Silence has become a rarity in the modern world. In 1996, Maxwell Davies spent a month in Antarctica Hoping to find absolute silence for his eighth symphony. “Once the air was filled with music. The young have never heard silence. In our polluted world they will never be able to hear it.”
A professional music group belonging to this organization was made to use some selected passages from the beta-ragas (such as Kadanakudhoohalam, Anandabhairavi and Faraj) with an emphasis on joyful rhythms to find that unresponding of the mentally retarded too show an inclination to those rhythms, which brought in a new confidence in the minds of the musicians that their talents would not just be wasted in entertaining the already entertained!
The parents of those special children present during the occasion also conveyed that their children have responded so well to musical pieces selected specially for them.
What is the secret of those musical pieces?
When we carefully look at these raga-tala combinations, we noticed that basically, the sounds conveyed a sense of assertion — pleasant assertion, rather which had a `wake-up’ effect on the minds of the retarded children. Secondly, the force with which the percussionists played their instruments (bongo, congo, tabla and mridangam), tried to capture the attention of these children with their overbearing dominance on them.
While some children started moving their heads and limbs with the rhythms, a few of them who were very severely retarded opened up their eyes, looked here and there, waved their palms and hands and then went back to their original position of sleep!
The encouraging results brought in by these experiments are now replicated with more children so that a reliable statistical analysis could be made possible on the effect of music on the mentally challenged people. The children will be listening to 30 different Carnatic and Hindustani ragas and the observers and researchers will be recording the impact of these ragas in a detailed manner.
The idea is to shortlist those musical structures which cannot only activate, but also cheer us up, fuelling our thinking process to make us more productive and socially interactive.
This article appeared in My Doctor – January 2007 – Page 21
Edited by Geeta Shreedar, July 14, 2021