What Makes Music Therapeutic? (1)

Answers can be found in music’s unique power to shape and share consciousness.

This article is the continuation of the series introducing distinct therapeutic functions of music.

In our hunter-gatherer phase -and as still observed in many tribal cultures today- spiritual leaders were often also the healers. Those who expanded their consciousness were the same individuals who diagnosed and treated illness. And more often than not, they were also the musicians of the tribe.

As ethnomusicology pioneer Bruno Nettl stated in 1956:

“Among many American Indian and some Paleo-Siberian tribes, composition is ordinarily relegated to shamans or other individuals connected with religion in a particular way. Indeed, musical and religious specialization are often correlated, and are probably the two activities in which specialization most commonly occurs.” - Nettl, B. (1956)

The use of music for healing might have been amongst its foremost and original use-cases. And in some ways, this remains so today.

We find music almost everywhere. We celebrate with music as much as we grief with music. We turn to music for relief, comfort, and peace, just as much as we use it to change moods or give us energy. While corporations and governments may attempt to influence our thoughts and actions with music, we also actively seek to be changed by music.

“Music has been used throughout history to influence emotional states, from military marches to religious ceremonies to lullabies. It is one of the most ancient forms of emotional regulation.” - Juslin & Sloboda (2010).

Whether at raves, jazz-clubs or karaoke bars. Whether alone or in groups. Whether through spontaneous self-medication or guided by a therapist. Whether consciously or unconsciously - humans continuously and actively seek transformation through music.

"Music is not only something people passively listen to—it is something they use to change their internal states, to give shape to emotions, to enter or exit altered states of consciousness." - Becker, J. (2004)

So what is it about music that grants its such power?

What is it about music that gives it therapeutic potential?

Image of Mawazine, a major music festival held in Rabat, Morocco, known for drawing record-breaking crowds in the millions.

(Re) Defining Music

How do you define music? If someone would ask you this question, what would you respond?

Introducing music in therapy will inherently expand and complicate the relational and intersubjective dynamics of the sessions. Recognising and skilfully navigating this is key.

To do so, a therapist must have their own views about music clear. How one personally relates to music will inevitably shape how it is brought into, and experienced within, the therapeutic space.

That’s why, before we can meaningfully explore what music does, we must first reflect on what music is. And music can be defined in a wide variety of ways. This series therefore presents a sequence of perspectives and concepts. Each of these highlights a distinct capacity or quality of music. These include viewing music as.. :

1. Structured Sound

2. A Transformative Technology

3. A Non-Verbal Language

4. A Process of Intersubjectivity

5. A Process of Enactment

6. A Holding Environment

7. Psycholytic

8. Psychomorphic

9. Psychedelic

10. Entheogenic

11. And more.

These concepts are not mutually exclusive, but in fact they overlap. I will begin by outlining some formal definitions of sound and music. From there, I will explore these of concepts that aim to expand, inform, and inspire a richer understanding of music’s therapeutic potential.

Sound is Structured Energy

At both ends of the spectrum, from healing to harming, we encounter the power of sound.

Sound results from the vibration of particles in a medium (such as air, water, or solids), and then propagates through that medium as waves.

Sound can therefore be viewed as structured energy. Although not electromagnetic, its oscillations carry energy (kinetic and potential). And sound is structured in the sense that it is characterised by differences in frequency, amplitude and form/shape.

Audible sound for humans exists within the frequency range of approximately 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz), but inaudible sounds (infrasound (below 20 Hz) and ultrasound (above 20 kHz)) occupy much broader spectrums.

Hearing range in Frequency (Hz() across animal kingdom, image taken from wikipedia

Modern applications of sound for healing range from diagnostic tools like ultrasound imaging (e.g., fetal sonography or cardiac echography), to therapeutic techniques that physically break down tissue (e.g., kidney stones through lithotripsy), emerging practices such as vibroacoustic therapy and guided auditory stimulation (e.g., for motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease) and sound healing (e.g., use specific frequencies or tonal fields to facilitate relaxation)

At the same time, sound can be used to collapse buildings and disorient or damage biological organisms. Infrasound exposure can for example cause nausea, panic and organ damage). Moreover, inaudible high-energy sound has been weaponized and used for crowd control, psychological disruption and military purposes (e.g., Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs)).

