Classical Music: Therapy for Body and Mind?

 The eighth in a series.

You can only imagine how fatigued and grumpy PAN used to feel after a busy day of chasing nymphs all around the Greek countryside, typically with little success. We have to wonder if the music of his pan pipes soothed the savage beast…or, in his case, beasts.  

There is a growing body of thought that music can and does improve the health and mood of people. Consider the following:

A group of neuroscientists determined in a 2010 study that music, as defined as “an abstract stimulus,” can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. 

This happens during anticipation and experience of peak emotional responses to music, according MRI readings. Their conclusion: “Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.”

New research shows that even sad music can lift a person’s mood, while other studies suggest music can boost happiness and reduce anxiety. Recent research conducted by Durham University in the UK and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, published in PLOS ONE produced this conclusion.

The research involved three waves of surveys with more than 2400 people in the UK and Finland. It focused on the emotions and memorable experiences associated with listening to sad songs. The majority of experiences reported by participants were positive.

"The results help us to pinpoint the ways people regulate their mood with the help of music, as well as how music rehabilitation and music therapy might tap into these processes of comfort, relief, and enjoyment" said lead author Tuomas Eerolas, Ph.D. a professor of music cognition at Durham university in a press release.  

Other research has focused on the joys that upbeat music can bring. A 2013 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that people who listened regularly to upbeat music could improve their moods and boost their happiness in just two weeks. 

In the study, participants were instructed to try to improve their mood with music, but they only succeeded when they listed to upbeat music by Copland as opposed to some of the more somber pieces composed by Stravinsky. 

And a happier mood brings benefits beyond feeling good. In a press release, lead study author Yuna Ferguson from the University of Missouri noted that happiness has been linked to better physical health, higher income, and greater relationship satisfaction. 

The restorative benefits of music go well beyond changing the mood of people. One study determined that music helped people who had just come out of cardiac surgery in Sweden. Soft and relaxing new-age music was show to help reduce the stress levels of patients in the recovery area of the hospital following surgery. 

Another study showed that patients awaiting surgery often suffer from fear and anxiety, which can be prevented by anxiolytic drugs. Relaxing music was shown to be an effective alternative to these drugs, with fewer adverse side effects. 

Music also has the power to help us manage pain. A study on this subject was conducted with people suffering from Fibromyalgia - a poorly understood chronic pain syndrome. The music intervention consisted of listening to music once a day for 4 consecutive weeks. The treatment group reported a significant reduction in pain and depression at week 4 compared to the control group who did not listen to music. 

It is not clear why music may reduce pain, though it appears that music's impact on dopamine release may play a role. Of course, stress and pain are closely linked, so the positive impact music has on reducing stress may also partially explain its positive impact on pain management. 

Music may also improve the function of the human immune system. Researchers at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, PA studied how music impacted levels of IgA - ad important antibody for the human immune system's first line of defense against disease. 

The musical duel of Pan and Apollo.

Undergraduate students have their salivary IgA levels measured before and after 30 minutes of listening to one of four programs: A tone click, a radio broadcast, a recording of soothing music or silence. The lucky kids exposed to the soothing music had significantly greater increases in IgA that the others. 

It's likely PAN did not understand the science behind the positive effects music had on both people and deities alike. After all, in his famous musical competition with Apollo, the ending was not so happy for him - but Apollo had one heck of a good time strumming his golden lyre.

Is Classical Music Still Relevant in Today’s World?

 The seventh in a series.

PAN

Pan can relate to problems with relevance and, shall we say, attractiveness. Since antiquity he’s been broadly rejected by many because of his odd looks, mischievous behavior and unsolicited advances, especially from the somewhat intolerant nymph community.

Does classical music face the prospect of wholesale rejection from modern day audiences?,

People have long believed that listening to classical music can boost intelligence, improve test scores, reduce anxiety and help battle depression. In the early 1990s a study was conducted that claimed listening to Mozart improved “special intelligence,” popularly interpreted as an increase in general IQ.

Beyond its potential value as a therapeutic tool, does classical music as an art form still hold an appeal for broad audiences today?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

"Classical music is alive and well," says George Trudeau, Director of the Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State. "What has changed is there are more avenues than ever before for classical performance and public education, including public radio, the Internet, and other digital technologies."

Despite widespread predictions of precipitous declines in audiences attending live classical music performances, a study from the National Endowment for the Arts in January of 2015 showed a nominal decrease of 2.8 percentage points of US adults attending a live classical music from 11.6% to 8.8% from 2002 to 2012.

But that still means 9 out of 10 US adults did not attend a classical music event in recent years.

