Listening to music and appreciating music is a complex process that involves memory, learning and emotions.
Music, unlike noise, consists of those selected sound vibrations and the intermittent silence, which have a pleasant impact on our mind. Several components in music viz., pitch, rhythm, melody and timbre have a personal one-to-one and deep-rooted association with the individual listener. A listener may thus find a particular melody or rhythm as pleasant or unpleasant, familiar or strange and sometimes may remain indifferent to it. According to music psychologists, such reaction or nonreaction to a strain could be due to the influence of one’s cultural milieu and personal experience of music associated with events such as visit to a town, encountering a lover, dreadful or enjoyable time undergone when one came in contact with such music etc.
The Brain Research
The brain researchers in recent times opine that there could be multiple areas of the brain, which have relevance to one’s musical experience. According to them, music is processed by the right hemisphere of the brain, which is generally associated with emotional, intuitive and creative aspects of human beings. Some of them also believe that the left hemi-sphere, associated with analysis and reasoning, also has a role to play in one’s musical experience. Thanks to the arrival of sophisticated electronic technology, especially instruments such as electro-encephalogram (EEG), the brain scientists have a clearer view about the functions of various parts of the brain and their reaction to various phenomena, including sound or music.
Studies made with the help of electroencephalogram (EEG) have now confirmed that both the right and left hemispheres of the brain show responses to music.
The Mozart Effect
In an experiment conducted at Irvine (University of California) a few years ago, college students were made to listen for 10 minutes to either a musical piece of Mozart (the not so popular sonata for two pianos in D major), a relaxation tape or just silence.
Immediately after listening to these selections, students underwent a spatial reasoning test (from the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale). The results showed that the students’ scores improved after. listening to the Mozart tape compared to either the relaxation tape or silence. Though it was found that the effects of music lasted only 10 to 15 minutes, the researchers believed that memory was improved because music and spatial abilities shared the same pathways in the brain. Therefore, they thought, the music could be helpful in “warming up” the brain for the spatial reasoning test. This phenomenon which came to be referred to as the ‘Mozart Effect’ however came into controversy as certain other laboratories, which tried subsequently could not endorse these findings. However, one thing is certain. The brain is the most complex of all our organs and modern scientists are still striving to under-stand its complexity. Though we may not know now how exactly music could affect our brain, by closing our eyes and listening to a soothing strain that wafts in the air, we do feel good and for a moment at least, we tend to overlook the chaos and confusion prevailing around our being!
This article was published in ‘AYURVEDA AND ALL’ – March 2008, Pages 28, 29
Edited by Geeta Shreedar, July 2021