Two contrasting use-cases illustrated by two books, on the left “Healing Sounds: The Power of Harmonics” by Goldman, J. (2002, Healing Arts Press), and on the right “Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear” by Goodman, S. (2009, MIT Press)

Music is Structured Sound

Engaging multiple neural systems simultaneously, through a dynamic interplay of expectation, surprise, and meaning-making, certain structures of sounds can evoke subjective experiences in remarkable ways.

What distinguishes music from mere sound is intentionality. This intentional organising of sound in time, marks the threshold where sound becomes music. Music is curated and created with purpose.

Music is therefore most commonly defined as “structured sound”, a “temporal pattern of sound” or “humanly organised sound”.

Spectrogram of a Guitar (a) and Piano (b), taken from Schroder (2019)

At the heart of music lies a distinct act of human creativity. Music is an intentional sonic architecture. It is a specific recipe of auditory ingredients. And is created with the purpose to influence consciousness. This makes music both a form of art and a mind-altering technology.

Importantly, this definition also differentiates music from musicality and musical qualities such as those found in the natural world. With musical qualities I refer to the distinct properties that sound can have, such as rhythm, pitch, timbre, and its temporal-dynamic contours. Musicality refers to the innate or cultivated capacity to perceive, create, and respond to these qualities

There is a world of sound artists inspired by the musical qualities of our natural and urbamn environments, including notable figures such as Chris Watson and Francisco Lopez.

Music is a Transformative Technology

The instincts and impulses to create or to engage with music, dominate the timeline of both our individual and collective psyche across the entire globe.

Sophisticated musical instruments dating back as far as 40,000 years have been unearthed, such as bone flutes found in the caves of southern Germany. Yet, we do not need instruments to make music. We can sing, hum and chant. We clap our hands and stamp our feet. Thus, music-making is arguably much older than 40.000 years.

Before humans made tools, they made sound. Before they built shelters, they built song.” - Mithen (2007)

Top left: Flute made of swan bone, dated 42 KA and found in Geissenkloesterle Cave, Germany. Top right: Percussion made of mammoth bone, dated 24 KA and found in Mezin, Ukraine. Bottom left: Flute made of bear bone, dated 40 KA and found in the Divje Babe cave, Slovenia. Bottom right: Flute made of Vulture bone, dated 35-43 KA and found in Hohle Fels, Germany.

Music is not only ancient but also to be found everywhere we look. The Natural History of Song (NHS) project represents a comprehensive cross-cultural investigation into this universality and diversity. The image below, taken from their website, visually shows the outcome of analysing nearly 5,000 descriptions of songs and performances from 60 distinct societies.

The locations of the 86 societies represented in NHS Discography, with points colored by the song type in each recording (dance, healing, love, lullaby).

This wide reach and magnitude of music impacting our lives and cultures, can be argued to be similar to our mastery of tool-making and fire-making, our inventing of the engines and machines that catapulted us into the skies and industrial revolutions, as well as the introduction of digital technologies, internet and artificial intelligence.

The invention of music, Aniruddh Patel argues, therefore can be regarded as a transformative technology:

“Music may be a human invention, but if so, it resembles the ability to make and control fire: it is something we invented that transforms human life. Indeed, it is more remarkable than fire making in some ways, because not only is it a product of our brain’s mental capacities, it also has the power to change the brain. It is thus emblematic of our species’ unique ability to change the nature of ourselves.” - Patel (2007)

But why did the music’s impact rise to such transformative and global status? Or otherwise put, why is music so important and influential to us?

Answers can be found when recognising the centrality of musicality, as an important glue holding communities, families and minds together for countless generations.

The opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey known as “The Dawn of Man,”presents a symbolic sequence where prehistoric hominids encounter a mysterious monolith. This moment marks the birth of tool use and the “transformation” of human consciousness.

Music is a Non-Verbal Language

Far before the acquisition of linguistic language, humans bonded and shared experiences of their lives primarily through non-verbal means characterised by musicality.

In the Non-verbal Origins of Being I wrote:

“While we Homo sapiens emerged approximately 300,000 years ago, genetic and archeological evidence indicates that spoken language (encompassing verbal, linguistic, lexical, and semantic communication) likely only evolved between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. This means that we communicated nonverbally for approximately 67% to 83% of our evolutionary history.”

These musical qualities of communication should not be seen merely as precursors to linguistic language, but recognised as part of the primary mode of being with self and others that we engaged in for the large majority of our evolutionary and developmental history.

The result is for music to be made from the same qualities that form the foundational building blocks of our consciousness, including the development of critical ego- and identity-faculties.

You can read up my line of reasoning for this perspective in greater detail in The Musical Nature of Consciousness, where I stated:

“Not merely are we born first and foremost into a musical reality, but our very first memories - we can thus say without even being poetic- are largely musical memories.

The first internalised decision-trees of information processes formed within our infant brains, i.e. the foundational schemas we acquire in an experience-based implicit manner, have an inherent musical quality to them.

Not only are these initial schema-systems ontologically ancient, we need to realise that these models of meaning making occur around processes and phenomena that are most significant for the individual infant. They concern the ways we learn how to engage with the most intense existentially-charged tides of life:

How we regulate comfort vs pain, relaxation vs tension, satisfaction vs hunger, being in peace vs being in a state of terror, feeling safe vs feeling insecure, being in “heaven” vs being “hell”, when/how/with-what to attach vs detach, etc.

The most influential experiences that shape how we fundamentally perceive the world and our place within it are entirely non-verbal and predominantly musical.”

Music can be viewed as an innovation that capitalises on musical qualities that are charged with meaning. It is so effective in encapsulating and communicating subjective experiences, because its logic so closely resembles the logic of both our individual mind and our collective psyche.

This explains why music has become a technology with transformative proportions. It conveys aspects of the human experience with remarkable accuracy, immediacy and significance:

• Accuracy: Music communicates subjective qualities of consciousness including its temporal dynamics. Not only evokes music imagery and feelings, but the dynamic contours and evolution of a set of imagery and feelings.

• Immediacy: Music communicates subjective experiences with immense directness. They are felt fully and immediately by the listener’s full faculties (body, emotion, mind), in an un-ignorable and “contagious” manner.

• Significance: These musical experiences are not put onto the listener from the outside, but are created via an interaction between the qualities of the composition and the resonance of these with the meaning-making apparatus of the listener.

To illustrate the significance of this for therapy, In “Music is Always Directive” I wrote:

“The non-verbal language of music never communicates about concrete objects or concepts. At least when instrumental and free of lyrics. Music only conveys abstractions of subjective processes.

For example, a piece of music might communicate a process of grief. This music will not be about grief for a specific person or event. The music will remain entirely confined to conveying the dynamics of the grieving process. Not the content of the grieving. It will remain to the listener to project into these sonic abstractions their own personal content.

Listening to music is therefore a highly creative act. It encourages an ongoing flux of meaning-making. It facilitates a dance of personal associations, patterned in time. Music can thereby invite the listener to stay connected with the more personally significant dimensions of the experience.”

This creative aspect of music-perception is important. It creates a richness that resembles the phenomenology of life and consciousness itself. And it enables this to be an experience that is shared amongst others. It makes music-experiences both realistic and intersubjective.

This “Intersubjective” characteristic of music will be elaborated on in greater detail over the next chapters, where I will explain how an inherent social intention becomes embedded within music and perceived when listening. Leading up to the view of music as a process of (re)enacting the self, and more broadly a process of evoking worlds. These worlds can function like a “Holding Environment” through which we access “Transformational Objects” that can change, repair and integrate the self.

This reading continues via the next part of this series.