ASSESSING MUSIC’S EFFECTS ON THE BODY & MIND
A lot of people think that music is merely entertainment, but what a lot of people don’t know is that there are many positive ways music can affect the human body and mind. Although music is entertaining, it also can help people heal. For example, if people are in pain, music can distract them from it. Some people perform much better athletically while listening to music, since it improves body movement and coordination. Music can help people be smarter too – it can enhance intelligence, learning, verbal memory, and attention span. Music can help people work more productively. While listening to music, people can recognize visual images, including letters and numbers, faster. With music having all these beneficial aspects, how could anyone say it is just mere entertainment?
Those who love music know that music can help them relax, decrease stress levels, and may even help boost the immune system. Music can also serve as a distracter – it can help keep your mind from thinking about frustrating things, such as pain. Listening to music can reduce speed of breathing and heartbeat, which helps one relax. Research shows that music therapy has successfully worked across the nation and the world on almost anyone, helping people relax, concentrate, relieve stress, and get to sleep (Corey-Butler).
People can listen to slow music to relax, or to faster music to concentrate. The Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Pavia, Italy conducted a test to assess the potential clinical use of music. The ones taking the test were young people, half of which were practiced musicians. Participants of the test listened to six styles of music, and while they listened, the researchers took notes on their breathing, heart rates, and blood pressure. When the participants listened to songs with faster tempos and simpler rhythmic structures, their blood pressure, breathing rate and heart rate all increased. A pause in the songs reduced heart rate, blood pressure, and caused minute ventilation. It didn’t matter whether or not the participant liked the style of music – rather, their level of relaxation depended on the tempo, or beat, of the music played (Bernardi).
Listening to music may help reduce the frequency and intensity of chronic headaches and migraines. Researchers at The University of Heidelberg, Germany conducted a test on primary school children to see if music therapy could help their migraines. Their results showed that all students that listened to the music had a strong reduction in frequency of headaches, and their conclusion was that music may be a promising treatment approach for headaches and migraines (Oelkers-Ax).
In humans, music listening activates a wide-spread bilateral network of brain regions related to attention, semantic processing, memory, motor functions, and emotional processing. Exposure to music can even enhance peoples’ emotional and cognitive functioning.
The Cognitive Brain Research Unit at the University of Helsinki conducted a study on 60 patients with a left or right hemisphere middle cerebral artery stroke designed to determine whether everyday music listening can facilitate the recovery of cognitive functions and mood after stroke. The patients were randomly assigned to a music group, a language group, or control group. For two months, the music and language groups listened daily to self-selected music or audio books, while the control group received no listening material. All patients underwent an extensive neuropsychological assessment, which included a wide range of cognitive tests, as well as mood and quality of life questionnaires. Results showed that the patients who listened to self-selected music had improved levels of focused attention and recovered significantly more verbal memory than patients that didn’t listen to music. The group of patients that listened to music experienced less depressed and confused moods than patients that didn’t listen to music. These findings for the first time show that listening to music during the early post-stroke stage can enhance cognitive recovery and prevent negative mood (Sarkamo).
Scientists at Willamette University have conducted tests and found that music can boost your immune system, especially when actively participating in singing or playing instruments. When participants played music, their levels of immune-system-boosting hormones noticeably increased. Since their immune system was reinforced by listening to music, participants benefited because they would be more ready to battle illnesses or not get them at all (Kuhn). Listening to music or singing in a choir can result in positive effect, and can reduce levels of a stress-related hormone called cortisol (Kreutz).
Music can improve physical performance. Those who like to exercise, walk, jog, dance, etc. can listen to music to become more motivated to start doing those things. Music can make working feel like fun. Listening to some good songs can make the most tedious and boring jogs interesting, or at least tolerable (Simpson). Volunteers of a study done by the University of Plymouth took 10-minute jogging sessions, some while listening to music, some while listening to nothing. The researchers took measurements of running speed and heart rate. The results of the study showed that there is a significant positive effect on those who listen to fast-tempo, loud music while jogging (Edworthy).
