Deborah, a Chicago woman in a debilitating marriage, finds herself ministered to when she listens to her favorite soprano arias. “It’s the difference between holding it together and falling apart,” she says. “Whenever I feel the fog of depression coming on, I pop in my music. It wipes out the fog almost immediately.”
Bob Kramer, a college professor in Boston, was devastated when his sister died of cancer. Inconsolable and unable to articulate his grief, he turned to music. “In the first, most difficult year after losing her, listening to the blues really helped to uncork my emotions and soothe them,” he says. “It was so perfect for what I was feeling, I could totally relate to it, not of course to the life of a black Southern sharecropper, but to the emotion of pain and suffering and loss.”
“We live in a world where we have plenty of occasions for weeping, but perhaps we have lost the rituals that allow some potent and formal expression of our remorse and sadness,” spiritual author Thomas Moore writes in an introduction to “Music for the Soul: A Program for Re-Enchantment” (Angel Records, CD $12.99). According to Moore, music moves us closer to the heart of everyday experience, including the opportunity to express sadness as we reflect on our personal tragedies.
The medical profession has long accepted music as an alternative medicine, one that inexplicably affects pulse, blood pressure and the electrical activity of muscles. The ancient Greeks used music to treat patients for various physical and mental illnesses. Music’s effect on pain, the immune system and illness have been studied in clinical settings since the 19th Century. In 1806, psychologists experimented with music as an antidote for depression and mania.
In the 1940s, American clinicians discovered that music could create moods, increase attention span, relieve tension, elicit associations and imagery and prompt self-expression. Today’s robust music-therapy movement has its roots in Veterans Administration hospitals during World War II, where GIs suffering from post traumatic stress and other disorders were found to respond favorably to music.
Though music’s role as an enigmatic healer has a long history, it was only with the seminal 1993 “Mozart Effect” study that music gained legitimacy as an elixir for the mind. The experiment, conducted at the University of California at Irvine, found that college students who listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major increased their IQ by an average of nine points to score 30 percent higher on spatial reasoning tests.
A 1995 study of SAT scores over seven years showed students exposed to the arts, including music appreciation and performance, consistently outperformed their non-art peers. Musically prepared students scored 61 points higher than their non-art peers in the SAT verbal scores and 46 points higher in the math scores, according to analysis by the National Association for Music Education in Reston, Va.
The Universities of Wisconsin and California at Irvine conducted a joint study in 1997 that echoed the spectacular “Mozart Effect” finding, that music can make children smarter. It compared 3- and 4-year-olds who were taught piano with those who received computer instruction. The piano students performed 34 percent better on abstract reasoning skills essential to learning subjects such as math and science.
“The music you listen to affects how you feel, think and act every day of your life,” says Elizabeth Miles, author of “Tune Your Brain: Using Music to Manage Your Mind, Body, and Mood” (Berkley Books, $12). “Because music is converted into electrical energy when it hits the inner ear and is then sent to the brain, through the spine and out into the muscles, the right kind of music literally electrifies your body.”
Research has established that fast, loud, rhythmic music stimulates the nervous system and produces faster heartbeat and breathing, higher blood pressure and more muscle movement. Slow, soft music does the opposite. Fast-paced energizing music increases a person’s ability to respond and act quickly, while slow music relaxes and aids focusing and concentration, meditation, and progressively induces sleep. But most people prefer music that is neither slow nor fast.
“People’s feelings about musical speed seem to be quite organic,” says Miles. “They like music with a comfortable tempo, around 80 beats a minute, which is the rate of the average human heartbeat.”
Existing studies in neuroscience, psychology and medicine show that different types of music — varying in speed, volume, rhythm, instrumentation, timbre, texture, form, melody, harmony and pitch — affect people in a number of ways. Miles, an ethnomusicologist (someone who studies music’s role in people’s lives in cultures around the world), expanded the research and developed her theory of Braintuning, the belief that music can elicit desired mood states:
To energize: Miles says energizing music must have a fast beat and speed and should be played at high volume. She cites James Brown’s “I Feel Good,” Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as examples.
To uplift: This music must have infectious uptempo beat and swinging and soaring arcs, says Miles. Examples: The Grateful Dead’s “American Beauty,” “The Best of Louis Jordan,” a classic R&B artist, and the final movement from Joseph Haydn’s “The Creation.”
To create: The right music pushes boundaries, plays with your expectations, surprises you and is rich in imagery. Examples: Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto, 1st Movement.
