Come alive to the sound of music
HOLIDAYING here in Edinburgh during its festivals, I am joining the million or so tourists who are joyfully imbibing the harmonies, the sounds and the cadences that enrich and regenerate our emotions.
Few here doubt the restorative and therapeutic power of music. Ranging from the 91-year-old Ravi Shankar, who will give a zither concert next week, to the rock a-capella group Out of the Blue, creating instrumental sounds without any instruments, the halls, theatres and streets will be heaving with audiences just wanting to be uplifted and energised.
But what happens here isn't just some orgy of culture for the effete. People are doing what has been recognised since the middle ages as a therapeutic exercise.
A famous treatise on depression 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Robert Burton, a 17th century British physician, identified music as an agent of psychological healing.
In Britain and the US music therapy has been in use since the 1940s and has a role in a variety of specialties including geriatric, palliative care, psychiatry and learning disability.
The Tomatis effect was described following the work of Alfred Tomatis, an ear, nose and throat specialist who developed a technique called sound therapy that involved listening to Mozart and Gregorian chant to help those with autism, dyslexia, depression and ADHD.
In 1997 music researcher Don Campbell popularised the idea that listening to Mozart could improve IQ by up to nine points -- a remarkable achievement if it were true.
This prompted the then Governor of Georgia to propose a budget to provide all new-born babies with a CD of classical music.
The Atlanta symphony orchestra were commissioned to select the pieces and many parents, eager to enhance their children's intelligence, bought into this theory.
In 2007 the German Research Ministry published a detailed review of 300 studies and failed to find any long-term effect on intelligence but recommended further research.
Evidence
There is now more solid evidence that emotions and mood are affected by music.
For example, grunge rock has been found to increase tension, aggression and fatigue while country music, with its focus on love gone wrong, has been linked to depression and suicide.
More positively, easy listening improves mood and classical music is said to uplift.
A detailed review by the Cochrane Collaboration, the world's most prestigious organisation for medical reviews, found some, albeit limited, evidence that music therapy may be of some benefit in the treatment of depression. However, only five studies were identified in the scientific literature.
Now, in the August issue of the 'British Journal of Psychiatry' there features a study written by Jaakko Erkkial and colleagues in Finland. It found that individual music therapy has a short-term beneficial effect when used in conjunction with treatment such as antidepressants and counselling. At a six-month follow-up the benefit had gone.
The therapy wasn't simply sitting listening to music but involved active participation either in improvised singing or instrumentation.
What the researchers couldn't answer was how the therapy worked -- was it through the physical activity involved, through the relationship experience that develops and in the process affirms the person, or was it as a result of some aesthetic and cathartic uplift?
Another possibility is that the effect is physiological. Music affects both the right and left side of our brain. Rhythm is dealt with by the left or logical part while emotion impacts on the right side.
Pause
Moreover, recent studies from the University of Pavia in Italy suggest that it is the periods of silence between notes that induce relaxation rather than the notes themselves -- perhaps this explains the few moments' pause before an audience claps at a concert.
Music that is 'dysrythmic' (greater than 120 beats per minute) increases the heart rate by up to five beats per minute while the converse occurs with slower tempos.
Clearly this is a fascinating area for future research. For the moment I will not contemplate the possibilities that such research opens up.
Instead I will wander the streets and sit in the concert halls of Edinburgh, humming, singing and stomping my feet at every opportunity in the clear knowledge that it will make me a happier person. I urge you too to follow suit.
Originally published in
