TLM-1st Edition/Volume 6
The Little Manual for a State of Well-Being The Power of Music
Painting: Bal du moulin de la Galette Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Music (ˈmyo͞ozik) noun. vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion. 1
Everywhere you turn, there is music surrounding you! You might not pay attention to it, but there is music playing to your ears, soothing you, accompanying you, motivating you in your life path! No matter where you come from, music has probably played an important role in your evolution. Your cultural background is meaningful and memorable because of the type of music you heard during your first years of childhood.
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Oxford English Dictionary
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“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal.”2
Plato
We will be exploring the benefits of music and its healing and soothing power! Much scientific study and medical research has been done to evaluate and measure the power of music, and learn how music can be used to treat pain and anxiety, stress, depression, memory issues, and even brain injury and seizures. Where does this healing potential come from? Is this a universal law of music? Are we hard-wired to benefit from music? Does everyone hear the same tones, enjoy the same melodies, or is each person’s ear uniquely attuned, in terms of their preferred musical genre, tempo, key, volume, etc.--and the meaning assigned to it?
Let’s look at some early music history first! The first evidence of musical instruments, dating back to about 40,000 years ago, reveals they were flutes carved out of bones. These flutes may have been used by our ancestors as a way of communicating or perhaps just for the making of music. As far as the origins of singing, humans probably started to develop vocal musical ability after the existence of Neanderthals3. According to a study by the BBC, Homo sapiens developed early artistic practices, such as producing cave paintings and the incorporation of ivory and bone musical instruments. It has also been noted that the early musical instruments were probably a more sophisticated development from earlier prototypes. This same study suggests that “the human voice may have gained its full vocal range at least 530,000 years ago, suggesting that several extinct species, including the Neanderthals, had the potential to sing.”4 Beyond their technical ability to sing, one wonders if they did so to communicate with a mate or purely for pleasure.
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
Victor Hugo 2 3
The Wordsworth dictionary of musical quotations, 1991, pg.45
Neanderthals are a group of fossil humans that appeared in Westen Eurasia in the Middle Pleistocene and shared the stage with first modern humans arriving in Europe from around 45,000 years ago. Ancient History Encyclopedia, https://www.ancient.eu/Neanderthal/ 4
Barras, Colin. (2014) “Did early humans, or even animals, invent music” http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20140907-does-music-pre-date-modern-man
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Starting from the early stages of development inside the womb, our vessels of hearing--the ears--let in sounds which our brain then identifies as musical melodies, or speaking and singing, or the natural audio chaos that surrounds us in everyday life. According to medical studies, the brain in the fetus starts to designate the areas that will govern smell, taste, vision, touch and sound as early as the 18th week of pregnancy. (ref. What we know as the instruments of knowledge, TLM vol.2) However, it is not until the 25th week of gestation that fetal hearing becomes functional and, “unlike the visual system, the auditory system requires outside auditory stimulation. This needs to include speech, music, and meaningful sounds from the environment.”5 Thus, we can suggest that humans are naturally hard-wired to process voice and sound--which if put together can create music. If we think about it, when we say music penetrates your body, we can see that it literally does, as when--for example--a pregnant mother sings or plays music for her late-term fetus. Another great example of this was described by a violinist composer, as quoted from the book The Power of Music by Elena Mannes: When someone says that a piece of music “touched me” or “moved me,” it is very literal. The sound of my voice enters your ear canal and it’s moving your eardrum. That’s a very intimate act. I am literally touching you, and when you speak to me, you are literally touching me. And then we extend that principle to the sound of violin.6
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”
Albert Einstein
So how does the brain react to the music it hears? Scientific studies have determined that the brain's four main parts: frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe and occipital lobe work in different ways when music penetrates the brain, engaging them to make the music enjoyable, especially the compositions you like the most. In reference to these functions, Tom Barnes--writing for the news and culture website MIC.com--describes them in such a clear way: Music doesn't follow one path through the brain in a fixed way...the auditory cortex is responsible for taking the music you hear and parsing the most rudimentary features such as pitch and volume. It works with the cerebellum to break down a stream of musical information into its component parts: pitch, timbre, spatial location and duration. The cerebellum has connections with the amygdala, the brain's emotional center...involved in arousal pleasure and the transmission of neurotransmitters like 5 6
Stanley, N. Graven; Joy V.Browne. “Auditory Development in the Fetus and the Infant” https://doi.org/10.1053/j.nainr.2008.10.010 Excerpt from The Power of Music: Pioneering Discoveries in the New Science of Song by Elena Mannes, May 24, 2011.
