"What results from the crossing of music with psychoanalysis? A mobilizing essay that demonstrates that music is not only a combination of sounds and silences, but fundamentally a bodily and intersubjective experience. That there is no music without a subject and without a culture from where to listen to it." (Page|12 see note)

"Vainer recovers here a music with guts, dance, stories and passions, bodies, social classes." Mariano Pacheco, essayist and journalist (read note(link is external))

"A book that has the strange merit of being an autobiography of the reader. Anyone will inevitably feel involved in his own life when reading it." Eduardo Müller, psychoanalyst (read presentation)

"Reading More Than Sounds is an experience in itself." Mariano Pensotti, playwright (watch video(link is external))

"After reading it, one never listens to music in the same way again." Ana María Talak, psychologist and historian (listen to audio(link is external))

"The book takes us to the inseparable link in music between the aesthetic and the ethical-political plane, that is, more than sounds." Pablo Vícari, Bachelor of Philosophy and Musical Arts (listen to audio(link is external))

Introduction:
"All we want is for a researcher to tell us why the young man sitting in row A is so strongly absorbed by the musical sounds he hears, while his girlfriend gets little or nothing out of them." The musician Aaron Copland launched that wish and Alejandro Vainer takes up the challenge. "Music is a bodily and intersubjective experience" is the axis that runs through it. In the antipodes of those who maintain that it is an "immaterial art", this book restores the body to the musical experience.

The author organizes a proposal where he defines a subjectivity that is bodily and how it is produced as a biological, psychic and cultural framework. Following Freud, he postulates the "musical complementary series", which allow him to unravel why we love certain types of music throughout our lives. Then he analyzes musical experiences in different situations. First, an analysis of what happened to the music in the concentration-extermination camps during World War II and in the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina. Second, the intertwining of eroticism and music throughout history. And third, an exhaustive analysis of the subjective and social function of background music. The most frequent way of listening today. The book closes with two bonus tracks: one on the history of psychoanalysts and music; the other about musicians and money, where the working conditions of those who produce those experiences that reach our bones are visualized.

An entertaining and profusely documented book. Its foundations range from psychoanalysis to musicology, passing through neurosciences, anthropology, sociology, literature and the testimonies of the musicians themselves.

A trip for music lovers. More than sounds, it is a part of our life.