Music has organizational properties. It may serve as a resource in daily life, and it may be understood to have social ‘powers’ in relation to human social being. The previous chapters have moved from music's connection to what are generally thought of as the innermost recesses of the self – emotion, memory, self-identity – through music's interrelationship with the body, to music's role as an active ingredient within the settings of inter-action. Music is but one type of cultural material; volumes could also be written about the role of many other types of aesthetic materials – visual, even olfactory – in relation to human agency. And music's ‘powers’ vacillate; within some contexts and for some people, music is a neutral medium.

At other times, music's powers may be profound. In a footnote to his famous study of encephalitis lethargica survivors, Oliver Sacks speaks of music's liberating ‘power’ in relation to Parkinsonism sufferers: