Sound of Body, Sound of Mind

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is a freelance writer based in London. He has a diverse range of interests and concerns, but his long reads can be found in “The Independent” while his poetry has appeared in “3AM Magazine”. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.

The well-tempered powers of music are age-old. Whether elegiac in its pathos or buoyantly uplifting, music has always been a euphonic tonic for the body and the soul. From Apollo to Florence Nightingale to the Nordoff-Robbins school of thought, music-as-therapy has a time-hallowed timbre. Music’s remarkable link to our emotions and the mind, to our synapses and somatic signals, makes it a natural remedial instrument. As a modern practice, however, music therapy can be understood as a goal-oriented psychological clinical intervention that can involve making, listening, discussing and largely engaging with music. In its active form, it entails playing instruments or wider forms of music-making; receptive music therapy involves a client listening and responding to music to alter mental states and bodily chemistry. Using the innate mood-influencing qualities of music, its therapeutic methodologies can help with improving emotional expression, as well as having empirically-proven physical and mental benefits. Under the right conditions, music therapy can improve heart rate and stimulate the brain, mute anxiety, muffle mental health conditions and silence stress.

Music has been used in the treatment of range of neurological conditions, including dementia. Globally, around 50 million people suffer with its deteriorating effects on memory, cognition, and emotional and social behaviour. In 2020, an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Castilla-La Mancha conducted a review into the therapeutic efficacy of music in the treatment of dementia. Promising results in the meta-analysis allowed them to conclude that passive music therapy improved the quality of life of people suffering with the syndrome by improving patients’ emotional wellbeing and cognitive functions. Combined with pharmacological and other psychosocial therapies, the positive neurological effects of listening to music allowed the Spanish research team to suggest that “music could be a powerful treatment strategy” for dementia.

While music itself can be therapeutic, there is a difference between simply self-directedly listening to music to lessen the pain of the world and clinical music therapy at large. The latter is a research-based scientific discipline administered by credentialed therapists and psychological specialists who develop medical relationships through evidence-based practice. Not to say that ‘self-medicating’ with music cannot be a source

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Enis Yucekoralp:

is a freelance writer based in London. He has a diverse range of interests and concerns, but his long reads can be found in “The Independent” while his poetry has appeared in “3AM Magazine”. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.

Publish date: 25.10.2021

Also read:

Enis Yucekoralp:

is a freelance writer based in London. He has a diverse range of interests and concerns, but his long reads can be found in “The Independent” while his poetry has appeared in “3AM Magazine”. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.

“Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world,” to utter the echo in Czesław Miłosz’s poem “A Magic Mountain”. Lying awake at night, I have sometimes found myself turning this idea over in my head. Like millions of slumberless souls, I have suffered with regular bouts of insomnia, which, in my case, were triggered by overworking, psychological pressure, and obsessive thoughts. Insomniac sleep deprivation provoked in me a profound anxiety, shades of paranoia, and the promise of depression. However, during one tempestuous summer a few years ago, I discovered an aural way to silence it.

Beleaguered in the stifling intensity of two interim jobs, I worked too much, too hard and too long; stress-ridden and marooned in the city, I fell over the edge into a nightly insomnia. Like quicksand, the more I tried to sleep and ignore the freneticism of my racing thoughts, the harder it became to drift off – I couldn’t say how I partook in Miłosz’s becoming. I tried everything, from books on balmy midnight sleepwalks to friendly lectures on temperance. Nothing worked. A sleeping pill prescription was complicated by side-effect trepidation spawned by my state of nervous distress; my mental health suffered and I feared a repeat of depressive episodes. In the past, I had used music to modulate my emotions, so I trialled a kind of self-directed musical hypnosis. Finally, here was something that hit a chord.

Sound of Body, Sound of Mind

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