & HUMANITIES SCHOLARS
Teach the relationship between biological explanation and lived experience. Poetry, children’s artwork, and narrative medicine create starting points for reflection on empathy, interpretation, resilience, and the responsibilities of clinical care.
Read the narrative medicine chapter →COURSE ADOPTION & TEACHING
Suggested reading pathways for medical humanities, music cognition, and neurology training. These can be used in a seminar, residency teaching session, or interdisciplinary reading group.
Suggested readings: Beethoven and Ravel’s medical portraits, children’s artwork, poetry, and narrative reflective practice.
Learning focus: distinguish clinical evidence from retrospective interpretation, examine patients’ expressions of illness, and develop a reflective response to a case or performance.
Start with narrative medicine →Suggested readings: cerebral processing, creative networks, auditory-motor interactions, musicality, and rhythm.
Learning focus: connect musical phenomena to proposed neural mechanisms, compare methods, and formulate a testable question without treating correlation as causation.
Start with cerebral processing →Suggested readings: neurocognitive disorders, musicogenic seizures, musical hallucinations, Mozart’s K.448, and music processing across the lifespan.
Learning focus: appraise study design and outcomes, discuss appropriate clinical applications, and identify where therapeutic claims exceed the available evidence.
Start with clinical phenomena →FOR EDUCATORS & LIBRARIES
Review the volume for your teaching, or help make it available to your institution.
Pair a chapter with a recording, a focused discussion, and a short critical or reflective assignment. Medical humanities programs, Osler societies, narrative medicine groups, and residency educators can adapt these pathways to their audiences.
Request an inspection or desk copy from CambridgeHave your course details ready: institution, course title, level, enrolment, and planned use. Cambridge assesses eligibility and availability.
Discuss teaching, lectures, or course use with the editors →Support access for students, clinicians, and researchers at your institution.
Recommend to your libraryOn Cambridge Core, use “Get access” and “Recommend to your librarian” where available through your institution. You can also send the recommendation below directly to your library.
I recommend that our library acquire Music, Medicine, and the Neurobiology of Creativity, edited by Phillip L. Pearl and Saman Arfaie (Cambridge University Press, 2026). The volume supports teaching and research in music cognition, neuroscience, neurology, and medical humanities. Hardback ISBN: 9781009407755. Paperback ISBN: 9781009407779. Digital ISBN: 9781009407786. Publisher listing: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/music-medicine-and-the-neurobiology-of-creativity/7A2DBFCA4DEFE2586E26F23075A8B9A2
OWN THE VOLUME
Music, Medicine, and the Neurobiology of Creativity
Edited by Phillip L. Pearl and Saman Arfaie
October 2026 · 356 pages · 25 chapters
USD prices: Bookshop.org. CAD prices: Amazon Canada. Prices dated 11 October 2026; prices, taxes, and shipping may vary by retailer.
HARDBACK ISBN 9781009407755 · PAPERBACK ISBN 9781009407779
FOR YOUR NEXT PAPER
Choose a style and copy the complete reference.
Pearl, P. L., & Arfaie, S. (Eds.). (2026). Music, medicine, and the neurobiology of creativity. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009407786
Pearl PL, Arfaie S, eds. Music, Medicine, and the Neurobiology of Creativity. Cambridge University Press; 2026. doi:10.1017/9781009407786
Pearl PL, Arfaie S, editors. Music, medicine, and the neurobiology of creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2026. doi:10.1017/9781009407786.
Pearl, Phillip L., and Saman Arfaie, eds. Music, Medicine, and the Neurobiology of Creativity. Cambridge University Press, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009407786.
@book{pearl_arfaie_2026,
editor = {Pearl, Phillip L. and Arfaie, Saman},
title = {Music, Medicine, and the Neurobiology of Creativity},
publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1017/9781009407786},
isbn = {9781009407755},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009407786}
}Pearl, P.L. and Arfaie, S. (eds.) (2026) Music, Medicine, and the Neurobiology of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009407786.
CONTACT THE EDITORS
For teaching, invitations, media enquiries, or questions about the companion site, contact the editors.