I know a man who can take you to Narnia. Well, not really Narnia, but to the very spot in England where Narnia was born in the mind of C.S. Lewis, author of "The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe" which is now a major motion picture by Disney, and the entire Chronicles of Narnia series.

Einstein would have loved the movie "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" because it is filled with not only imagination, but also time dilation and wormholes that tunnel into distant regions of space and time and black holes and string theory and spacetime curvature...all implicated in his General Theory of Relativity.

Will listening to music make you smarter? Will learning to play a musical instrument make your brain grow larger than normal? Questions like these ones have been popping up all over the place in the past few years, and not just in scientific journals either.

At the present time music is not yet used as a formal treatment for epilepsy, but the sheer fact that music has shown a potential ability to be a treatment for epilepsy as well as its ability to induce epileptic seizures would seem to indicate that music just might play a more significant role in the human experience than we ever imagined.

In the last few years a new dimension to learning music has appeared in the form of the internet - the world wide web. Now instead of being limited to classroom courses, students are free to create their own schedules and learn at their own pace.

Chord symbols (for example, Cmaj7 or G6) are a type of notation used frequently in jazz and other areas of modern music to notate chord progressions and changes.

Since chords (the main component of harmony) are one of the three most vital elements of music - the others being melody and rhythm - it would be useful to know how many chords there are. And it doesn't matter whether you play piano or guitar or some other instrument - chords are chords.

There are roughly umpteen zillion reasons why you should learn enough chords to be able to "chord a song" at the piano. By "chord a song", I mean the ability to play 3 or 4 chords on the piano in some sort of rhythm while you or someone else sings the tune. To do this, you don't need to be a Van Cliburn; all you need to do is learn a few basic chords and be able to more back and forth between them in some organized rhythmic pattern.

What in the world is "naked music?" You know it when you hear it, but the words that describe it sound strange, don't they? We've all heard of popular music and rock music and gospel music and jazz music, but naked music?

What in the world would you and I do if there was no such thing as music? Can you imagine a world without music? No songs, no tunes, no rock, no roll, no jazz, no hymns, no boogie-woogie, no country-western, no symphonies. No singing in the shower. No whistling Dixie.

We've all heard of them. Child prodigies who begin composing music at some ridiculously young age. For instance, history reports that Mozart was writing minuets by the time he was five years old. Amazing. At five years of age, I'm not sure that I knew the difference between my finger and my thumb and I certainly wasn't composing music.

It's no secret that virtually everyone loves music in some form or other. After all, it is the universal language, and we all participate in it to some degree from the cradle to the grave. It starts with our Mothers' lullaby, ends with our funeral song, with a zillion other stops along the way

Playing by ear is the ability to play a piece of music (or, eventually, learn an instrument) by simply listening to it repeatedly. The majority of self-taught musicians began their education this way; they picked up their instrument and began playing an easy melody from a well-known song, slowly picking out the notes as they went along.