Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Pychomantiums, Music and Music Therapy

I am currently reading "Musicophilia", a fascinating book on music and the brain. It is interesting that this book discusses how the innate appeal of music to most people seems to defy both the notion that all human traits can be traced back to an evolutionary purpose. Music of couse can't help us to survive so it would seem to fall outside the Darwinian framework which so often in the realm of scientism, seems to claim to be a univesal explaination for all that is alive and indeed, all that is human.

Recent studies on where music comes from in the brain also seems to refute this in that music does not come from one single part of the brain and in fact, is both a right and left brained activity.

What we do know about music if we speak outside of the scientific realm, is that it seems to speak to our soul, to what is most human in us. Not a biological collection of evolved functions but what is human. It speaks to hour hope, our fears, our dreams, our anger and perhaps at times, our nightmares as well. Music in effect acts as a mirror on our soul. As I have said many times, we don't play music it plays us.

So what interests me, and why I sometimes frequent music therapy web sites, is that they seem to be attune to the healing aspects of music but also its strong psychological effects, negative and positive. What I am interested in is if there are universal Jungian type archetypes of sound? R Murray Schafer speaks about this in his "The Tuning of the World". Consider for example the power of the sound of the bell in many cultures. Is there anything universal about these sounds?

And if so, then where does this put the synthesizer. Before it, we were limited to fixed instrument sounds but now, the possibilities are greatly expanded. We can produced sounds that nobody has heard before.

So the synthesizer can in a sense act as a psychomantium to illicit emotional responses in us before not possible or so it might seem. What I am interested in doing is trying to learn the hidden language of the mind so as to use a synthesizer as a tool to speak that very language.

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