Last fall’s Duke conference on music and the brain left me wondering if one day doctors could administer music custom designed to alleviate very specific emotional and psychological problems, or manage complex diseases with sound. Now I see in Sunday’s NY Times that some pretty impressive people are actually trying to refine and test “musical pharmacology” in a clinical way.
A British neuroscientist quoted in the piece: “Physiologically, it’s perfectly plausible that music would affect not only psychiatric conditions but also endocrine, autonomic and autoimmune disorders,” he said. “I can’t say music is a pill to abolish these diseases. But my vision is that we can come up with things to help. This work is so important. So many pills have horrible side effects, both physiological and psychological. Music has no side effects, or no harmful ones.”
There’s evidence already that listening carefully and frequently to recognized classical music can be palliative. But it’s an open and interesting question how much farther we could go if the music wasn’t required to stand on its own as a work of art, or whether music that doesn’t hold up as art can be effective. This new group includes composer/therapists whose aim, the story says, “is not to write concert music of independent aesthetic merit, any more than an apothecary is out to concoct choice cordials. It is to deliver specific stimuli — dosages of rhythm, harmony or dissonance and timbre — at the appropriate time and in an effective sequence.”
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