1. why does music appear to ease pain? Whihttps://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.9zImvev9TVYUmAbvFPVcJgHaEK&pid=Api&P=0&h=220le the exact mechanisms remain unclear, many researchers believe one reason is because listening to music triggers the release of opioids in the brain, the body’s natural pain relievers.
2. if you’ve been feeling down, stressed-out, or have experienced a traumatic event, it could be a good time to seek support from music. From sensory baths using low tech, crystal bowls to high tech, 3D immersive environments using state-of-the-art audio/visual equipment—the neuroscience of music is underscoring what we’ve known intuitively for centuries: music has the ability to reduce stress, expand creativity, treat depression, and help us heal from traumatic events.
3.Music therapy is a burgeoning field. People who become certified music therapists are usually accomplished musicians who have deep knowledge of how music can evoke emotional responses to relax or stimulate people or help them heal. They combine this knowledge with their familiarity with a wide variety of musical styles to find the specific kind that can get you through a challenging physical rehab session or guide you into meditation. And they can find that music in your favorite genre, be it electropop or grand opera.
4.Music therapy is an evidence-based treatment that helps with a variety of disorders including cardiac conditions, depression, autism, substance abuse and Alzheimer’s disease. It can help with memory, lower blood pressure, improve coping, reduce stress, improve self-esteem and more. You don’t need a background in music to participate.
5.Sound vibrations alone are known to stimulate mood-altering processes in our brains.
6.For example, there are certain chord progressions that occur very often, which contribute to the predictable nature of music. But at the same time, you don’t want it to be too predictable. An occasional surprise note, dropped beat, change in tempo or key change keeps the music interesting. The combination of familiarity and surprises ultimately leads to the activation of reward centers in the brain. Put simply: you like that tune.
In an engaging and elegantly written blog of December 3 (amusosmusings.wordpress.com/2013/12/…/is-music-an-academic-subject…) Muso asks the question ‘Is music an academic subject?’ This is in reponse to a headteacher who is not at all convinced that Music is like EBacc subjects History and Languages, for example. Muso proceeds to make the academic case by pointing out that Music, and unlike the other arts, has a long theoretical history (Plato’s generation of thought about dance, movement, poetry and Aristotle’s writing on Drama seem to have been overlooked). Furthermore, so the argument runs, there was a time not long ago when musical analysis and more general thought about music were widely recognised as central to the subject’s identity, an identity to some extent lost so it is inferred.
‘My definition of an academic subject is that engagement with it is intellectually demanding, that it is mindful. Improvising, composing, perfoming music are all intellectual behaviours calling on mind and body. There is a demand for thinking, thinking in sound and thinking about it-critical engagement with it. To bifurcate the making and the thinking is unhelpful.’ In response, Muso made the point that ‘academic’ is commonly understood as meaning ‘scholarship’ and for there to be scholarship thinking is not enough, a body of thought about the nature of music is required, and there is a history to this. But now the question arises ‘to what extent is it scholarly to examine this body of thought critically and to question its authority?’ Not to do so would seem to be un-scholarly. ‘Scholarly’, ‘academic’ can very quickly gain an aura of authority masking a particular world view rooted, in the case of music, in a particualr musicology, a way of thinking about and studying music. In the current climate of political debate thinking of music as an academic subject all too easily becomes part of a wider ideological programme of cultural restoration enthusiastically and zealously enacted by the minsiter of state for education, and uncritically reflected in the Ofsted report ‘Music in schools: what hubs must do.’ That the report makes no reference to ‘critical engagement’ is telling. The advocates of music as an academic subject often draw upon music’s relationship with maths and its abstract qualities. Like maths, music proportions time. No it doesn’t. It is people who proportion musical time in relationship to the tempo of lived experience as part of social and cultural practice.