After all these years, I remain fascinated by music’s therapeutic value.
As I write this, just above the computer monitor is an autographed photo of BB King. Down and to my left in my collection of 45 rpm records is the copy of his “The Thrill is Gone” that I learned to spin on a turntable when I was three years old.
I needed Soundgarden when I first heard them 36 years ago, and their posters, memorabilia, and albums surround me in this room.
I didn’t have the words for it until author/vocalist Henry Rollins said it: These records saved me.
I’m a scientist at heart: Show me the data, the research, the evidence that backs up a claim. I’d love to talk to a neuropsychiatrist about why music has such therapeutic value to so many of us. If we had that conversation today, I might speculate that spending the duration of a song vicariously experiencing what the songwriter described not only takes us out of our typical neural processing but compartmentalizes the emotional side.
Evidence is king in this field, though some pseudoscience creeps in here and there. An otherwise good counselor I saw years ago was mortified when I told her I was going to see a hardcore band. She pulled out a coffee table book full of beautiful images of how water reacts to sound waves. The water molecules’ distorted and asymmetrical appearance when exposed to heavy metal was enough to convince her that seeing a band like Helmet would adversely affect my emotions.
On the contrary, I find that music to be cathartic. It’s an opportunity to experience rage, aggression, anger, and many other scary emotions while containing them within the parameters of a song’s duration.
Furthermore, that music also has ample opportunity to feel joy, revelry, abandon, and many much more positively regarded emotions.
You and I are going to feel our entire range of emotions in a lifetime. People see counselors because of distress, and often this distress is from untethered emotions creating real world problems. We strategize to reduce the distress and have some control over the emotions. If you can fully unleash the ugliness associated with a situation like estrangement for the length of one song, album, or concert, I would suggest to you that what you’ve experienced is therapeutic.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks is a fantastic book that takes an in-depth look at how humans experience music.