Trudeau continued "Classical music infuses our daily lives," he adds, "through commercials, films, public life, and popular culture, to motivate, set moods, and inspire other artistic expressions, and the entire genre is now only a download away."

There are some programs that are boosting accessibility to classical music, including The Metropolitan Opera’s HD cinema presentations, where people can show up in casual clothes and experience opera close to home, on more than 2,000 screens in 70 countries around the globe.

Lawrence Kramer

The reasons to enjoy classical music may be a blinding glimpse of the obvious. Lawrence Kramer who wrote “Why Classical Music Still Matters” back in 2007 told the NY Times that classical music “is addressed to someone who has a certain independence of mind.” It “almost posits for its audience a certain degree of Western identity, which includes that sense of individual capacity to think, to sense, to imagine.”

But there are still many strongly held perceptions that hold potential audiences back from listening to and attending classical music performances.

The BBC Proms – an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts and other events held annually in London – has taken the challenge head-on. Founded in 1895, each season consists of more than 70 concerts in venues such as Royal Albert Hall and chamber concerts at Cadogan Hall.

The BBC just published “The 11 obstacles to liking classical music (and why they are all in your mind).”

Their website states “Nowadays, the snobs who dismiss classical music as elitist or irrelevant outnumber the classical music snobs themselves. There's something in classical music for everyone, and there's no better time to find out for yourself. It's Proms season, so let us puncture some enduring myths and misconceptions when it comes to watching and enjoying classical music.”

The top five obstacles cited, and BBC Proms solutions included:

1.    Concerts go on for too long: Their answer is that most Proms concerts are broken into manageable chunks, complete with intervals. Some shows offer shorter works, and one even offers DJ Mr. Switch remixing snippets of canonical works.

2.    Concerts are too expensive: Proms concert admission is priced as low as £6 for standing room tickets at Royal Albert Hall in London, with 1,350 available for each concert.

3.    It’s Elitist: As the BBC states “It's a misconception that all classical concerts are black-tie or boater-worthy events. Unless you're at an exclusive festival like Glyndebourne, this isn't the case. At the Proms, anyone can walk in on the day wearing anything they like.”

4.    There are too many rules: The BBC notes “There are a few points of etiquette. It never used to be the case, but you shouldn't clap between symphonic movements (just follow the rest of the audience if you're not sure) and don't make noise during the music. But really the only rule worth observing is to be respectful of those around you.” And continues “Some Proms concerts are designed to be more informal; last year's Radio 1 Ibiza Prom was a full-on rave.”

5.    The Music is not for me: The BBC answer - Classical music is only as off-putting as you want to make it, and there's no reason why most of it can't be enjoyed on the most basic level. There are few things closer to pure pleasure than Elgar's Cello Concerto, as close to unadulterated joy as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, or as heavenly as most big vocal works by Bach. So think about it like this: Do you identity as a curious music fan? The Proms offer a wide selection music from across many centuries, right up to the present day. You will find much that you'll love.

Leave it to the BBC to provide these clever retorts to the issues many may have with classical music. There may be some valuable lessons to be learned by symphony orchestras and other classical music performers on this side of the Atlantic.

We suspect PAN may be paying close attention to the way the BBC Proms concert series is overcoming perceived issues with an alternative and more attractive perspective with nay-sayers. Hope springs eternal for those who are persistent, especially in matters of sharing cultural excellence and love. And there may be hope yet for our friend PAN. 

 

Can Music We Don't Really Like Bring Us Together?

The sixth in a series

Music, like food, is rooted in biology, and it is like breathing, all pervasive. But are certain aspects of our reactions to music universal as human beings? And is there some way that it can help bring us together across cultural divides?

When PAN wandered the mountains of ancient Greece, did the shepherds tending their flocks, or even the wood-nymphs (including Syrinx) take to his panpipe music at their first listen? 

Modern science tells us that music is a fundamental part of our evolution, as humans probably sang before they spoke in syntactically guided sentences. Music is strongly linked to motivation and human social contact. While only a few people may be able to play music, almost all of us can at least sing or hum a tune.

A team of researchers from McGill University Montreal, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Montreal arrived at this conclusion after traveling deep into the rainforest to play music to a very isolated group of people, the Mbenzélé Pygmies, who live without access to radio, television or the internet.

They then compared how the Mbenzélé responded both to their own music and to unfamiliar Western music, with the way that a group of Canadians responded to the same pieces.

The researchers explain, in a recent article in Frontiers in Psychology, that although the groups felt quite differently about whether specific pieces of music made them feel good or bad, their subjective and physiological responses to how exciting or calming they found the music to be appeared to be universal.

