Music Therapy: Riddle of the Mozart Effect

You must hand it to the Chinese. They never fail to use body parts whatever the occasion! Now they are producing musical albums with some curious titles. Obesity and Constipation are two. Insomnia is another. There’s Liver, Heart, and Lungs, and also an orchestral piece that has been nicknamed The Kidney Bladder Suite by Don Campbell, a trained classical musician, composer, and author.

Most of the albums use traditional Chinese instruments and are flawlessly performed. The Chinese “take” these musical compositions like they’d take a herbal medicine, to help them get over the problems described in the album titles, or strengthen the organs named in the titles.

The Japanese aren’t far behind too. On a visit to Japan, Campbell says he came across more compilations of classical and romantic music with prescriptive suggestions. For headaches and migraines, the Japanese -suggested Mendelssohn’s Spring Song, Dvorak’s Humoresque, or even a dose of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris.

Music therapy is an ancient science. In hospitals throughout India, traditional Indian music is used medicinally. In Chennai, in the south of India, the Raga Research Centre has assembled an interdisciplinary team of doctors who experiment with different ragas for use in music therapy. They have found two particular ragas beneficial in treating hypertension and mental illness.

This is nothing new, really. The roots of shamanic and indigenous music reach back to the dawn of civilisation, when the sound of the drum, rattle, and other primitive instruments would bring communities together, launch crop plantings and harvests, and march tribes into battle. People believed that music and sound magically allowed the powers above and below to come together.

Humans, we have to assume, have known ever since they took to singing or played their first musical instrument (a bone flute between 43,000 and 82,000 years ago) that music evokes powerful forces. Evidence even suggests that dance and song preceded speech, which means that music is humanity’s original language.

Researchers, in fact, have found that two-thirds of the inner ear’s cilia – thousands of tiny hair that lie on a flat plane like piano keys – resonate only at the higher “musical” frequencies (3,000 to 20,000 hertz). This would seem to tell us that at one time human beings communicated primarily through song or tone.

Modern scientists agree that many different kinds of music can be therapeutic. Some people respond well to reggae or jazz. Others are uplifted – indeed healed – after listening to Gregorian chants, or heavy metal. But researchers have discovered that the work of one composer in particular – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – mysteriously rises above all other forms of music in its power to heal the human body.

This special ability of Mozart’s music to heal is called the Mozart Effect. Scientists are not only beginning to understand that some forms of music are more healing than others, with Mozart’s at the top, but they’re also starting to understand why.

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