All cultures have stories of miraculous transformations—of individuals, groups, even landscapes—produced by instrumental music and song. In recent decades, our understanding of the transformative effects of music has itself been doubly transformed by new kinds of historical and cognitive research.

These podcasts were created by Resident Members at Green College, at the University of British Columbia, and based on a series of public lectures and discussions at the College in 2017-18 that explored the modalities of mind/body-altering and world-changing musical experience in the persons of players and listeners across time, and also in the wider history of societies and cultures, using performances of “classical” (and other) music in all periods and settings, and their audiences, to generate data.