Timeline: Vermont Public Classical

Simply type “study music” into a google search and you’ll get about three billion results; from videos and tracks of original pieces that use alpha waves to help you focus to long playlists of classical music for study and concentration. There are entire genres and branches of the music industry devoted to providing music as a backdrop to other activities. Do they work? Yes, yes they do. As Rebecca West of the Music Institute of Chicago stated, “Rhythm, melody and tempo are tools used to target non-musical behaviors, to catapult change throughout the body. A change in rhythm can trigger a reaction in the brain.”

German philosopher Immanuel Kant called music “The Quickening Art.” Oliver Sacks uses this quote often when explaining how music can jump-start the human brain. Music employs so many different parts of the mind at once. It can trigger responses that may have seemed dormant or even lost forever. Sometimes, the effect of music on the mind can even appear miraculous. I’ve seen it, firsthand.

For the past few months we’ve been exploring the way that music affects us physically, emotionally, socially and neurologically. Along the way we’ve hinted at how these concepts and studies have been translated into therapies designed to address particular needs of patients. Music therapy has become a well-established health profession dedicated to the use of musical invention to address the wellness of individuals.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice!

Aristotle wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

We all know that listening to music is enjoyable, pleasurable, emotional… in short, it feels good. Why though? Why do we react to music this way?

The act of making music, actively participating in the creation of organized sound, has beneficial side effects, emotionally, socially and physically.

Our ability to hear patterns, recognize words and focus our auditory perception is thanks, in large part, to a very specific region of the brain, the superior temporal gyrus. It’s located just behind and above each ear. It’s the site of our auditory association cortex, in other words it’s the place that helps us understand language, speech and music.

Synesthesia means “sensing together” and it describes the phenomenon of one our senses triggering another; such as sound and color. This isn’t something farfetched; we come across this idea every single day. The English language is filled with synesthetic idioms. Loud colors, frozen silence, bitter cold, sharp cheese, feeling blue and seeing red are just a few examples. We understand these figures of speech instantaneously without realizing that on the surface, they’re rather odd mixtures of our five senses.

In our last episode we talked about beat induction and rhythmic entrainment, this is what causes us to pick up the beat around us and tap our feet, even if we aren’t consciously doing it. I mentioned at the very end that there are cutting edge music therapy techniques that use entrainment as a means to treat neuro-biological disorders. The idea is to use outside auditory stimulus, drones, drumming and the like, to change the mental state of the listener.

We’ve all been there, driving down the street listening to music while moving our fingers to the rhythm, sitting in a concert hall tapping our toes to the music, working out in the gym making our reps or steps match the background beat around us. I’ve caught myself falling into step with random music coming out of a shop or coffee house just by simply walking past. We call this rhythmic entrainment, the tendency to sync up with the beat around us.