Music has been said to be a combining ‘language for humanity’, as it can shifts the way we think, speak and feel without the necessity of words, but simply with a melody. Although it affects us all in different ways, it is undeniably a compelling tool for everyone with an extraordinary power to stimulate emotions and memories. Maybe it’s Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ which brings you to tears, or maybe it doesn’t affect you at all, meanwhile Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you’ leaves you sobbing. Ultimately, music speaks to us in different ways.
When you listen to a piece of music: classical, pop, hip-hop or even hard-core metal, it usually triggers the brain’s internal opioid system. Of course, not everyone feels stimulated or content when listening to heavy metal, so the ‘opioid’ effect varies from individual to individual. However, when you do get a reaction powerful enough for your body to physically respond with goosebumps (also known as “frisson goosebumps”), an emotional or aesthetic response has taken place; a moment of ecstasy, of being transported by an experience so great that it leaves you emotionally vulnerable. In fact, music that is powerful enough to give you that ‘spine-tingling’ sensation which lights up the brain’s “reward centre”, similar to the pleasurable stimuli which we experience from alcohol or chocolate… potentially explaining why together, these ‘substances’ leave some of us in blissful ecstasy?
Learning to play music on the other hand has been found to result in even greater stimuli. When playing a piece of music, you are strengthening the brains connections and engaging, simultaneously, with almost every area of the brain (especially the visual, auditory and motor). Both right and left hemisphere of the brain are engaged, resulting in an increased volume and activity in the brain’s ‘corpus callosum’ (the bridge between the two hemisphere). In other words, your brain is doing a full-on workout, explaining why reading and/or playing music can leave musicians mentally exhausted. It also gives you the rewarding factor and thus, leaves that feeling of wanting more.
Music arrives at the ear in the form of sound waves, which is then collected, and the ear canal funnels the waves to the eardrum, causing it to vibrate. The vibrations are relayed along the chain of tiny bones in the middle ear until they reach the third bone called ‘the stapes’, which connects to the ‘cochlea’. The cochlea is a world of its own, busy and complicated, it is filled with fluid that surrounds around 10,000 to 15,000 tiny hair cells (known as cilia). The vibrations passed on from the stapes send fluid waves through the spiral-shaped cochlea, which then produce swaying movements of the hair cells. In turn, these cells release chemical neurotransmitters that activate the auditory nerve, sending miniature electric currents to the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of the brain, enabling us to experience the pleasure of music.
I would say music allows us to feel ‘at one’ with ourselves and get in touch with something inside us we forget we have (perhaps our soul?). Whether it is listening to, or making music, we are transported to another sort of dimension when we fully enjoy a piece of music. Maybe this is why musicians say they feel a ‘high’ when creating music. The feeling of being spiritually transported is a seemingly popular one amongst us humans, as we want to feel a sense of freedom in this transportation. Those of us who find this sense of liberation and transportation in a moment of ecstasy, have found something rare and beautiful which we must hold onto dearly.
Dolphinmind 