Music can help people learn better. The idea that music can make people more intelligent has received a significant amount of attention from the media and scientists. Research confirms that listening to music or playing an instrument can actually help people learn better.
Music can enhance some of the humans’ higher brain functions, such as literacy skills and memory. The way humans process pitch of talking or singing can be developed through musical practice (Besson).
Learning an instrument may even help people recover from memory loss after brain injury, researchers have found. A study by the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that children who undergo musical training are better at recalling words than children who have no musical training. The longer the period of musical training, the more words the children can recall. How does music help a child to retain words? One of the researchers, Chan, believes that learning music stimulates the part of the human’s brain that processes auditory input. As that part is stimulated, a part right near it which processes verbal memory develops at the same time. In this way, verbal memory training sort of happens as a by-product of musical training (Lavelle).
Music can help with concentration and attention. A study conducted by the Department of Psychology took 20 musicians and 20 non-musicians and documented their reaction times and accuracy in a series of tests. The musicians’ performance was significantly better than non-musicians. Consistent with previous research, the results showed that musicians had a more balanced capacity of attention (Patson).
Florida State University conducted a study which was aimed to enhance the pre-reading and writing skills of 25 children who were 4 – 5 years old and were enrolled in Early Invention and Exceptional Student Education programs. They had students receive two 30-minute musical activities sessions each week for a year. The researchers’ overall results showed that the music sessions significantly enhanced the children’s ability to learn prereading and writing concepts, and therefore, music helped the students learn (Register).
Musical training helps with memory performance and math processing. A group of researchers at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio conducted a study on fifteen normal adults. Eight had musical training since they were young, and seven didn’t. The test was simple: the adults were told to add and subtract fractions mentally, while researchers monitored them using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The adults that had been practicing music since they were young had a naturally improved memory, because playing music takes lots of memorizing (unless it’s read from paper), and this naturally improved memory helped them do math problems in their head faster (Schmithorst).
Everyone has heard of how listening to classical music or Mozart can help improve children’s scores on tests and school work, but now recent studies show that listening to even pop music can help young children’s cognitive abilities. The Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto conducted a study where a large sample of 10 and 1 year olds were tested after they listened to contemporary pop music, Mozart, or a discussion about the actual test. Performance on the square completion test didn’t show any kind of affect from the listening experience, but performance on the paper folding test was superior for children who listened to pop music compared to the other two groups. These findings show that positive benefits of listening liked music can help improve performance that has to do with the mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning (Schellenberg).
Music helps people work more productively and efficiently. It can effectively eliminate exercise-induced fatigue and fatigue symptoms caused by monotonous work. When people do work and listen to music at the same time, it can feel so much easier. Since music serves a distracter, it can distract people from the work they’re doing, and lets them sort of get into the flow of doing what they’re doing, while decreasing levels of stress.
The Department of Engineering Production at the University of Birmingham, England conducted a series of experiments that investigated the relationship between the playing of background music during the performance of repetitive work and efficiency in performing such a task. The results gives strong support to the idea that the use of music in industry could result in economic benefits because of productivity level increases (Fox).
The Department of Human Sports Science at the Nanjing Institute of Physical Education conducted a study aimed to evaluate the effects of relaxing music on aerobic exercise-induced fatigue. Thirty healthy male college students were used as subjects, and half were assigned to a music group or a non-music group. All the subjects rode an exercise bike and maintained a pedal cadence of 50 rotations per minute until fatigue. After that the music group listened to 15 minutes of relaxing music, while the subjects in the non-music group rested for 15 minutes without music. The results were that the music-listeners’ heart rates, urinary protein, and simple reaction time decreased significantly, and these decreases were greater than the non-music students’. These results suggest that relaxing music has better effects on rehabilitation of cardiovascular, central, and psychological fatigue, as well as the promotion of the regulatory capability of the kidneys (Jing).
Not only can music help people with stroke, dyslexia, recovering athletes, but it can benefit just about anyone living on planet earth. It helps young children and students learn better, since it improves concentration, memory performance, and attention. It improves body movement and coordination. It boosts your immune system. Who can really say they hate music, when it affects your body and mind in such great and beneficial ways?
