Music's Health Effects

Imagine a world, where everyone has advanced focus, where everyone has no stress, and where everyone is perfectly happy. This perfect utopia may seem like a setting in a futuristic science fiction book, but this utopia is not some far flung reality. It’s possible, through the powerful healing effects of music. Music for centuries has entertained the crowds who came to watch it, but until recently have we learned the effects it brings to the human body. From raising your oxygen saturation, to lowering your blood pressure to changing mood, the health effects of music are becoming more and more revealed. As man begins to unlock the secret’s of music, this knowledge can start being applied to the real world. This includes the world of business, academia, and more recently medical fields. So in short, music can provide stress relief, it improves focus, and it improves mental health.

Music effect on stress relief is due in part to it’s effect on mood. This may seem like a sentence within a sentence, but it is much more than that. When listening to classical music, one is brought into a state of calm. When listening to rap or faster tempo music, one is brought into a state of action. These effects all have to do with the power of music on our mood. Classical music, is the most effective at calming someone down. In terms of numbers, listening to classical music, as used in this study, was associated with a significant (5-5.6%, p<0.05) lowering of the resting heart rate and a consistent improvement of oxygen saturation (by 1-1.4%).(V K Paul1 #4.) These may seem like strange numbers, but they have a great deal to do with the topic at hand. Later on in the paper, it discusses more vividly into the terms of oxygen saturation and heart rate...

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...aled after the 2nd or 3rd treatment, and five failed the test. (Campbell. #249) These statistics not only show that music is successful after the first try, but also after the 2nd and 3rd times as well. The mentally disabled also benefit from music. For instance, a patient with parkinson’s disease stands in a frozen stance unable to initiate a step forward, the music therapist starts to sing a song with a strong rhythm. The client’s frozen stance is unlocked and she takes a faltered step forward, then gets into the rhythm of walking. (Campbell, #112) Another example, is that developmentally disabled-children are known to respond positively to music, where other means of comprehending and sharing experience are confused or limited. (Heal #14) Music therapy is being applied in today’s medical field, and it seems it will continue to push innovation in the medical field.