Elizabeth Margulis, TRANSPORTED

May 28 | In-Store | 6:00 PM

Elizabeth Margulis, Transported

Join us and enter (Liveright), the new book by acclaimed music cognition researcher wherein she 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. Elizabeth will be in conversation with Daniel Shanahan.

Doors and minibar open at 5:30PM

Getting here: We are located at 1620 Orrington Avenue, in downtown Evanston, just one block east of the Davis Street Metra and CTA public transit stops. There is metered street parking as well as numerous parking garages nearby.

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About the book: 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.

Combining cutting-edge neuroscience, psychology, ethnography, and revelations from her own teaching and pathbreaking research, Margulis shows not only that musical imaginings are widespread and meaningful—but also that daydreams which seem deeply personal are often widely shared. Music can alleviate anxiety, ignite creativity, and foster connection in our increasingly fragmented era.

At a time when attention is perpetually under siege, Transported makes a powerful case for music as one of the last spaces where the mind is still free to wander—and reminds us that these wanderings are more meaningful and more important to our individual and collective well-being than we’ve ever realized.

About Elizabeth: 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.

About Daniel: Daniel Shanahan is Associate Professor in the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. His research incorporates music-analytic, computational, and experimental methods to better understand the cognitive and communicative constraints of music. He has served as co-editor of Empirical Musicology Review. He won the Mentorship Award from the Society for Music Theory and Cognition. His work has been published in outlets from Music Perception to Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Along with his co-editors, he won the Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award for their volume of the journal Engaging Music: Beyond Western Musicalities.

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