He has written extensively on music and medicine, notably in his 2012 monograph Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease, a study of the idea that music can make listeners hysterical or homosexual, bringing out latent degeneration, brainwashing them or killing them stone dead, from Plato to the Nazis and twenty-first-century panics. He has written many academic and popular articles on related topics.