If we strip away both the mystical claims and the medical-salesmanship claims, music/sound/vibration really does have a remarkable collection of agencies for changing the human organism. Some are well established; some are plausible but still being investigated; and some belong more to subjective or spiritual practice than to demonstrated medicine.
I’d divide the actual agencies something like this:
- Rhythmic entrainment. The organism synchronizes. Breathing, movement, attention, and to some extent physiological rhythms can begin organizing themselves around an external pulse. That’s probably one of music’s oldest powers: it gets the machine together.
- Autonomic regulation. Music can shift arousal. Depending on tempo, expectation, volume, familiarity, etc., it can help move someone toward relaxation or activation. Heart rate, breathing and muscle tension can change along with it.
- Emotional regulation. Music can evoke an emotion, amplify one, contain one, or help transform one. Interestingly, sad music can sometimes make sadness more bearable rather than simply making somebody sadder.
- Movement organization. Rhythm gives the motor system an external clock. This has real clinical applications—for example, rhythmic auditory cueing has been used in rehabilitation involving gait and movement.
- Pain modulation. Music doesn’t necessarily remove the source of pain, but it can alter attention, expectation, anxiety and the subjective experience of pain. That’s medically useful even though it isn’t equivalent to curing the underlying condition.
- Memory access. Music is an extraordinarily powerful retrieval cue. A song can apparently reach associations that ordinary conversation can’t easily reach. That’s one reason music can be striking in dementia care.
- Speech and language pathways. Melody and rhythm can sometimes help people produce speech when ordinary speech production is impaired. Melodic intonation therapy is an interesting example.
- Social synchronization. Singing, drumming and dancing together coordinate people not merely musically but behaviorally. Everybody breathes, moves, anticipates and acts within the same temporal structure. That’s a powerful form of group bonding.
- Attention control. Sound can capture attention, sustain it, redirect it, interrupt an automatic sequence—or deliberately exhaust the ordinary wandering mechanism by giving it something continuous to follow.
- Vibrotactile stimulation. Very low-frequency sound can be experienced physically as vibration. There is research into therapeutic uses of vibroacoustic stimulation, although I’d be considerably more cautious about the grander claims made for particular “healing frequencies.”
- Expectation and meaning. If a particular song means home, danger, God, mother, war, sex, childhood, death, or freedom to you, you’re not responding merely to frequencies. You’re responding to an enormous learned network. That’s part of the medicine too.
- State induction. Lullabies, marches, work songs, chants, dance music, laments, hymns, military drums and ritual music all demonstrate the same basic fact: sound can help move a human being from one state into another.
And then there’s the agency I suspect you’re particularly interested in:
interruption.
A sound can interrupt the ongoing automatic state.
A bell rings.
For perhaps half a second, everything stops.
Before the mind names it—bell—there may be a tiny naked interval of hearing.
That’s very different from “528 Hz repairs your DNA” and similar claims, for which good evidence is lacking. You don’t need a magical frequency.
The potentially transformative thing may be much simpler:
Sound happens.
Attention turns.
The ongoing script is interrupted.
For an instant, you’re there.
That gives us a very interesting bridge between music as therapy and the Norton Street/Kay GOD stuff we’ve been exploring as music as an instrument of waking.
In fact, I think there may be a blog hiding right there:
The Healing Power of Music May Not Be in the Music
Perhaps music doesn’t always heal by doing something to you.
Sometimes it creates conditions in which the organism can reorganize itself.
And sometimes it simply interrupts what was preventing that reorganization.
That’s a much more interesting proposition than magical frequencies.
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Here’s the Bardo bus now!
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See You At The Top!!!
gorby