Use These Four Elements of Music To Transform Your Brain
Strategically use music to improve your everyday living
Music is all around us - in our homes and cars, in the grocery store and waiting rooms, at big venues like sporting events and during personal time while exercising. Why not benefit from music, since you're listening to it already? Use these four elements of music to transform your brain, one note at a time.
Volume
How loud music is greatly influences the ambiance of an environment. It's no accident that music can literally be felt at large sporting events but melts into the background at a romantic restaurant.
Yet sometimes, it's easy to forget just how loud music is. Our family often listens to evening music (like Spanish classical guitar playlists) during our family dinners. I tend to speak softly, but when I find myself especially competing with the music to make myself heard, I know that the volume is too high.
Volume that's too loud — i.e., noise — adds stress to a situation. It's common for a television to be blaring in a home while the children are fighting and Mom is struggling to get dinner on the table. We can't always control the volume of our children's voices, but we certainly can control that of the TV. Turn off the TV, put on some quiet, calming music, and let music make the situation better.
If possible, the adults in the home can come to some kind of agreement on appropriate volumes for different activities or times of the day. To have Dad yelling at/coaching the Monday Night Football Game (That’s right — I'm looking at you, Jets fan!) while Mom is trying to get Baby to sleep on the other side of the wall probably won't end in a peaceful night for Baby or the marriage.
Here's a general rule of thumb: if you're listening to music for the enjoyment of listening or perhaps to add to the social energy at a get-together, you may want to turn up the music. But if the music is meant to be in the background, and you find yourself shouting over the music to have a decent conversation, you'll probably want to turn down the volume.
Continue reading below . . .
Tempo
Do you ever put on peppy music while you're exercising? (The Rocky theme on loop? Guilty.) Or have you made my mistake of listening to relaxing music while driving? Adding to the monotony of the road, this kind of music makes me sleepy more quickly.
Tempo, or the number of beats per minute, generally describes how fast or slow a song is. A song's tempo can speed up our movements or slow us down. This occurs because of a phenomenon known as entrainment, where our body movements naturally start to match the beat of music. You've experienced entrainment if you’ve listen to music while walking or jogging and find your footsteps falling in time with the musical beat. Tempo can excite us, like the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture, or drift us into sleep, like Brahms' Lullaby.
(Fun fact/side note: my horse-loving daughter told me that horses in a herd synchronize their heart rates -- i.e., the tempos of their hearts. This serves as an early warning system for the herd: one horse's heart rate will increase in response to perceived danger, which then alerts the other horses to the possible threat. Fascinating!)
Choosing music with an appropriate tempo for our task at hand creates a soundtrack to our daily living. We can create playlists for the rhythms of work — from email and admin work, to studying and deep work on projects, to dinner prep and cleanup times. If having music on in the background to support your work isn't something you're used to, the music can be a distraction at first. Over time, though, your brain will get used to being supported by the tempo.
On either end of the energy spectrum, it's straightforward to match a music piece's tempo to whatever we're doing: fast tempos for exercise, slow tempos for relaxation. What can get tricky, though, is picking the right tempo for thinking work: too fast can be a distraction, while too slow won't get our creative juices flowing. Whatever music you do choose, favor pieces with a consistent tempo throughout the piece.
Frequency
A friend's mom, upon hearing Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 for the first time, commented, "What is this groaning?"
She was commenting on the low frequency of the cello. In music, frequency — measured in Hertz (Hz) — refers to the number of sound waves or vibrations that pass through a particular point each second. Lower frequencies are interpreted by our brain as lower-pitched sounds, while higher frequencies result in higher-pitched sounds.
Alfred Tomatis (1920-2001), a French ENT (ear, nose, throat) medical doctor, was a pioneer in understanding how the ability of the ear to hear and the brain to process frequencies affected many areas, from academic learning, communication, and self-confidence, to memory, energy, and sleep.
He developed a way to filter frequencies to expose and train the brain to better process particular frequencies, which he was able to correlate to specific functions. These functions were typically deficient in some way. Through training the brain with the appropriate frequencies, Tomatis was able to help people improve these weaknesses.
For brain training purposes, frequencies can be divided into low (20-1,500 Hz), middle (1,500-5,000 Hz), and high (5,000-20,000 Hz) ranges. Strengthening the brain's ability to process low frequencies has resulted in improvements like greater relaxation and calm, more restful sleep, and smoother gross motor and fine motor coordination. Training middle frequencies has improved memory, concentration, and academic performance, while also enhancing social awareness and relationships with others. High-frequency training has increased productivity, creativity, and motivation, resulting in better organizational and decision-making skills.
While every piece will have its own specific frequency range, the pitch ranges of certain instruments tend to fall in one of the three frequency bands. Instruments whose note ranges are mostly of low frequency include the double bass, the cello, and the viola. The middle to high notes of the violin, flute, clarinet, and piccolo fall into the middle frequency range. Whistles, chimes, and bells produce sounds in the high frequency range.
Continue reading below . . .
Space
You hear a siren, but you can't tell where it is. Is the emergency vehicle in front of or behind you? You know you're supposed to pull over to the right side of the road, but one time, you did that and put yourself directly in the path of an ambulance. You know every second counts, but you're frozen —What should you do?
Sound technology has gone through tremendous developments from stereo sound, through a channel on each side of the listener, to variations of surround sound, which use three, five, or seven channels around the environment. Every modern moviegoer has experienced surround sound in its full glory.
Consider music moving through space. The result is particularly fascinating, at least to geeky-ish people like me: the Doppler effect, which explains why a sound seems to change as it goes past us. The Doppler effect highlights the connection between volume, frequency, and space, as well as tempo. Imagine you're standing still, and a vehicle's siren is coming toward you — thus, the space between you and the sound is decreasing. You perceive the siren's volume to increase, and the frequency you hear is high. When the siren passes and moves away from you, i.e., the space increases, the volume seems to decrease, and the frequency you hear sounds low. Your distance from the sound also has an effect: this change in perception is more sudden if the vehicle is on the street where you are standing, than if you were one block away. This distance reflects the tempo of the change. Yet through your shifting perception, the volume and frequency of the siren itself is constant. (Just wow . . . I told you I was geeky-ish. Watch this video for a fun, short explanation of the Doppler effect.)
Many people don't consider the importance of being able to tell where a sound is in relation to us. Yet, that ability is a critical factor in our fight-flight-or-freeze stress response. The sensitivity level of this skill is particularly significant for those suffering from autism, PTSD, and inner ear/balance conditions. For these people, hearing loud noises without being able to determine the direction of the source can be terrifying.
Improving your ability to distinguish sound in space can help reduce the intensity of the stress response and increase a sense of calm and well-being.
Thus, the four elements of music you can use to train your brain are Volume, Tempo, Frequency, and Space. Volume is the easiest to control, and you can learn to choose appropriate Tempos for your task at hand. You'll likely need more specialized knowledge to effectively use Frequency as a brain-training tool. And Space is the hardest tool of all to use properly.
The Listening Program (“TLP”) is a highly effective, neuroscience-based music therapy which incorporates all four of these elements into its acoustically modified music. Most notably, the element of Space, in the form of dynamic surround sound (giving you the auditory effect of sitting still while an orchestra is rotating around you) is a technological feature baked into the music itself. I love being a Certified Provider of The Listening Program, since this easy-to-implement, at-home therapy has helped members of my own family, my clients, and — since 1999 — over a million other Listeners around the world to become better at:
dealing with stress
getting along with others
listening
communicating
moving around
focusing and executive functioning
being creative