Dr. Hauke Egermann

The researchers arrived at this conclusion by playing 19 short musical excerpts  (11 western and 8 Pygmy) of between about 30 and 90 seconds to forty Pygmies in the Congo and then to forty Canadians in Montreal.

"Our major discovery is that listeners from very different groups both responded to how exciting or calming they felt the music to be in similar ways," says Hauke Egermann, who is currently based at the Technische Universität in Berlin.

Can people learn to love music they don’t like?

We all can readily identify music we hate. But can we intentionally transform our visceral response to different types of music?

Researchers at Australia's University of Melbourne say that the more dissonance (which they describe as "perceived roughness, harshness, unpleasantness, or difficulty in listening to the sound") that we hear in music, the less we enjoy said music.

However, the more we're exposed to a certain kind of music — either through intentional engagement or simple osmosis in whatever culture we're immersed in — the more we like that music.

The team played both "pure tones" and various chords for participants -- a mixed group of trained musicians studying at the school's conservatory and members of the general public -- and had them rate the sounds for perceived dissonance, and for familiarity, on a five-point scale.

Trained musicians, perhaps predictably, were more sensitive to dissonance than lay listeners. But they also found that when listeners hadn't previously encountered a certain chord, they found it nearly impossible to hear the individual notes that comprised it. Where this ability was lacking, the chords sounded dissonant, and thus, unpleasant.

Sarah Wilson

The ability to identify tones and thus enjoy harmonies was positively correlated with musical training. Said study co-author Sarah Wilson "This showed us that even the ability to hear a musical pitch (or note) is learned." 

From a practical standpoint, the results seem to suggest that we can train ourselves to better appreciate music. This includes the unfamiliar traditions, (assuming this is not just a clever way of promoting the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music) is great news for those who've been wanting to get into jazz or other musical genres.

This is reason enough for inquisitive people to "sample" classical music in non-traditional venues or based on various forms of popular culture such as motion pictures, themed programs or Broadway musicals. There may be a great opportunity to grow audiences for classical music, based on the way we all process music in our brains.

We're sure PAN will be right in the mix, as he tries to use these new scientific insights in his romantics efforts in the woods and fields of Arcadia.

The Consistent Way Music of DIfferent Genres Impacts the Mind.

The fifth in a series

PAN

Among other things, PAN was the patron god of the shepherds and anyone else who took delight in a free-spirited way of life. Pan ruled over the earth’s mountains and woodland areas, and was affiliated with all types of rustic music.

Perhaps that’s why PAN came to mind the other night at the Great Lawn in New York City’s Central Park as the NY Philharmonic started to play. It was pure bliss as the orchestra performed Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto” and Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben” on a warm spring night.

Imagine the same feeling you may have experienced attending a concert by your favorite orchestra – there might be an unexplained emotion building as you start to transcend reality. This is the result of your mind processing music, when a decidedly physiological effect can begin to take hold.  

John Blacking

Your mind’s ability to take in the music and make sense of it, has been referred to as “humanly organized sound” by John Blacking, a twentieth century ethnomusicologist and author a highly influential book “How Musical is Man?” published in 1977.

In the book, Blacking argued "it is the activities of man the music maker that are of more interest and consequence to humanity than the particular musical achievements of Western man", and that "no musical style has 'its own terms.' The terms are the terms of its society and culture."

But questions still remain – why and how does music make us feel the way we do? Do we each experience music in the same way, or differently?

The plain fact is that different people like different kinds of music. Some are delighted by classical music while others can’t stand it. Despite personal differences, research has shown that music in general has a consistent effect on people’s brains.

“Despite our idiosyncrasies in listening, the brain experiences music in a very consistent fashion across subjects,” according to Daniel Abrams, co-author of a study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

“We spend a lot of time listening to music – often in groups, and often in conjunction with synchronized movement and dance said Vinod Menon, PhD. A professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study’s senior author.

Menon continued “Here, we’ve shown for the first time that despite our individual differences in musical experiences and preferences, classical music elicits a highly consistent pattern of activity across individuals in several brain structures including those involved in movement planning, memory and attention.”

“The notion that healthy subjects respond to complex sounds in the same way” Menon said “could provide novel insights into how individuals with language and speech disorders might listen to and track information differently from the rest of us.”

Among participants, the researchers found synchronization in several key brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in different people who listen to the same music. This suggests that the participants not only perceive the music the same way, but despite whatever personal differences they brought to the table there's a level on which they share a common experience.

fMRI scan of the cognitive activity impact of music.

Brain regions involved in movement, attention, planning and memory consistently showed activation when participants listened to music based on the findings of the study -- these are structures that don't have to do with auditory processing itself. “This means that when we experience music, a lot of other things are going on beyond merely processing sound” Abrams said.

