The mysterious power of music

It relieves stress, revives memories, makes us smarter and even heals! Today, science is looking for an explanation for the mysterious power of music over our brains. We have invited experts to reflect on the mysteries of its beneficial effects. Poll results and first-person stories.

“Why read Plato when any saxophone can open the door for us to a world of other ideas?”* This provocative question by essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran shows how strong the power of music over us, how deep the feelings it awakens in us. But what emotions are we talking about? Psychologists at the University of Geneva have been figuring this out for eight years**. Klaus Scherer and Marcel Zentner (Klaus Scherer, Marcel Zentner) asked hundreds of music lovers what they experience when they listen to their favorite songs. Nine emotions were in the lead in the responses: admiration, sadness, joy, tenderness, sadness, feelings of peace and power, excitement and a feeling of going beyond reality. But guilt, shame or disgust – negative emotions – no one mentioned.

Music stimulates pleasure zones

“The sunniest sounds in the world are heard in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto,” says 40-year-old Inna. “Listening to him, every time I get such a boost of energy that I feel like after a week-long vacation at the sea!” “I get goosebumps from Massive Attack’s ‘Group Four’ and ‘Nothing’s Impossible’ from Depeche Mode’s latest album,” admits 32-year-old Igor. “I feel a tremendous upsurge, I immediately want to do something!” Some melodies, rhythms, voices inspire us, calm us down, help us change the atmosphere, tune in to work or, like 24-year-old Marina, start a new day. “I always got up in the morning with difficulty,” she says. “But since I have a Louis Armstrong CD turned on instead of an alarm clock, after the first bars of “What a Wonderful World” I smile, and the day begins joyfully.” “Music is very bodily,” explains Dina Kirnarskaya, Doctor of Psychology and Musicologist, “that is why we so easily enter into resonance with it, sing along, swing to the beat, beat the rhythm, feel emotional excitement. We literally pass it through ourselves. And that intimacy is what makes music a favorite art form for many of us.” In addition, we project our tension, our unpleasant feelings onto her, instead of being angry at ourselves or at others. The melody not only protects us from stress, but also pacifies.

Psychologists at McGill University in Canada have shown that music stimulates the activity of pleasure centers in our brain, which usually signal us about pleasant taste or sexual sensations***.

“Music is what you like, which means it is experienced as “what makes me more alive,” explains existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova. She makes the blood run faster. Eyes begin to shine, hands warm up, a blush appears on the cheeks. Have you noticed that people leave the concert flushed, animated, rejuvenated? In this sense, music works just like love or good food. It’s one of the most powerful sources of pleasure.”

Grigory Pomerants, philosopher “I listen to divine sounds”

“It gives me great inner satisfaction to listen to Bach or Mozart. Although it was not given to me from birth, it was not in the tradition of the family. My father had only six grades of education, and my mother graduated from a women’s gymnasium – that’s all. And so, having watched the film Chapaev for the first time – I was then sixteen years old – I was shocked by a fragment from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which was played there by a White Guard colonel. Of course, he was a complete scoundrel, but he played the Moonlight Sonata well. And at that moment I realized that there is a huge world that gives a person a lot of joys, into which I must enter. It turned out to be not easy: this should be taught in childhood, and I was already 16. I saw that I did not understand anything: I come to a concert and listen for the first minutes, and then everything slips away. The process of being drawn into classical music was very complex and long, it lasted up to thirty-something years. And, oddly enough, the camp helped me*. Because there was a limitation of all possibilities – except for the ability to listen to Tchaikovsky’s symphonies on the radio. And in the frost of 35 degrees – the Arkhangelsk region is still the region – I walked back and forth with another person, I didn’t even know his name, I just found another music lover. And so we walked back and forth between the barracks, until we listened to the entire symphony from the loudspeaker on the pole in this frost. Then, having returned to Moscow, I could easily move on… Music is also good because it can be replicated, because it almost does not deteriorate on a good disc. And that means you can go to bed, putting on a Mozart concerto, and fall asleep to the divine sounds of his music.

* After his arrest in 1949, Grigory Pomerants was sentenced to five years under Art. 58-10, from 1950 to 1953 he was in Kargopollag, released under an amnesty, later rehabilitated.

Music transforms suffering into sadness

Music accompanies us in less happy moments. “It may seem strange, but when I’m especially sad, I don’t like to listen to funny things,” continues Igor. – I choose something amazingly sad, like “I Am a Bird Now” by Antony and The Johnsons or “Last Autumn” by DDT. Everything happens as if I have to overcome one sadness with another. “In moments of depression and apathy, a person stops feeling, he cannot cry, and emotions arise only in response to something consonant with sadness,” explains Svetlana Krivtsova. “And such a melody (like a sad story in a movie) helps to feel alive, it becomes the music of purification, starting a beneficial process – sadness, which ultimately breaks the circle of suffering and reconciles a person with life.”

