In another room, a sitting parlour of some kind, Mozart at age six once played a concert for the emperor. After the performance, little Wolfie ran over the empress, sat on her lap, and gave her a big hug.

After the Schonbrunn, I rode the subway system to the Haer der Musik, which as you can guess is the Hall of Music. I listened to Beethoven and Mozart and Strauss and Hayden, and then explored the sonosphere, a myriad of weird sounds and sound paradoxes, including the sounds inside the womb.

I also attended a concert on Strauss and Mozart that was no doubt put together for tourists, with a small orchestra playing highlights of the most famous pieces everyone has heard. a hundred times.

I wandered down through the center plaza by St. Stephen’s cathedral—a 900-year-old cathedral which dwarfs any cathedral I’ve ever seen. Apparently it took 300 years to build and looks as if you could house a miniature universe inside it. Long baroque spires point up upward into the sky. The outside covering is mostly black (due to deterioration) and a bit chilling. Inside, the long, endlessly high ceiling helps amplify the sacred space and provides an appealing acoustical environment for composers, especially for pieces such as Mozart’s Requiem.

The streets jutting out from St. Stephen’s are narrow and bustling with city shops and strolling people. I passed a duet of street singers, a small accordion band, a guitar soloist, and finally came across about a hundred people staring up at an enormous outdoor LCD screen displaying live opera. I sat down next to the others and gazed at the opera scene. I think a woman killed someone, and the man was sitting down trying to figure out what to do. It was all in German.

As I was later eating dinner at a pizzeria, looking out onto the people on the streets, I wondered what it must be like to live in Vienna, with such a legacy of music. What exactly do you do with that legacy? How does it influence your life, to have Mozart, Beethoven, Hayden, Strauss be the forefathers of where you live and breathe every day? When you see opera on a live screen, even though it might seem a little ridiculous, do you reverently stop what you’re doing, sit down on the cement, and watch it? Do long symphonies strike a pleasing chord inside of you, tapping into a gene you possess because of your Vienna birthright?

The interesting thing about travel is that it takes you two places at once: on the one hand, you’re surrounded by a new culture, which can at times be mesmerizing, especially in Europe. On the other hand, you also begin to see your own culture, your own ways of seeing and doing and being. You couldn’t see it before because you were immersed so deep and were blind to it. As such, I also thought about my own cultural legacy (whatever that might be), and how I am handling it.

I love Mozart’s music, especially symphonies with flutes, and upbeat music like Rondo Alla Turca. But in the Haer der Musik, listening to Beethoven Re:loaded (a modern rendering of Beethoven into Moby-like electronic rhythm), I couldn’t help but wonder: if Mozart were alive today, would he compose 18^th century symphonies, or would he be more like the Beatles? Would he write operas, or play an acoustic guitar? Would he compose baroque symphonies or rhythm and blues?

In a way the legacy of the past traps us. We immortalize the seemingly timeless art of our predecessors, but the art is not entirely timeless. It is dated. It fits a particular time and culture. I don’t think any historic composer, if somehow born today with the same talent and musical ambitions, would be writing operas unless there were a legacy of operas.

Traveling solo can be lonely, with reflection as my only companion. Forgive me for the jab at opera.

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Sacks explains that unlike other areas of the brain that are localized in specific regions — for example, memory is in one area, speech is in another, motor skills in another, and so on — music is “recruited” by almost every region of the brain. When people suffer trauma to the brain, they may lose speech if the trauma affected the area responsible for speech. But music is almost always unaffected because it is so thoroughly distributed throughout the brain.

Sacks explains:

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species.

I find this fascinating because it validates and reinforces the importance of music, even over speech. Like many people, I’ve always felt music to be a powerful influence. Now that I know that music components are found in every lobe of my brain, much more than speech, it seems even more primal and significant in purpose.

But what is the purpose? Sacks asks why evolution favored such a strong integration of music with the brain. He conjectures music may serve as a sexual and cultural selector, but really no one has a good reason why it should aid human survival. He says humans thousands of years ago played bone flutes that carry the same tones as flutes today. Music is baked into our genes and neural synapses.

Some other topics Sacks covers in the podcast include the following:

• The subconscious effect of music
• Why tunes get stuck in your head
• A boy who is amusical (can’t distinguish tones, so all music sounds awful to him)
• How deaf people develop a more acute sense of music (case in point, Beethoven)
• People who hallucinate that they hear music
• A man who is struck by lightening and develops an obsession with music composition

To listen to the podcast, subscribe to the Science Friday podcast here, and then listen to the episode entitled “Author Explains Mysteries of Music and Mind.”

Honestly, I can’t tell. The Writer’s Mind CD is supposed to stimulate your brain waves to give you both creativity (by selecting Track 1) or motivation (by selecting Track 2), but it just sounds like rain to me. But even the falling rain seems to focus my attention. It tricks me into really thinking it’s raining outside, which makes me feel cozy inside my safe shelter.

To be fair, the falling rain is just a mask over the frequencies that would probably otherwise be intolerable to listen to. In a nutshell, here’s how the technology is supposed to work. Your brain emits different wave patterns (Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta) based on moods. The Delta frequencies you emit during sleep contrast with the Alpha frequencies you emit during more creative states. So if you can refocus those Delta waves into Alpha waves, maybe you’ll stop falling asleep at your desk and instead feel motivated to write.

Someone just sent me the CD for free. Check out their site — Writers Mind — if you’re interested. It seems a bit gimmicky to me, and if were really true that you could transport yourself into a creative state through these practically inaudible frequencies, then there would also be CDs out there to remove anger, help you sleep, motivate you to exercise, compel you spend money, etc. (actually, there probably already are these CDs).

I think that if this technology works, it has a 10 percent or less effect on my actual thoughts. The human mind is complex. We may emit certain frequencies based on our moods, but it doesn’t mean that hearing those frequencies will have the reverse effect of changing our moods.

However, despite my skepticism, I have to admit that I keep playing the CD whenever I don’t feel like writing, and it seems to help a little, if nothing more than to provide white noise to blanket out other talk going on. I prefer music when I write, and this soundtrack (a rain downpour) provides the audible without any distracting words.