To focus: Neural priming to boost abstract reasoning and language and logical tasks requires complex musical arrangements such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17, finale. To stimulate alpha brain waves for deep concentration, Miles suggests Baroque masterpieces including Johann Sebastian Bach’s cerebral “The Well Tempered Clavier,” “The Art of the Fugue” and “A Musical Offering.” “It’s important to listen to complex IQ-boosting music before (not during) your mental task, while clear-textured, alpha wave selections make good background music while you work,” Miles says.
To cleanse: Choose music that will grab and shake you, from hard rock and rap to cry-in-your-beer honky-tonk and blues. Examples: the rap music of NWA or Public Enemy, heavy metal Metallica, grunge Nine Inch Nails or Hole and Gustav Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War” from “The Planets.”
To heal: Turn to music that provides warmth and rich imagery, including songs with lyrics or featuring harps. Examples: Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun,” Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria for Voice and Piano in B-Flat and Aretha Franklin’s “Aretha Gospel.”
To relax: Choose soft music with pure tone and long reverberation, including Gregorian chants as well as soothing sounds of acoustic strings and flutes. Examples: “Salve-Regina-Gregorian Chant” by the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of St. Maurice, Chopin’s “Nocturnes” and the music of Enya and Sarah McLachlan.
According to the principles of Braintuning, music could be used to induce desired mood states in everyone from hyperactive children and lethargic teenagers to stressed-out parents and working adults. But experts say music is not a miracle drug and should be used sparingly, with respite and periods of silence. Too much of any one kind of music can have a negative effect, they say.
Music scholars also say the kind of music has to have some resonance with the individual. In other words, playing Mozart to an inner-city class of 3rd graders raised on rap, reggae and salsa will not produce instant IQ leaps unless the children like the music in the first place.
Parents first need to broaden their children’s musical diet, says Miles.
“If a child listens only to rap or hard rock, it’s going to be a challenge to get him to listen to Mozart, but you can introduce him first to Shostakovich, who was full of angst . . . the hard rock composer of his day.”
Since the Mozart Effect study, scientists using brain-mapping technology have been exploring a new frontier: the ability of music to construct and fortify nerve-cell connections in the area of higher brain functions.
“The neural priming effect of music would be akin to a software upgrade, reprogramming the mind to increase mental and physical capabilities,” says Miles.
But the crowded lives of many Americans leave little room for undivided attention to music. Cindy Morrisey, a travel agent in Chicago and mother of Mark, 6, and Erin, 5, turns on the classical music station briefly while preparing dinner.
“I get to unwind while I make dinner, and it calms the kids down while they do their homework,” Morrisey says. “I wish I had more time to sit down and listen to music.”
In the face of mounting evidence, listening to music could be one of the most important things we do for ourselves. Lan, an accomplished interior designer in Chicago who listens to music throughout the day, says he can’t imagine a life without it.
“I choreograph my days to music,” he says. “I don’t think I’d be as creative or happy without it.”
“When we listen to music, we are contemplating the very structures and colors that make up our own lives,” Moore writes. “Music appeals to the emotions and the imagination, allowing us to experience in art the dynamic patterns that give everyday life meaning and value.”
HOW TO GET MORE IN TUNE
There is more information about the benefits of music on the Internet.
About health, see the Web site of the American Music Therapy Association (www.namt.com).
For educational benefits, see the National Association for Music Education site (www.menc.org).
About how music affects moods, see Elizabeth Miles’ Braintuning site (www.tuneyourbrain.com).
For a shortcut to build a helpful musical library, several avenues are available.
– “Tune Your Brain — Music to Manage Your Mind, Body, and Mood,” an audio companion to the book of the same name by ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Miles features 13 tracks of classical music by various composers to manage all seven of the desired mood states. (Polygram Classics & Jazz, $8.99 to $11.99)
– In 1998, Miles introduced the first four in a series of seven “Tune Your Brain …” CDs featuring the music of Mozart, each focusing on a different mood state. (Polygram Classics & Jazz, $8.99 to $11.99)
– “Women of Spirit,” a selection of 13 uplifting songs by female artists from every continent about the trials and tribulations of womanhood. (Putumayo World Music, $16.99)
– Dan Campbell, director of the Institute for Music, Health and Education in Boulder, Colo., compiled “The Mozart Effect,” a collection of the composer’s work sequenced to enhance creativity. (Spirit Music, $16.99)
– The Children’s Group, in Pickering, Ontario, produces a line of CDs and series of symphonies in the U.S., Canada and Great Britain designed to introduce children to the benefits of classical music. Campbell played a major role in several of the CDs, which are available in some music stores. For more information, see www.childrensgroup.com or call 800-757-8372.