One resulting theory is that these brain areas are involved in holding particular parts of a song, such as the melody, in the mind while the rest of the piece of music plays on, Abrams said. “The results also reflect the power of music to unite people” Levitin added.

Too bad these studies were not available to give PAN some ammunition for his efforts to seduce the nymphs. He might have been able to make a better case based on intellect not just animal instinct.

Anticipation: The Marriage of Music and the Mind

The Fourth in a Series

Pan & the metamorphosis of Pitys.

If anyone was an expert on anticipation it had to be PAN. While he was a lover of the nymphs, they are reported to have often fled from his advances. Could it have been his off-putting half-man, half-goat appearance?

The nymph Pitys was one object of PAN’s desires. She fled to escape his advances and was then transformed into a fir tree. After this episode PAN was reported to have said “Here on the sacred pine tree shall I hang my tuneful pipe.” Not exactly the outcome he had been hoping for. 

Back in the early 1970s singer-songwriter Carly Simon released her second studio album “Anticipation” and its title track, reportedly written in 15 minutes, relates to Simon’s state of mind as she waited to go on a date with Cat Stevens. Luckily, the date must have been a success as Carly’s fate most certainly was not that of Pitys!

The song was written with a formula using verses followed by a refrain:

We can never know about the days to come.

But we think about them anyway, yay.

And I wonder if I’m really with you now.

Or just chasing after some some finer day.

Anticipation, anticipation.

Is making me late.

Is keeping me waiting.

The hit song broke convention because the refrain is not repeated after the last stanza:

And tomorrow we might be together.

I’m no prophet and I don’t know nature’s way,

so I’ll try and see into your eyes right now.

And stay right here because these are the good old days.

So what makes for memorable and enjoyable music, at least from the standpoint of the way that we as humans process the music? Neuroscience is starting to provide some answers. 

The New York TImes reported when pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum — an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamines.

But what may be most interesting here is when this neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might call the anticipation phase.

Daniel Levitin

As Daniel Levitin (right) puts it in his best-selling book 'This is Your Brain on Music' - "Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brains impose structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music."

Wired UK noted last year that listening to music evokes an intangible emotional reaction, but the neural basis of this reaction is complicated. Pitch, melody, rhythm and other components of music are all processed by various areas of the brain, and how it all fits together has (so far) remained mysterious.

IS THERE ONE PLACE IN THE BRAIN WHERE MUSIC IS PROCESSED?

Despite attempts to locate a 'music processor' in the brain, no one neural population -- an 'ensemble' of nervous system cells -- has been identified that could respond selectively to music as opposed to speech or other noises.

Now, for the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a neural population in the human auditory cortex that responds selectively to sounds that people typically categorize as music, but not to speech or other environmental sounds.

“It has been the subject of widespread speculation,” says Josh McDermott, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

McDermott continued “One of the core debates surrounding music is to what extent it has dedicated mechanisms in the brain and to what extent it piggybacks off of mechanisms that primarily serve other functions.”

The MIT study used a new method designed to identify neural populations from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Using this method, the researchers identified six neural populations with different functions, including the music-selective population and another set of neurons that responds selectively to speech.

THE ROLE OF MUSIC AND HUMAN EVOLUTION 

What is clear is that music – pitches separated by normalized intervals occurring according to recognizable intervals in time – rests on a feature of the brain with which we are born. This suggests an evolutionary value to music, perhaps beyond holding together the social order of a small tribe for survival.

It would not be surprising if we discovered over time that music, broadly construed, is fundamental to mating, child-raising, the propagation of moral and cultural codes, our political order, our sense of beauty, and at some level our language.

Take away our capacity for discriminating rhythms and note intervals, and we may be close to being crustaceans again.

BACK TO THE ANTICIPATION

It starts with auditory cortex – the part of the temporal lobe that processes auditory information in humans and other vertebrates - where musical information is likely being processed. This region of the brain can be active when we imagine a tune.

This area of the brain can encode the abstract relationships between sounds – for instance the particular sound pattern that makes a major cord, regardless of the key or instrument. Other studies show distinctive responses from similar regions when there is an unexpected break in a repetitive pattern of sounds, or in a cord progression. It’s something like when you hear a musician play a wrong note – which can be easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar piece of music.

As the NY Times observed “These cortical circuits allow us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events. They are thought to accumulate musical information over our lifetime, creating templates of the statistical regularities that are present in the music of our culture and enabling us to understand the music we hear in relation to our stored mental representations of the music we’ve heard.”

Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate these predictive mechanisms to give us what we want — or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better, akin to Carly Simon’s recording of “Anticipation” or even Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor.