Music

[mab]

if music listened for four or five hours continuously ,has it any effect on brain cells.

Is memory effected by listening to music for long time?

[rakuenso]

The only thing I've heard music do is that it improves our cognitive functions

[Xavier]

I know of no reason to believe that musical sound waves have a direct effect on the brain, physically or chemically. However the effect of listening to, and interpreting music is considered a useful therapy. A few years ago the Chelsea and Westminister Hospital in London finished a long trial of non-clinical care for terminal cancer patients and of many alternates considered the most successful outcomes related to music and to art.

The hospital employed various artists and performance artists to visit their chronic care wards to display, teach and involve patients. I haven't been associated with hospitals for a while but I understand that such therapy is becoming well integrated with 'establishment medicine' in the UK.

The implication is that the patients state of mind is improved; simple pleasures and activity aid the 'will to live' but there may be a more influential unconscious effect on the emotions.

A tonic pedal/ in a musical score (when the root note of the key is continuously played in the bass line) gives the music a stable, contented feel whilst a dominant pedal/ (when the note played is the fifth of the key) makes the music feel nervous,edgy.

Studies into driving behaviour have indicated that listening to loud or fast beating music makes drivers accelerate harder than a gentle waltz, despite instruction to the contrary.

Such effects are psychological, as opposed to neurochemical effects of or after the interpretation of the sounds has begun as they do not all transcend culture. Whilst cultures generally agree about cadences sounding 'good' and discords 'bad' and the same rhythmic devices are invented over and over by different cultures the emotional cues or dominant and tonic pedals were lost on asian music lovers (though they are fortunately saved from this state of insensibility by our western cultural imperialism)

(As a neophyte music student I was warned to avoid the dreaded consecutive fifths/ in my compositions (when, in a chord the root and fifth notes of key are played and in the next chord the first and fifth of that key are played). It was said to make the music sound 'oriental' or -as risk of cultural slur(the english schooling system was still unenlightened back then) - 'ching-chong' music. Play it and you will hear that that phrase is basically onomatopaeic)