How Music Empowers argues that empowerment is the key to unlocking the long-standing mystery of how music moves us. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in embodied cognitive science, psychology, and cultural studies, the book provides a new way of understanding how music affects listeners. The argument develops from our latest conceptions of what it is to be human, investigating experiences of listening to popular music in everyday life. Through listening, individuals have the potential to redefine themselves, gain resilience, connect with other people, and make a difference in society.

"Listening Patterns" is dedicated to facing the great diversity of discourses on listening in today's literature and to proposing a possible key of interpretation. The book develops the analysis of listening, in its most general sense, in three parts with the aim of presenting a versatile model which can be used in a wide variety of applications. After setting the discussion on the experience of listening as an eminently epistemological problem, the first part focuses on the examination of theories of listening in terms of the points of view expressed by the grammatical elements and metaphors involved.