Music makes us smarter

“Without music, life would be a mistake,” wrote Nietzsche****. She, as a muse and inspiration, accompanies many creators and researchers. “Melody makes me think and breathe in new ways,” says psychoanalyst and music therapist Edith Lecourt. “New ideas often come to me in those moments when I listen to music.” The famous phoniatrist Alfred Tomatis, studying the influence of high-frequency sounds on the human psyche, found that after ten minutes of listening to Mozart’s Sonata in D major for two pianos, students increased their IQ test scores by nine points. Does music really make us smarter?

“It is based on different heights,” explains Dina Kirnarskaya. – Spatial processes are easily read in it – this is high, and this is low. And when three sounds sound at the same time, we already hear volume. Determination of height, comparison, memorization – all this starts the active work of the brain. Svetlana Krivtsova confirms these observations with the latest data from the field of neuropsychology: “Today we know for sure that thinking is an emotional process. The rational cannot be separated or opposed to the sensible. You can learn something new only with a certain emotional mood, which music also creates.” One thing is certain: music awakens our consciousness, opens up a space for us in which the emotions we experience can expand the horizon of our thinking.

Read more:

  • Oliver Sacks: “I don’t have time for the unimportant”

Natalya Zimyanina, music critic “Once a miracle happens – and everything inside us changes”

Music for some, noise for others. Some of us are so unmusical that we are unable to get in tune, dance, remember a melody… However, the study of the brain using magnetic resonance imaging did not reveal any anatomical differences in such people that could be the reason for this. Psychologies: Do we all have the ability to love classical music? Natalya Zimyanina: The more we listen to music that we like, the more we love it. We experience an ever greater joy of recognition. Music is like a religion: once a miracle happens, everything inside of us changes. I know a lot of absolutely non-musical people who, having heard some classical composition, fell for it. One once liked Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto (moreover, in the film “Spring on Zarechnaya Street”) – and for half a century he listened to all of Rachmaninoff and is sure that he has found his composer. Another believes that her whole soul, everything that she cannot express in words, is in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. And these are people who are far from music: an athlete and a doctor. I myself, being a student of a music school, could not really fall in love with music. Once, in the eighth grade, I was very offended, I locked myself in the room and turned on the radio loudly to spite everyone. And suddenly such beautiful sounds poured out of it that I forgave everyone everything, I felt beautiful and confident. And what is most surprising is that I manage to revive this feeling in myself even now. What did I get? It was Svyatoslav Richter who played Grieg’s concerto for piano and orchestra! I bought a record and listened to it to the holes. Why do some of us never listen to music? Because they consider themselves incapable of feeling it. So think those who have never heard music that would have meaning for them. There are listeners who go only to their favorite Mozart’s “Requiem” and, listening to it, for the hundredth time keenly experience the story of the “black man”, the “poisoner of Salieri” and the “common grave for the poor”, where Mozart was buried. One physicist says that for him there is no more adequate picture of cold space than the second part of Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata. And listening to Scriabin’s Fifth Etude from opus 42, he experiences the creation of the world. And this is a man who cannot even whistle “chizhik-fawn”! So everyone can feel the music. Some people just haven’t been so lucky.

Interview Maria Filippenko

Music protects us

“A megaphone man came to work in our department: he constantly and very loudly says something,” recalls 36-year-old Oksana. “I had to buy headphones, and now I listen to them with a light lounge that does not distract from business.” Music, like a cap of invisibility, can instantly protect from excessive communication. Why do most of us wear headphones on the street? Why does a teenager turn on loud music in his room after a quarrel with his parents? “Listening to the player in the subway or bus, I protect myself from random conversations,” admits 32-year-old Dmitry. – I turn on something louder, for example, electronic French group Daft Punk. And once at home, when the neighbors tormented me with the Russian “chanson”, I put on Verdi’s Il trovatore for them. It worked brilliantly – ten minutes later it was quiet.” “Music helps us get closer to ourselves,” analyzes Svetlana Krivtsova. – In crowded places – for example, in the subway – we often experience a vague feeling of losing ourselves. Flickering people, switching attention from one to another – it seems to us that we are hanging out in the void. The easiest way to retire and feel inner stability again is to turn on the player. By the way, one of the consequences of such a return to oneself is tolerance for others.

