How Certain Music & Sounds Improve Mood & Heal the Mind & Body

We begin life (and even before) being affected by music. It is widely noted that babies first begin to respond to music while still in the womb. Everyone has heard that playing classical music for your baby supposedly helps the baby become smarter. In the United Kingdom, a study concluded that children are able to recognize and even prefer certain music or songs after birth that they had heard while in the womb up to three months before birth. I can personally account to this. I used to sing the song, You Are My Sunshine to my daughter while she was still growing in my womb. I did this a few times a day. (Stop rolling your eyes! I heard it was good for the baby so I did it even though I felt stupid at first!) So, even after she was born and to this day (currently at 21 months of age) whenever she gets upset or riled up, I sing that song to her. She actually stares at me as if she recognizes it. It calms her and usually evokes a smile immediately.

Although the genre of music made no difference, the babies who were exposed to songs with a faster tempo showed a stronger preference for that song than those who had heard something slower. According to studies, researchers have also established that playing soft background music or a mother's humming actually helped premature babies by aiding faster weight gain and were able to leave hospitals earlier versus the ones who aren't. Pretty cool, huh?

Many studies show that besides just the melody and music, amplitude has an effect on some aspect of most people. The lowest and loudest amplitudes extracted the slowest response time. (For instance in shoppers.) If the music was too low, the participants were working harder to hear it and if it was too loud, they became distracted and often annoyed. However, moderate music levels did make the response time faster than if there was no music.
So, if you are planning on opening a store or currently own one, keep the music level MODERATE. You don't operate a night club or dance bar! Just think about this: How many times have you been driving and looking for an address or street sign and TURNED DOWN the radio? Haha! Food for thought, right there!

When Albert Einstein spoke about his theory of relativity, he stated, "It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition." As a child, Einstein did very poorly in school and the teachers recommended that his parents not even bother to continue teaching him. His parents luckily ignored the teachers and instead, decided to buy him a violin. Throughout his life, Einstein improvised on his violin in order to figure out his problems and equations. Music was a key factor helping him become the genius we now recognize him to have been.
Music has also been shown to aid in memory. The melody makes text easier to remember. This increases if the melody is simple and repeated such as Mozart and other classical musicians.

According to Michigan State University which began the world's first music therapy program in 1944, there are many specific reasons why music therapy works. Music with a strong beat can actually cause brainwaves to resonate in sync with the beat, with faster beats bringing sharper concentration and more alert thinking. A slower tempo promotes a calm, meditative state. Both can continue being beneficial to you even after you stop listening because it helps the brain in changing brainwave speed by itself later.

Certain music and sounds have proven to show beneficial changes in heart and breathing rates, inducing relaxation and calming stress problems. Music also brings a elevating state of mind and has helped to keep depression, anxiety and many other debilitating ailments under control.

Researchers at the University of Toronto are developing brain wave music which is a type of music therapy that involves creating music that imitates the patterns formed by individual brain waves. The people they test the music on are given their own CD, with music made for their specific brain waves. They're hoping that this new approach may help relieve chronic insomnia, anxiety and/or depression, even without the additional assistance of medication.

Music is invariably a crucial part of everyone's life and has shaped the way we all live and develop. If used in the right ways, it can help us learn, heal, or even persist throughout our last years of life when certain ailments impact our mind. There is still so much to learn and discover about the way our minds interpret music and how if effects all of us, but we have a great foundation of evidence to date.


Hopefully elementary and high schools will continue music programs and researchers will prolong studies and tests to help us learn how else music can benefit us all.