Therapeutic Effect of Music
Since ancient times, music has been recognized for its therapeutic value. Greek physicians used flutes, lyres, and zitters to heal their patients. They used vibration to aid in digestion, treat mental disturbance, and induce sleep. Aristotle (323–373 BCE), in his famous book De Anima, wrote that flute music could arouse strong emotions and purify the soul.
We know of the protoplasmic movements of single cells, described by botanist Robert Brown (1773–1858), as Brownian movement/motion, and although random, the movements are rhythmic and produce music. In one of his romantic dissertations, Brown said the “motions are so musical…”
Researchers began to systemically study the application of music in medicine and healing near the end of the 19th century. Studies reporting the effects of music on physiological responses, such as cardiac output, respiratory rate, pulse rate, and blood pressure (BP), were originally reported by Diogel (late 1700s) of Salpetriere Hospital in Paris (the same hospital in which Princess Diana died
Diogel had soot-coated drums with a stylus to measure BP and pulse rate of his patients. Diogel would bring live musicians in his laboratory by his patients’ bedsides to conduct his experiments and record his findings. (Remember! There was no recorded music at this time.) His first paper, a seminal scientific work, was published in 1880. Diogel showed that music lowers BP, increases cardiac output, decreases pulse rate and, in general, assists the work of the parasympathetic system. This work was replicated by Corning of America in 1880 and later by Tarchanoff (1846–1908) of Russia. Tarchanoff, a professor of medicine at the University of Moscow, often called on his colleague, Dr. Alexander Borodin (1833–1887), a professor of medicine and chemistry and also a musician and composer, to play for Tarchanoff’s patients while he recorded the effect of music on their vital functions. Tarchanoff published his paper in 1903 and dedicated it to Borodin.
Music is a part of the cycle of natural life. Music is based on rhythm and harmony. Human life is based on rhythm. Day and night, seasonal changes, and all physiological and biological functions are rhythmic. We inhale and exhale, our hearts beat in systole (contraction) and diastole (expansion or relaxation.) Sleeping, eating, menstrual cycles, walking, talking, and other, if not all, functions of life are rhythmic.
A UC Davis neuroscientist, Petr Janata, in a recent paper “The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories,” (published in 2009 in Cerebral Cortex ) linked medial memory to music. He discovered that the region of the brain where memories of our past are supported and retrieved also serves as a hub that links familiar music
For millennia, man has composed and enjoyed music without knowing the scientific reasons why he would do so. We have used music to enhance spirituality, to get closer to our maker, to unite us for a cause, to marshal us in wars, to swell us with pride, and to mourn and resolve sadness and grief. Additional data-driven discoveries in the past 60 years show us the promise of music in healing.
Stimulation of the ventral nucleus of hypothalamus by 70 millivolts of electricity would throw the subject into rage. If one played soothing classical music while stimulating this region, the patient would not show anger. Clinical experiments at Columbia Hospital in the 1950s and early 1960s showed that patients with a propensity to religious orientation and enjoyment of classical music were a third faster to respond and heal postoperative retinal detachment than those who were not.
Manfred Clynes (born 1925), a neurophysiologist whose family fled from Austria to Australia, published extensive data documenting the relationship between music, brain, and mind. His classical textbook Music, Mind, and Brain , published in 1982, is the benchmark of excellence in the field. The limbic system, consisting of thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, mammary bodies, and fornix, all subcortical structures in the brain, comprise the “anatomy of emotions.” They are responsible for the autonomic or the vegetative functions, such as breathing, appetite, body temperature, and moods (e.g., anger, sorrow, love, hatred, violence, compassion, sadness). Music brings about the excitation of the limbic system with corresponding changes in neurotransmitters, such as catecholamine, indolamine, dopamine, endorphin, and the latest, neuron growth hormone.
A Japanese geneticist and musician, Susumu Ohno (1929–2000), author of the seminal work Evolution by Gene Duplication (1970), was the first to propose the hypotheses of the Barr body and human paleopolyploidy and also contributed articles to the journal Immunogenetics . Ohno observed that music is like deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in repetition and development. For example, each organism’s genes are composed of strands of DNA, which are made up of four nucleotides containing the four amino acids—adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The order of these bases of repeated four is far from random. Indeed, within a gene, certain oligomers, which are short chains of bases arranged in a set sequence, frequently occur in a predictable manner. Ohno stated that this is hardly surprising because recurrence is rampant in nature. According to Ohno in his classical paper Genomes and Music , “evolution relies on gene duplication; very much like music, it requires changes in variations on themes. All and all, truly new coding sequences generated by modern organisms recapitulate the first prehistoric coding sequence of eons ago…” When Ohno assigned notes to each of the four bases—cystine for do , adenine for re and mi , guanine for fa and sol , thymine for la and ti , and cytosine again for do , the genes made music. And that music wasn’t just melodies repeating endlessly, because in genes, wrote Ohno, “the monotony created by the endless recurrence of these decamers, hexamers, and their derivatives is broken by refreshing appearances of tandomly recurring base oligomers that are not directly related.” For example, a section of the ribonucleic acid mouse gene for polymerase II sounds like music from genes that encode cell adhesion molecules, which sound like a musical score Debussy would have written. And the sequence of human X-linked phosphoglycerate kinase (the enzyme for breakdown of glucose) played on violin is hauntingly melancholy, as though reflecting the Weltschmerz of the gene that persevered for hundreds of millions year ago.
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