Music brings us closer to the unconscious

Musical harmonies touch the very depths of our unconscious. “Yesterday on the radio I heard Dunayevsky’s overture to the film “Children of Captain Grant,” says Elena. – This caused me a flashback: I saw myself as a ten-year-old girl in the hall of the Sokol cinema, where I first watched this film. I felt so good! I am 56 years old, but I have not experienced such a feeling of happiness since childhood. “Music can take us back to the past, just as the taste of Madeleine biscuits plunged us into the memories of Marcel Proust,” says psychoanalyst Didier Larue. – When we hear motives familiar from childhood, we involuntarily return to long-past experiences. This is because our emotions, often without our knowledge, are forever attached to certain melodies and sounds. There are few forms of art that would allow you to immerse yourself so completely in your unconscious.

“The music that we like and suits us at the moment is the shortest way to our individuality,” Svetlana Krivtsova is convinced. – This is an opportunity to feel: I am who I am. It requires openness, and this openness itself reinforces it. Music is a canvas for the projection of our personality. That’s why we’re so passionate about it.” It is a precious opportunity to deeply experience the emotions we usually suppress in our daily lives.

* E. Sioran “Bitter Syllogisms”. Eksmo; Algorithm, 2008.

** The study by Klaus Scherer, Marcel Zentner “Emotional eUects of music: production rules” can be found on the website of the University of Geneva: www.unige.ch. With the help of surveys, psychologists have determined how classical European music affects our emotions, the autonomic nervous system, relationships with people, and the ability to empathize.

*** The results of the study are described in detail on the scientific website www.sciam.ru

**** F. Nietzsche “The Twilight of the Idols”. Thought, 1990.

ABOUT IT

  • Don Campbell “The Mozart Effect” Medley, 1999.
  • Dina Kirnarskaya “Musical abilities” Talents-XXI century, 2004.

Read more:

  • Oliver Sachs: “Man is musical”

Alexander Galibin, People’s Artist of Russia, artistic director of the Moscow Drama Theatre. K. S. Stanislavsky

Delight

“Only classic! I enjoy listening to The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple. These are the teams I grew up with. Yes, the same ABBA! Her best things inspire me.”

Calm down

“Tosca” Puccini. Words cannot describe this music. Each aria is a masterpiece. This opera helps to find inner balance, and it becomes easier for me to communicate and do something.”

Relax

“Gary Sukachev! I can not listen to him for months, and then I put on any of his collections, and my mood rises. This person gives me a huge amount of energy.”

Change the atmosphere

“Klavdia Shulzhenko is very close to me. Thanks to her voice, there is a feeling of simplicity and clarity of what is happening now.”

Get ready for work

“Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck… Thanks to classic jazz, I recover, feel in harmony with myself and start working on.”

My CD therapy

The actress, director and musician reveal her “emotional playlist” to us – musical works that set the rhythm of their lives depending on their mood.

Tatyana Drubich, actress, endocrinologist

Delight

“Come on everybody! Сlap your hands…” – nothing can be better than old rock and roll. Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chubby Checker – they have never let me down, these are people who have made me happy since childhood. And you don’t have to worry about future generations – it has already been tested on children. I’m not talking about The Beatles.”

Calm down

“I still need silence. But I noticed that ethnic music gives peace with its special sound of Indian bansuri, Japanese flute – all this turns out to the beat and rhythm of my heart, which is about to wean from the disturbing beat.

Relax

“Good live concerts by real rock musicians. BG, Aguzarova, Garik (Sukachev. – Ed.) … And an inexhaustible source of strength – Brahms’ First Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. daughter Anya.

Change the atmosphere

“Bach. “Goldberg Variations” performed by Glen Gould is space music, you overcome gravity with it. Did you hear her? This is the most ingenious music that can be.”

Get ready for work

“I am looking for her. But the right music on set always helps. “One Hundred Days After Childhood” was filmed under Charles Aznavour (“Isabelle” sounded), “Moscow” – under the tango of Piazzolla. “Anna Karenina” was shot under the music already written for this film. Good directors always prepare music for filming in advance, this gives the right rhythm and plasticity to the game.

Leonid Fedorov, composer, leader of the Auktyon group

Delight

“The Beatles! It’s best to listen to them in the morning.”

Calm down

“Old European music. XIV-XV centuries: Johannes de Okegem, Guillaume de Machaux, Jacob Obrecht, Orlando di Lasso. Wildly beautiful! This music is mathematically precisely calculated, there is absolutely no dissonance in it, listening, you feel peace and power at the same time.

Relax

“Bach. Such a giant! This man set himself too high goals and fulfilled them. This is the most intense music. And from my contemporaries I listen to the music of Vladimir Martynov. For example, his latest opera Vita Nova. Again, because it’s very powerful music.”

Change the atmosphere

“Miles Davis’ jazz music, it combines musical flair and innovation. Or the playing of avant-garde guitarist David Bailey. Someone will say that this is not music at all, but for me he is a unique, unlike any other musician.”

Get ready for work

American group XIU XIU. I recently heard this very unusual modern rock. I was hooked. But bad pop music spoils the mood, but I learned not to hear it.

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