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dopamine.7 And this is when the so-called dopamine rush occurs: shortly after the joy of hearing music intensifies within you, causing actual chills. This holds true across musical genres, as well as personal musical taste preferences. Beyonce or Bach? No matter which is your jam, this does not change the synchronized effects that it causes in our brains. According to scientific and neurological studies, the following effects are in play: Classical music is good for motivation and focus, as well as for cultivating a positive attitude towards goals. This last effect is also shared with the rock music genre, which helps with anger management and an increased sense of consideration for others. The euphoria experienced when listening to dance music--enhanced by sensations of being transported or elevated--accurately describes how ravers feel when their favorite DJ plays extended bass drops. When feeling dejected or blue, on the other hand, a sad song’s lyrics will drag you in as the vocalist’s expressed feelings seem to relate to your own, in a validation that might help alleviate sadness and facilitate a healing process. These are just a few examples of how we directly or indirectly benefit from the moods associated with specific types of music.8
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” Maya Angelou
The benefits of music have been proven to help with the treatment of stress, boosting the immune system, and reducing anxiety, seizures, and fatigue. Music helps Parkinson’s patients, evokes memories, enhances intelligence, and offers therapeutic benefits after brain injury. According to Barbara Else, senior advisor with the American Music Therapy Association, “We have such a connection to music because it is ‘hardwired’ to our brains and bodies...the elements of music - melody, rhythm, etc.- are echoed in our physiology, functioning and being.”9
Now that we see the infinite benefits of music for human well-being, it should be highly recommended that we listen more frequently to music we enjoy, as this will help us gain a better perspective of all the things around us, and it will help sooth our inner self. On doing my research on this topic--the power of music for healing--I encountered a great video on Youtube, which clearly explains the power of music and its way of interpretation. I highly recommend watching it so you may get a little more knowledge on the subject and see some great visual examples of music’s impact on brain 7
Barnes, Tom. “Here is what happens Inside your Brain When listening to Music, in 3D Mind-Blowing GIF’s” 06-03-2015 https://www.mic.com/articles/119856/this-is-what-happens-inside-your-brain-when-you-hear-a-song 8
Bound, Chris. “Here is how different music genres affect your mood” https://www.mysticsons.com/article/feature-heres-how-different-music-genres-affect-your-mood#.X5YO7ohKiUl 9
Whiteman, Honor. “The power of music, how it can benefit health” Nov.19,2015. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/302903
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function. Here is the link to the TEDx talk by Alan Harvey, titled Your brain on music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZFFwy5fwYI
We will close this Little Manual with a few words about the Impressionist movement, introduced by Claude Debussy during the late 19th century. This term is vaguely applied to music of that period, and was introduced by analogy with French painting. Specific characteristics of Impressionist music include static harmony, emphasis on instrumental timbres (that create a shimmering interplay of “colours”), melodies that lack directed motion, surface ornamentation that obscures or substitutes for melody, and an avoidance of traditional music form. Impressionism can be seen as a reaction against the rhetoric of Romanticism.10
About the Renoir painting depicted above (first page of this Little Manual), we can relate its Impressionist features to similarities found in the musical world, such as the movement depicted in the scene. For example, in studying the painting, we see: interaction between the dancers; faces of pleasure and joy as the people seem to be enjoying the music--which is implied because no musicians are included in the mise en scène; and its colours which really distinguish the harmony and the essence of the painting. Perhaps it is the first impression that matters--and from my perspective, that is the interpretation given by Renoir in this particular painting. If we can relate the essence of the power of music to this painting from an analytical artistic view, it is possible to consider that colorful images can provoke joyful emotions. Even inside a painting, the power of music can move you about, perhaps thinking from that perspective.
Some musical sounds may be perceived as disturbing for some but for others, the same music may bring peace, comfort, inspiration, memories, a burst of emotions, etc. As I was finishing up this edition, I encountered a video on Twitter which really moved and inspired me. In the video, a former “First Ballerina in New York” sits in a wheelchair, crippled by Alzheimer’s disease. This elderly woman listens to a selection from the classic ballet “Swan Lake” by Tchaikovsky which she used to perform, as her brain reacts to the music, she spontaneously begins moving her hands, arms, and head in the precise choreography she had learned and performed to this music so many decades earlier. I highly recommend that you watch this video (link on p. 6) to see how this person, affected by Alzheimers, music can really help someone overcome an illness at least for a moment. And makes me think more about the true power of music! I am thankful that there is so much music in my life, and I hope everyone else’s life path is full of it--for an enhanced State of Well-being. Let the music begin!
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https://www.britannica.com/art/Impressionism-music
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“Music has the power to create a universe or to destroy a civilization.”
Katherine Neville
“First Ballerina New York video link below” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owb1uWDg3QM PEACE! LOVE! HAPPINESS! Remember to continue reading issues of my Little Manual, as we will be bringing in new topics which connect to the previous ones. This is a process of support for you, for a State of Well-Being! Don’t forget to share this with family and friends!
Article written by Efra Gonz Edited by Tammy Melody Gomez For any help or support you might need, contact Efra Gonz @ nochenoir@h mail.com 6