Is music good for you? Can it make you feel better? Most of us would have no hesitation in answering “yes” to this question. We all know how a particular song or piece of music touches us, how it can elevate us when we are feeling low, or enhance feelings of happiness. Music that seems to articulate our sorrows manages, paradoxically, to lessen them. But does music do more than this: does it have an effect on the nuts and bolts of your physical wellbeing, things such as heart function, blood pressure, mental health and cognitive function?
Anecdotal evidence and numerous small-scale studies have emerged over the past ten years that make dramatic claims about its supposedly “healing” or improving effects. According to which study you read, listening to complex forms of music (that means Mozart, not Atomic Kitten) may make you more intelligent, improve your memory, make you a better communicator, reduce the need for pain-relieving drugs during surgery, and even repair damaged neural connections in the brain.
This is an area that is as grey as the brain itself because music’s effects on our health are rooted in our neurological responses to it. And it is in problems directly concerned with the brain — such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and dementia — that music’s medical applications seem most promising and exciting.
Paul Robertson, the former leader of the Medici Quartet, promotes the relationship between music, the mind and emotions, and says that music may offer a way into the brain when other pathways have become damaged. He cites the case of Stephen Wade, a linguist and amateur composer, who suffered a stroke and can no longer speak, read or write. Wade does not remember a conversation from a few minutes before, but can play complex passages of music. He cannot write words, but is able to write music.
Last year he completed a degree in music composition at Cambridge University. Wade’s story is not unusual; thousands of people lose the ability to process language, but not music.
“Music is the underlying structure of communication,” says Robertson. “It is hard-wired into our brains. Neurological research shows that it is not memory that is lost, but the access to it, so music may offer another route in, providing a kind of short-cut.”
Like everything else, regular exercise of the brain will keep it fit, and music appears to reach and stimulate connections in the brain that are beyond the reach of language. This has been the basis of acclaimed music therapies, such as that of the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Centre, in North London. During a session the therapist usually works from a piano and the client, who does not need to be musical, is free to improvise on a variety of instruments or to sing. The underlying tenet is: everyone responds to music, no matter how ill or disabled, and that the benefits are far-reaching, improving communication and health.
Jane Hansen has spent the past ten years researching the “healing” effects of music all over the world. In her recent BBC radio programme, The Power of Music, she cited examples of the palliative or transforming effect of music on conditions ranging from asthma to stroke injury, including one extraordinary case of a wheelchair-bound stroke victim regaining the ability to walk and talk after music therapy. Hansen also visited Hellersen Hospital for Sports Injuries in Lüdenscheid, Germany, where music has reduced the dosage of pain-relieving drugs by up to 50 per cent: “It works by making the patient calm and focused, and by displacement, as when you distract a crying child to stop the tears.”
Trauma is another condition where music has had surprising success. Nigel Osborne has been working in Bosnia-Herzegovina with children displaying emotional distress and behavioural disorders after witnessing scenes of war at close quarters. “Music offers non-verbal ways of communicating to people who don’t want to speak,” says Osborne, a professor of music at Edinburgh University. He went on to help set up the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar, which has the world ’s only music-therapy department dealing with victims of war.
Music’s ability to express feelings that are beyond the scope of words is exactly why it has proven so successful in treating emotional and mental health conditions. At a profound level music appears to touch core feelings of connectivity and identity in us. It can provide us with an emotional map of ourselves. Osborne describes it as making us “emotionally whole”, while Robertson believes that it “gives us a complete sense of who we are. Music allows us to understand life beyond language”.
At present, we know only a fraction of what there is to know, but scientists are endeavouring to discover more. Osborne has helped to establish the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development, in Edinburgh, which is researching the effects of music on human neurophysiology. “This is an exciting time because we are on the brink of getting a handle on why music has such a powerful hold on our emotions,” he says. “Music doesn’t have an effect on just one area of the brain; the whole brain lights up. This has great implications for science, and for human activity.”
ENERGY THERAPIES
Catriona Wrottesley’s article last week (Tap away the trauma) prompted requests for contact information: visit the Association for the Advancement of Meridian Energy Therapies (AAMET) at www.meridiantherapy.org; and Emotional Freedom Technique, devised by Gary Craig, is described on www.emofree.com. The NHS therapist Dr Phil Mollon has written EMDR and the Energy Therapies: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Karnac, £22.50).
The lost voice of hellfire
The maverick pop star Arthur Brown shot to fame in the Sixties with his high-octane song Fire. Brown moved to America in the Seventies, where he continued writing and performing. In the late Nineties he suffered a brain haemorrhage during a live show in Texas. His hearing and voice — famous for a window-shattering top-note scream — were impaired as a result: “I didn’t know whether I’d be able to sing again and found it excruciatingly painful to listen to very low and high notes. I decided to try the Tomatis therapy at the Listening Centre, in Lewes.”
The Tomatis Method is a listening therapy that aims to retrain the patient’s ear. It starts with the premise that the voice produces only what the ear can hear and, to improve speech, music and language learning, the ear has to be taught how to listen properly. The therapy, which involves listening sessions with special earphones, uses music, mainly Mozart and Gregorian chants, to “stimulate” and re-educate the patient’s ear.
The method has helped some celebrity voices — Sting, Plácido Domingo, Juliette Binoche— but also claims success with autism and learning disorders in children, and depression, vertigo, dyslexia and hearing problems in adults.
Brown says: “I first had to take a listening test and, just by looking at the chart of this, Dr Tomatis was able to give me an accurate account of my physical and emotional history. The treatment itself was pleasant; regular two-hour sessions of listening to Mozart and Gregorian chants. As the
therapy progresses, you talk through its effects with a therapist. The benefits increase as time goes on. The notes that had been painful to listen to became easier on the ear and eventually no longer hurt. I could hear properly again, which meant that I could also sing — and the treatment improved the flexibility of my voice.
“I believe that music can improve health. It has a direct entry to the psyche. Any music you hear is going to challenge you in some way; it can help to integrate you or it can shatter you. It can work both ways.”
For information on music therapy visit: nordoff-robbins.org.uk; coda.org.uk; musicmindspirit.org; listeningcentre.co.uk (for the Tomatis Method)
