Choosing Music to Soothe the Savage Beast

By Porter Shimer

Healers in ancient times used music to treat heart problems, to  lift depression and to cure insomnia. It worked as medicine then. And it can work even better today because there is more noise for music to drown out.

Dr. Ernest A. Peterson, chief of the division of auditory research at the University of Miami School of Medicine, did an experiment which suggests that the amount of noise we live with today could be doing us harm.

Peterson took a healthy rhesus monkey and for one day exposed it to normal levels of everyday 20^th century noise. The ring of the an alarm clock, the buzz of an electric razor and the dialogue of the “Today Show” made up the first part of the monkey’s morning. Following 30 minutes of canned traffic, it was on to a 9-to-5 symphony of workday traffic. Nightfall brought televised football. And the monkey’s sleep, finally, was lightly polluted by the hum of a room air conditioner.

How did he hold up? Not well. His blood pressure and heart rate increased 30 percent, and stayed elevated long after relative peace was restored.

“These results are not definitive,” Peterson remarked on the findings, “but they do suggest to us that noise may be one of the contributing factors to the long-term development of cardiovascular disease in man.”

Why is noise so upsetting? Because we’re still not used to it. While technological progress has brought with it a veritable holocaust of sound, we remain stuck inside our bodies that evolved during times of relative quiet. Big noises for the cavemen meant big trouble, be it in the form of an approaching lion or a volcanic eruption. Our bodies haven’t quite been able to forget that.

We may think we’ve adapted to the clamor  of the 20^th century, says Dr. Jack Westman, professor  of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. But subconsciously, it’s weighing on us, he says.

When a group of 960 housewives were interviewed in Denmark, for example, it was found that those who lived in loud neighborhoods (with noise levels in the 68-to-78 decibel range) saw doctors more often for psychological problems, used more tranquilizers and showed higher rates of mental illness than women living in areas where decibel levels were between 51 and 63.

Westman says noise has a way of bringing submerged tensions to the surface. He sees it as a catalyst to more warfare along the domestic front than many of us realize.

So what do we do about  noise if – as Westman says – there is no healthy way of simply tuning it out?

We can do our best to eliminate it. Or we can reverse its disquieting effects by exposing ourselves to its opposite: music.

If noise is sound out of order, music is sound in order. And the more ordered the sound is, the better it is for us.

An interesting example of this comes from a study done in west Germany, which showed that professional musicians, while rehearsing discordantly modern compositions made up of arbitrary sounds and noises, complained of nervous tension, headaches, depression, difficulty sleeping, marital and family problems and even impotence. None of these areas were a problem when these musicians rehearsed classical scores.

Flatly stated by the German Tribune, “The majority of these musicians are convinced their health is suffering from constant recitals of contemporary music.”

Music, In other words, can do damage as well as good. It is indeed powerful stuff. How does it work?

Along two fronts, basically. Music has rhythm, a eat that works on us physically. And it has a melody, a tune that works on us psychologically.

For example, Dr. John Diamond, former professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, did an experiment which showed that when people listened to a drumbeat characteristic of much of today’s rock and roll, they were robbed of two-thirds of their muscular strength. Because the beat, two shorts followed by a long, is the exact inverse of the rhythm of the heart., it interferes with the transmission of brain waves from one side of the brain to the other, Diamond says, and the result is muscular weakness. On the other hand, the beat of a waltz had a strengthening effect, he determined.

What can a melody do? Put the finishing touches on rhythm. What rhythm starts physically, melody finishes emotionally. In a work of art, the two cooperate, and the result can be a very moving experience.

So what can all that mean to you? A way to alter your consciousness without having to alter your health.

The next time you find yourself in a mood that you either don’t like or wouldn’t mind amplifying, try putting on some music.

If your mood is low, don’t rush it. Start out with something even sadder than you are, to bleed yourself. Then work up gradually to happier pieces.

By the same token, if you are wound up, and you would like to wind down, try irritating yourself that final “inch” with something just as hyper as you are. Then work down to where you want to be. Don’t make the mistake of trying to do too much, too fast. Establish a rapport first between yourself and music.

• When to listen to what – making specific recommendations is difficult, because music relies on personal associations for a large part of its effect. We’ll try, nevertheless.
• To relax, look to lightly orchestrated pieces with easy rhythmic flow: Debussy’s “Claire de lune”; Wagner’s “Song of the Evening Star” from “Tannhauser”; Dvorack’s “New World Symphony.”
• To perk up, try selections with pronounced and bouncy rhythms: Gounod’s “Soldier’s Chorus”; Berlioz’s “Hungarian March”; Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”; Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
• To fall asleep, some good choices are “The Slumber Motif” from Wagner’s “Die Walkure”; Strauss’ “Blue Danube”; “The Bartered Bride” by Bach.
• To lift you spirits, try Chopin’s mazurkas and preludes; Shubert’s “Faith in Spring”; the melodious arias of Verdi and Bellini; Mozart’s sonatas; the first and second movements of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony; or the slower movement of Beethoven’s Eighth.

Put these pieces on (or others like them) as background music, or give them your undivided attention. The nice thing about music is that it works whether you concentrate on it or not. That was demonstrated recently in an experiment in which a group of college students allowed to listen to music during final exams had a substantially lesser increase in blood pressure than a group not allowed the same musical advantage. The group accompanied by music also scored better (Preventive Medicine, March, 1979).

If classical music is not your style, go pop. There is no such thing as good or bad taste in something as intensely personal as music.