Music for healing: from magic to medicine

Claudius Conrad a

"Music has had an illustrious position in the course of human history: not only as an art, but also as a medium for healing. Only recently has there been growing interest by the research community in trying to understand how music affects patients and physicians. Within the past few years, human and animal studies have examined the psychological and physiological effects of music. Yet a fundamental question underlying the role of music in health is also to ask why music developed in the first place and why it produces an emotional reaction and attenuation of the human stress response in the listener despite serving no essential biological need.

The discovery of simple flute-like instruments disinterred with Cro-Magnun and Neanderthal remains suggests that music has existed since prehistoric times. Scholars, such as Robert Dunbar, believe that ancient musical rituals—drums beating, voices chanting, bodies swaying—may have been the earliest form of religion and served to invoke a sense of deindividuation. However, while hypotheses abound about how and why music evolved and remained part of the human fabric, few have experimental or descriptive evidence to corroborate them. The oldest example of the contextual use of music for healing may be the depiction of harp-playing priests and musicians in frescos from 4000 BCE. During this era, a Codex haburami (hallelujah to the healer), was performed as sonorous reimbursement for medicinal services rendered. In 2000 BCE, the cuneiform writings of Assyrians depict the use of music to circumvent the path of evil spirits. In later centuries, the first specific application of music as therapy developed in ancient Greece, with Aesculapius recommending the use of music to conquer passion. Perhaps not until the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, did an interest develop in trying to understand the effects of music on human beings.

At that time, the Pythagoreans were the first to elucidate the mathematical relations of tones. They were fascinated by concepts that would help to define the infinite: to understand space, they developed astronomy; to understand numbers, they introduced mathematics; and to understand music, they created harmony theory. Severinus Boethius (480—526 CE), who has been credited with discovering the relation between the weight of a hammer hitting an ambos and the pitch of the resulting sound, also detailed how the Pythagoreans examined the relation between various rhythms and their resulting alterations of human affect in his work,De institutione musica. "

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