Knowledge of music as a healing art and vehicle of the Divine has traveled down the generations for millennia. Today, advances in science and research offer a clearer understanding of what’s been intuitively known.
Music and Spirituality
The ancient Greeks recognized the order of the universe in musical sound forms. By the Middle Ages, the mathematical parallels between music and nature led people to believe that one could imitate the work of the divine by creating music. To them, music offered humans a direct line to the creator, a source of comfort when survival was tenuous at best.
Centuries later, conservationist Jane Goodall described what eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow would call a peak experience: a transcendent experience that can entail feelings of intense joy, awe, and Universal unity.
In her autobiography Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Goodall explains how listening to a Bach fugue in an ancient English cathedral became a spiritual encounter: “It is hard now…to recapture that moment of ecstasy in the cathedral…If I hear Bach’s fugue…the result is the same: just as the chimes of Big Ben trigger an unconscious spasm of fear, so that music floods my whole being with love, joy, and a sort of spiritual exaltation.”
Goodall speaks to how music slips into the body and psyche, affecting one quite deeply. She describes how the notes, composition, tempo, tonal quality, and rhythm of Bach’s fugue or Big Ben’s chimes seemed woven into the fabric of her being.
Research on Music and Health
Perhaps such an expansive core experience is indicative of how the order inherent to music and nature manifests in the most internal, rhythmic aspects of human functioning. Homeodynamics considers the various periodic processes of human functioning, such as Circadian rhythms and other movements within the body. At the most basic level, humans are hardwired with rhythmic elements reminiscent of musical elements.
It should then follow that the organization inherent to music could stimulate physiological and psychological responses in the body to realign off-kilter internal rhythms. One study suggests that certain physiological processes, such as heart rate, respiration rate, vascular dilation, oxygenation, and autonomic activity, can sync to musical elements through a natural tendency called entrainment.
In another study, researchers Leslie Bunt and Joanna Marston-Wyld compared psychotherapy and music therapy in treating cancer patients. They found that cancer patients who participated in group music therapy experienced both physiological and psychological stimulation, whereas traditional psychotherapy yielded only psychological stimulus. The study also suggested that listening to and creating music can reduce symptom severity in cancer patients.
Music has a noticeable impact on the brain. A 1999 study found that harmonized, consonant music stimulated parts of the brain associated with pleasure, while dissonant music stimulated parts of the limbic system linked to unpleasant emotion. Researchers also learned that music, particularly baroque, stimulates both hemispheres of the brain, which enhances focus and concentration.
Music also stimulates the medial pre-frontal cortex, which sits right behind the forehead. A recent study conducted by cognitive neuroscientist Petr Janata of University of California, Davis showed that music cues the brain to retrieve particular memories. Janata uses the analogy of a soundtrack over which a mental movie is played. This could explain why certain songs fill people with nostalgia or grief, and why people with Alzheimer’s are able to retain lyrics and melodies well into their illness.
As the fields of medicine, neuroscience, and expressive therapies continue to grow, the underpinnings of music and its curative abilities will become increasingly clear, shaping the future of music as a healing art.
Sources:
- Blood AF, Zatorre RJ, Bermudez P, Evans AC. (1999). Emotional responses to pleasant and unpleasant music correlate with activity in paralimbic brain regions. Nature
- Neuroscience, 2(4), pp. 382-387.
- Bunt, L. & Marston-Wyld, J. (1995). Where Words Fail Music Takes Over: A Collaborative Study by a Music Therapist and a Counselor in the Context of Cancer Care. Music Therapy Perspectives, Vol. 13, pp. 46-50.
- Goodall, J. (1999). Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. New York: Warner Brothers.
- Janata, P. (2009). The neural architecture of music-evoked autobiographical memories. Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp008.
- Rider, M.S., & Eagle, C.T. (1986). Rhythmic entrainment as a mechanism for learning in music therapy. In J.R. Evans & M. Clynes (Eds.), Psychological, Linguistic, and Musical Processes, pp. 225–248.
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