Music Psychology in Music and Mind in Everyday Life - Essay Example

Number] An essay on ‘Music and mind in everyday life’ The of the book ‘Music and mind in everyday life’ Eric Clarke, Nicola Dibben, Stephanie Pitts uses psychology to illustrate the impact of music in everyday of our lives They tried to explain the musical behavior and real life experiences via circumstances which includes listening, performing, adopting, learning and teaching music. The book elaborates the way music stimulates peoples psychology, lifts there spirits and can put adverse reaction on any individual separately, which is highlighted the way he engages himself with the music. This book in a very comprehensive way describes the psychology of music in three elaborative terms; ‘Making Music’, ‘Using Music’ and ‘Acquiring Music’. It describes the person’s psychology by incorporating some real life as well as some designed scenarios. This useful tactic helps in understanding the music’s influence in everyday life experiences through practice and research both. The basic direction or the principal focus of the book is hence; the understanding one should gain by stimulating both the senses of human’s mind; music and psychology, and how they affect us when they come together. The authors use the real life experiences to demonstrate the effect of music on human’s emotions and hence brain. All through the book research has been made in order to achieve the sole purpose of understanding and explaining the vast impact of music on human’s psychology. There purpose was to achieve collaboration between music and how a human mind reacts and reflects its influences. This collaborative magic encourages the writers to write about this endlessly fascinating research and which clearly affects the lives of millions of people on this earth every day. This book describes how the millions of people incorporate music in their lives, some uses it as an emotional regulator and some uses it merely to relieve the everyday stress, as in workplace. Choices and intervention of music in a person’s life inform a lot about a person’s identity. The book starts in the backdrop of Princess of Wales, Diana Spencer’s funeral, and focuses on the music played in that scenario. The music in that cathedral played lots of roles; it not only helped in organizing time and channelling the participants, it also helped in expressing the values of the individuals present as well as in expressing the emotion of the loved ones. The course of the song sung by Elton John ‘Goodbye England’s Rose’ helped in channelling heavy breathing as well as in keeping the listeners focused. This scenario was facilitated in the book to set the mood right, right from the start. It strongly and clearly describes the vision of the entire book and research associated with it. The entire book is divided in to three sub-categories , the first one ‘Making Music’ covers chapter 2 to 4, and gives a detailed account of how the motivation and skills are essential in creating music, how the improvisation is required in performance and staging the music and how important expression are. ‘Making Music’ covers those psychological grounds of a human’s brain development which takes part in motivating the person in to expressing his emotions through music. In this section research is done in the history of music, and how the individual from previous generation uses music to express their feelings. It also supports the belief that musician are more commonly introverts and they spend a lot of time in practicing and composing their music, only that way they are able to produce master pieces and this is their only way of putting across their emotions. The next section is of ‘Using Music’, comprises of chapter 5 to 7, elaborates the use of music. This section gives a detailed account about how people use music in order to achieve mental peace and harmony. How music help them in focusing, combating stress, giving them a unique identity and to harness their moods. It also acts as a therapeutic ingredient which is essential in a person life nowadays more than ever since the availability of music is painless and effort-less, unlike the yester years when it was a luxurious commodity of the very few. It also researches and defines the difference between listening and hearing, and how it affects personal and group hearing separately. This section also introduces studies which show that people use music to alter their moods and emotion, to focus, to forget, to relax or to concentrate. Like in an office environment music acts as an agent to block out noise and helps in concentrating, it also reduces the work place stress. Such therapeutic usage of music is known and highlighted in the corporate world for a long time now. Music also helps in describing ones true self or in certain instances, their alters-egos. Music serves a different purpose for every individual in different frame of minds and situations. In the next section, ‘Acquiring Music’, comprising of chapter 8 to 10, writers emphasize on the way people adopt and acquire music for their self development all through their lives. They portray that an infant’s sense of learning and developing starts right from the 20 weeks of gestation. They believe that a foetus who is familiar with music before his birth and who was subjected to music listening in the womb can recognize that sound and music after the birth as well. Mozart’s Effect follows the discussion, which help in developing cognitive defects in infants. It is also put forth that music helps in releasing ‘oxytocin’ in human’s mind, which is a feel good hormone and help in mood alteration in individuals and can enhance bounding. The last chapter present an overview of the history of music right from its beginning, giving a summary of the great philosophers Plato, Aristotle and Aristoxenus understanding on the subject of music; later in the chapter music is described as the discipline of psychology, highlighting its significance for the understanding of human subjectivity. The authors of the book involved themselves in a very complex task of understanding the human mind through music. The writers were inclined towards the brain development and role of music in their lives and personalities whether they are lone listeners or group listeners. They tried to encompass the views and influences of music on composers, producers and listeners or motivators alike. Their focus was music psychology which is a very unique and bold topic to aim for. Nevertheless, their focus was very firm on the topics of musicology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience and sociology. Although the topic of the book was very well versed and informative as well as interesting, but it was more like introducing some new ideas rather than the elaboration of those ideas or presenting extensive analysis. References were also limited to the footnotes and they used the method of illustration of real and imaginary life events to elaborate their theories, which was very captivating at times, as in the case of the story of ‘Little Rudolph’ on page 142, but it fails to justify or to prove a point. They should have used more research work to give detail to their theory of how music can be used as a tool of psychology. As in the case of the ‘head-turning’ experiment done on infants, which describes how the infants reacted when they hear a familiar sound and turns their heads towards it and many infants reacted in the same, this experiment does not come to a conclusion, it does not fully accomplishes a statement at the end. They also introduced the term ‘Enculturation’ where again infants were tested upon, and it is defined that infants can hear high pitch voices from different cultures but this ability subsides with the time once they get more comfortable in the sounds of their environment, this theory was also not fully researched, it was more an idea then an analysis. On the whole, the entire book force the readers to think, and it very clearly and quite comfortably made its point that music can affect human’s psychology and can play very vital role in its development. Over the years, it has been learnt from the book, human race has developed and modified itself through the use of music, it has employed music in revolutionizing the nations, questioning the authorities, expressing their anger, fear, and inner most feeling through music. Music has helped in healing, combating stress related diseases, work load as well as mood alteration, and last but not the least in expressing the very sensitive and fragile emotion of love. It proposed that music has a very difficult task of understanding human’s brain and helping in the development and curing brain disorders through it. The Authors, Eric Clarke is a Heather Professor of Psychology in Oxford University. Before this book he has also written a book called ‘Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning’ (OUP, 2005) and is the co-editor of ‘Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects’. In his previous books he has enhanced the topics of psychology of performance and the role of recording music on listening. He has also described the ecological changes music brought about in humans in these books. His previous book acts more as a road map to this book, he establishes the ground in the previous book where he learned and teaches the natural occurrences in human because of music plus the methods of music making which affect us in different ways. Then this book ‘Music and Mind in the everyday life’ comes in to existence. Although readers do not need to read his previous work to get an understanding of this book, but if the readers are familiar with his previous book they can easily justify his journey to this book and can understand the background as well. As for the co-authors, Dr.Nicola Dibben & Dr.Stephanie Pitts, both are senior lecturers of music in Sheffield University, and are published writers as well. Their previous work was focused more towards individual musician and their working, amateur’s musicians, emotion related to music, and role of gender in music. Although their field of interest was more diversified but they had ample knowledge through their experience to write profoundly on the music psychology as they have done in this book. There are in-numerous books written on the topic of ‘Music Psychology’, how mind is altered through music. For example there were books written in the early 19th centuries which serve as the bible in this topic, like ‘Psychology of Music’ written by Carl Emil Seashore, 1938. Books like these touch such chords in human brains which were never addressed before. As the music advances so the writers as well, the book written in 1999 by Diana Deutesch ‘The Psychology of Music’ and in 1988(originally written in 1958) ‘The perception of Music’ by Robert Frances and W. J. Dowling dwells on the topics of how the exposure to music and taking the formal training in perceiving the music is required to touch the audience on deeper more psychological level. In more recent times, the book ‘ Psychology for Musicians: Understanding and Acquiring the Skills ‘ by Andreas C. Lehmann; John A. Sloboda; Robert H. Woody includes the topic of modern musicians psychology in performing and composing music, this book was generated more for the purpose of curriculum then to discuss new ideas. The book which comes in to close vicinity of our book, is Tia DeNora’s ‘Music in everyday life’ written in 2000, although the theme seems closely related but this book is more of a book on sociology of music rather than on psychology, it comprises mainly of detailed interviews and social reviews. “Music and Mind in Everyday Life” appeals to both musicians and non-musicians alike. It can also work as a tool for understanding human behaviour and can be useful for music scholars, psychologists, educators and music therapists alike. This book also opens your mind to understand music on a deeper and spiritual level, and can help us in addressing our very own inner emotion. Work Cited Eric, Clarke, Nicola, Dibben & Stephanie Pitts. ‘Music and Mind in Everyday Life’ Oxford University Press. Print. Read More