SCIENCE
Change Your Playlist, Your Music Selections Can Make Your Environment Healthier and Happier
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Although there’s debate about whether or not musicality is unique to the human species, there’s no question we are musical beings. That’s not to say that every person has perfect pitch, can play a musical instrument, or even carry a tune. Rather, it means that, from the moment of birth, we use variations in sound – pitch, timbre, rhythm, intensity, and melody – as our earliest method of communicating feelings of hunger, sleepiness, contentment, and irritation. Parents, likewise, use sound to interact with infants. In fact, research has shown that this early “musical” back-and-forth between parent and infant is so important that its absence can have large detrimental effects on the cognitive and
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Residential Tech Today | Nov/Dec 2018
emotional development of the child. In The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It, author Philip Ball posits that evolution “seems to have given us intrinsic proclivities for extracting music from the world. Music is a part of what we are and how we perceive the world.” The importance of music doesn’t diminish as we grow older, either. In many ways, music is as fundamental to human health and wellbeing as eating and sleeping. It’s been that way for millennia. In 2012, for example, archeologists unearthed a pair of flutes (one made of bird bone, the other from mammoth tusk) that were carefully crafted by an aspiring homo sapien close to 43,000 years
By Darryl Wilkinson
ago. Throughout recorded history, indigenous cultures have used songs as a way of remembering and retelling oral histories and traditions. At the same time, they used (and continue to use) music and chanting as an element of “healing ceremonies” for both body and mind. “A look into the healing practices of indigenous cultures, for example,” writes Jill Sonke at the University of Florida Center for the Arts in Healthcare, “often reveals rituals that engage music as a means for transcendence, diagnostic discovery, affirmation, treatment, and for communication across human and spiritual realms … Even more fundamental is the broad utilization of music as a means for
