Author Talk: Elizabeth Margulis

"Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams"

Author and music cognition researcher Elizabeth Margulis will discuss her new book exploring the powerful ties between music, emotion, and memories.

A song comes on—and suddenly, you’re somewhere else. Reliving past heartbreak. Picturing a serene future. Imagining a fantastical scene. Across genres, music has an uncanny ability to carry us into distinct inner worlds. In Transported, acclaimed music cognition researcher Elizabeth Margulis explores the phenomenon of musical daydreams—the vivid, spontaneous, emotionally charged images, stories, and memories we lapse into while listening to music—and argues that these everyday reveries offer a powerful and underappreciated window into how we think, feel, and connect. Renée Fleming calls Transported “fascinating and timely” and Béla Fleck describes it as “deeply enjoyable.” 

Joining the discussion will be Becca Martin-Brown. Becca Martin-Brown is the former features editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. She now hosts "The Other Way" with Kyle Kellams on Tuesdays on Ozarks at Large.

Pearl's Books will be selling books at the program, and a book signing will follow the talk.

About the Author

Elizabeth Margulis is Professor and Acting Chair of the Department of Music at Princeton University, where she directs the Music Cognition Lab. She is the author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (Oxford), which won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory and the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, and The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford), which has been translated into seven languages. Her co-edited volume The Science-Music Borderlands (MIT) won the Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society. Her work has been featured in outlets ranging from NPR’s All Things Considered to the BBC to Netflix Explained. Transported is her first book for general audiences.

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