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MUSIC :: ITS INESCAPABLE EFFECTS
From biological to psychological, physical to emotional, music affects us all
Published in PRESS Magazine October 2003
In the beginning was the Word. Almost all great religions recognize this. What the original word was, however, no one really knows. But as scientists continually debate over what transpired during the universe's evolution, they discovered that very soon after the Big Bang and before anything else appeared in the universe, primordial sound waves were produced. As it turns out, sound has been with us through all our evolutionary process and the product of sound is a natural outcome of this evolution.
Music.
The powerful universal link that interconnects society, music is a simple fact of life that we experience everyday. We come across music everyday, from the moment we wake up, up until the moment we close our eyes for some z’s. Music isn’t just melodic sounds. It all starts with noises and many different rhythms. Many of our daily activities are running at a certain pace and rhythm, just take walking, skipping and jumping. Applying the more conventional meaning of music, most people, after waking up to a friendly tune from the radio clock, sing a refreshing aria in the shower and listen the car radio all the way to work or school, or to the MP3/minidisc/discman/walkman on their morning workout.
Imagine going through your day without those songs you connect with that guide you through each day’s troubles – those annoying cyclic, repetitious rituals that everyone must go through in order to complete each day. Impossible, huh? Life without music? It’s hard enough to imagine a movie without music or a Christmas without carols, but life?! It's a practically insane thought! With music, life becomes fluid in nature and less concrete, making it easier for you to maneuver through life’s cracks and crevices and reach the other side where your senses are heightened and your love for life is increased. Regardless of culture, ethnicity, religion or race, music affects people around the world every day.
Music affects our lives, our emotions and our health without us even knowing it. A well-known fact, yes, there is no denying that music can suggest and affect our state of mind. What has baffled people for years, probably since the beginning of time is, how does it work? Why does music have such a profound effect on us? How does music affect us humans the way it does? How do organized sounds affect us to such an extent that billions are spent annually making music?
Through the years, scientists, researchers, physicists, people in the medical field and even in the mathematical field have tried to unlock the mystery behind the power of music – what is it about combined elements of rhythms, tempo, lyrics, sounds, pitch, arrangements that has lead music to be the connection of all living things in the universe? While professors around the world have produced volumes and volumes of information on the said matter, this article certainly does not intend to do that. Rather, this will just provide you with a glimpse of the bigger picture. Here, a crash course on how music really affects us and why it affects us as it does – from the spiritual to the emotional to the psychological and to the physical aspects of our being human.
Music is Food for the Soul
Music is Spiritual
The communication tool universally interpreted by its sound and capacity to touch one's soul, music has always been defined as spiritual. As it turns out, music affects the brain at different levels, which explains why our moods change with different types of music. However, at a very deep level, its effect is similar to that of deep meditation. This may be the reason why all great religions stress music as a means of praying and meditation as they made use of musical chants, hymns and other forms of music since ancient times to sing glory to God or to help focus the mind on the spiritual thoughts. But why does music affect the brain in such a deep way and why does it help in meditation? How exactly does music add up to the picture? Apparently, it calms the mind and produces a great sense of well being and euphoria similar to the one experienced during deep meditation. Recent Positron Emission Tomography (PET) studies have shown that some types of music activates neural pathways similar to those associated with euphoria and reward. These pathways are the very same ones activated in response to other pleasurable activities like eating and sex, which give emotional happiness.
To provide an analogy, let’s take a look at deep meditation first. In deep meditation, the mind focuses on a single thought for a long time, leading to contemplation. Reflection then is done on a single thought after which it produces the sense of well being and happiness. Sounds simple? Well, yes, considering that this process makes use of a major portion of the 100 billion neurons of the brain in a laser like fashion for a single thought. Amazing, huh? In the end, it is this deep meditation process that helps stimulate or "tickle" the pituitary gland, giving off the feeling of well being.
Now to bring in music. When we hear soul stirring music, we again get a feeling of well being. Thus, the soul stirring music and deep meditative thought has similar characteristics. The brain therefore appreciates and absorbs the soul stirring music by creating the same complex thought pattern as that during meditation. As we evolve intellectually and spiritually, we become increasingly tuned to emotionally satisfying music, since the brain becomes supple and is able to focus on a single thought for a long time.
Music’s Power to Make Us Feel
Similar effects are also seen for different types of music, which produce anger, sadness and other human emotions. Powerful enough to strengthen and weaken emotions, music has the power to make us feel. It has the power to move one to tears and the power to make one laugh, it has the power to invoke anger from within a person and the power to calm down the hysterical (“Music soothes the savage beast”, remember?). However, while all of us are, yes, vulnerable to the emotions that music evokes, in the end, is still up to us whether we wish let the music take us through that emotion that leads us to label a style of music as appealing or unappealing. American composer Aaron Copland hit the nail right on the head when he said, "Music is a language without a dictionary whose symbols are interpreted by the listener according to some unspoken Esperanto of his emotions." Always a tool to reach our inner depths, music is not selective – it is us, the audience that selects the music – as we find appealing the music that expresses or brings meaning to our emotions evoked by the music.
Now the question: how can music excite, calm or depress people? Music does this by directly communicating to the emotional side (the right side) of the human brain. To be more exact, the harmony – the combination of tones of different pitches – does this. Once communication is established, this side of the brain mixes different chemicals together and serves them up to the rest of the body in the form of a cocktail, thus directly affect our emotions, which in turn, directly affect the way we act or react to our environment. To illustrate, pleasing music stimulates the brain, specifically the right side of the brain, to turn on the gene which produces endorphins, in this case, serotonin, the “happiness” enzyme of the brain and the body's painkillers and anti-depressants. Once that gene produces serotonin and the level of serotonin in the brain rises, you are induced to think that you are happy and secure. Simply put, easy-listening music can work like an anesthetic or like that happy drug! Truly, music has a major impact on emotion. However, different kinds of music bring about different emotions. For instance, heavy metal music may leave you feeling energized yet aggressive as opposed to classical music which would probably leave one feeling a bit more refined and sophisticated. Music and the Mood
While music can evoke many different emotions within individual listeners, certain music are more apt to trigger certain moods. It can either set a mood of enjoyment and excitement or enchantment and inspiration or depression and melancholy. Quick and transformative, music has a tremendous ability to alter any person’s mood in a matter of seconds. While music can powerfully evoke emotion found only at the inner depths of our being, coupling it with the appropriate mood for the situation, it can also just as quickly, with astonishing power, change a person's mood. And, surprise, surprise, the process isn’t different from how music affects people emotionally. The stimulus (music) is presented after which it establishes communication with the brain which in turn taps those enzyme-producing genes to release those emotion-altering enzymes, and voila! You feel the essence of the music. And it’s not just because of the music – it’s because of YOU. And one of the best parts of this is because of the infinite variety of music, listeners can always find a song to match their particular mood.
The unfortunate thing about this matter of psychology in music is that it seems that all of the mystery of why we as humans react to music in different ways has been unearthed. But while it all does sound like Science has music it all figured out, there are still numerous gaps to fill in, for Science still has not figured out a way of understanding the exact mechanism of how music affects us. For instance, science still does not know why a speech can have very little effect on the mind, while vocal music can make people go wild.
Thus, a great deal of the mystery still remains and now, we can still savor the mysterious side of psychology in music.
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