The Frame Drum and States of Consciousness

A skin stretched over a wooden circle: the simplest instrument humankind ever invented, and perhaps the oldest. But what really happens when it begins to turn?Andrea Piccioni — one of the world's leading frame drum performers — brings together three fields that rarely speak to one another: the science of rhythm (why the brain predicts the beat, and why the beat moves us), the anthropology of trance (possession as a healthy cultural fact, not a pathology), and the pedagogy of orality (how to transmit a music that never passes through the written page).He writes from the inside, in the first person, with the rigour of autoethnography: three furrows of his own experience — the circle of the whirling dervishes, the feasts of Southern Italy, his own neurodivergence — become instruments of knowledge.A work of serious popular scholarship, backed by a rigorous scientific apparatus — and set firmly against the easy rhetoric of rhythm that "hypnotises".