’)Can music be good (or bad) for you?
By: Julian Treasure
This is a very contextual debate and it's dangerous to generalise. What follows is
a personal view. If you find the concepts interesting or challenging, I encourage
you to search the Internet and you will find a wealth of material on all aspects of
this topic, from the scientific and academic to the spiritual, aesthetic and downright
bizarre.Wherever there are people, there is music. Its origins may lie in mother-song, and in bonding or rite of passage tribal or community chant/dance rituals (both of which can still be heard all over the world today). Anthropologist Steven Mithen even proposes that music was how we communicated before we invented language - a ‘proto-hum‘ much like what happens if you try to communicate to someone with your mouth full, just intonation and tempo with no words.
Despite its ancient roots and its ubiquity, nobody knows why music is so important to us or how it works. Listing its functions from making love to making war doesn’t help much; accepting that it effectively conveys emotion is only a revelatory as knowing that electricity works.
Of course, all sound affects us. It does this in four ways: physiologically (entrainment can change our heart rate, breathing, hormone secretions and even brain waves); psychologically (affecting our moods and emotions); cognitively (changing how well we think); and behaviourally (we move away from unpleasant sound if we can). Most of this effect is nonconscious: we have become used to suppressing sound because we’re commonly surrounded by noise in the modern world.
Music is particularly powerful for three reasons. First, it consciously uses all the aspects of sound, such as tempo, melody, harmony, voice and timbre. Second, we recognise it very fast (think of the opening chord of Hard Day’s Night). Third, we associate it strongly with remembered experience (think of the opening two notes of the Jaws theme).
The complex aggregation of micro-elements that we don’t consciously recognise but that combine to have an emotional effect makes music what Manfred Clynes would call an essentic form. It conveys very well what the composer puts into it.
So is it good for us?
Physiologically, any music played long and loud is bad for us. Our hearing can be destroyed by this kind of exposure - just ask any professional rock musician. One in six American teenagers already has damaged hearing through excessive use of headphones at high volume. (Rule of thumb: if you can’t hear people talking to you from a metre away in a moderately loud voice, it’s too loud!)
Also, playing highly stimulating music (fast tempo, dramatic content) for long periods is probably not healthy because it leads to cortisol and noradrenaline secretion without the concomitant fight or flight action - unless you’re actually dancing, running or fighting. Long term overdose with those hormones is well documented to create many health problems, from depression to sexual dysfunction.
But are there genres that are particularly beneficial (or harmful)? Here we enter very subjective territory because one person’s music is another person’s noise. A Sex Pistols fan might abhor Bach, while a MJQ lover might be unable to bear Underworld. It’s very personal. The question is, does liking music automatically make it good for you?
Repetition is a factor. If I forced you to listen to your favourite song for seven days straight, your relationship with it would change. That’s why shop staff suffer so much at Christmas time, when they can hear Jingle Bells hundreds of times. Noise we can’t control is stressful, so this kind of repetition is definitely not healthy.
While mainstream experts like Tomatis and also plenty of people from the left field claim baroque music like Mozart, or calming devotional music like Gregorian or Sanskrit chant, or all sorts of ambient or new age music as generally beneficial, either for calming and de-stressing or for aiding cognition, there are certainly plenty of people who would hate those genres and therefore get stressed by having to listen to it! In the UK there have been successful trials using classical music to drive groups of youths away from places they were congregating in. The academic literature has focused on the thesis that aggressive, loud music (they usually choose heavy metal) is bad for you, mainly psychologically - it's been statistically linked with increased rates of depression and suicidal tendencies in several papers.
Because music transmits emotion so well, it seems logical to suggest that it may not be psychologically healthy to listen to a lot of music that’s made with negative emotion. For example listening to a lot of rap or death metal may not be healthy in the long run because much of it contains a good deal of anger, which you will receive and resonate with; most people would say it’s unhealthy to feel anger, or any other strong emotional stress, too often. To what extent 'negative' emotions are actually bad for you is another whole argument of course...
So in summary listening to music that stresses you or communicates negative emotion is probably not good for you. Listening to music that de-stresses you, helps you to think or communicates positive emotion is probably good for you. A good rule of thumb is probably to enjoy a varied diet, as with food - but make sure none of it is too loud for too long, because your ears are precious and once you’ve damaged your hearing it can never be restored.
© Julian Treasure 2010
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