While I’m writing this, I am listening to Django Reinhardt’s songs coming right out of a Staimusic playlist. The playlist goes on endlessly, but I’m not really listening to it, it’s just the music I love to have around. But writing this article, and pondering about the topic, I felt the communicative power of music I am missing.
We’re so accustomed to listening to music that sometimes we lose focus and start considering it just as the soundtrack of our days. Like when we’re driving in a traffic jam and put on the radio, we aren’t really listening to music, we are just using it as a means to dampen the noise of car engines outside. Or when we are studying in your room, and put on some music to fill the air and maybe help us concentrate. There are many ways we have devised to ignore the wonderful sound of our favorite band playing a song that was exactly made to elicit something: maybe a feeling of happiness, introspection, or maybe the singer wrote it just to share with us a great insight or piece of advice from someone who’s lived one of the possible experiences of life.
And it’s the same every time we listen to music without even knowing we are. But think about all those moments when we were so into music, maybe during the teenage years, when we know by heart all the lyrics of our favorite songs.
This is exactly the way music gives us advice. It’s its smooth way to tell us something, the singers, the instruments, the whole experience of listening itself. So, in Staimusic’s idea of slow listening, we are trying to get you back there. There is a lot to learn from aware, slow listening. First of all, you feel what music is trying to tell you. As normal people, we tend to ignore someone trying to give us a piece of advice, unless we look up to that person. But we’re always looking up to our favorite bands, aren’t we? This exact principle is what makes music therapy so efficient.
Mental health and music therapy are relatively new topics in medicine, as a matter of fact, only in 1948 a pioneer of music therapy and a psychiatrist, Dr. Altshuler first set up a music therapy program to help people cope with a series of mental disorders. He defined what’s called the Iso-principle, that is pairing the music with a patient’s mood and then changing it to positively modify the same patient’s mood. This means we should really listen to the music we feel the most!
Let’s take the traffic jam driving example above. If we just carelessly listen to the radio, then we wouldn’t enjoy the essence of music. But if we put on some crazy music and let some steam off, wouldn’t we feel soothed right after? And who cares about what your traffic jam neighbor is thinking? He’d probably do the same if we showed them this post! And then, following the Iso principle, we should treat ourselves with some calm, relaxing music to help us out the jam!
I made the experiment myself, when I was a secondary teacher professor. I am a musician too, and of course a listener. When I was working in my school, we had less then a hundred students. Some of them were studying psychology related subjects, and in my class, we would often chat about mental health and music. We set up a little challenge, which was actually a sort of way to trick them into studying more while in a condition of relax. I asked them to browse a mental health related web page, pick a topic from the list and read the related articles while actively listening to the music they felt in that moment. The result was revealing, as they all seemed to finally understand why they had picked a song to listen to instead of another. After this brief, let’s say homemade experiment of ours, we took some time to discuss what we thought about music after this slow listening. Some felt a stronger link with what they were listening to, while others reconsidered their choices and admitted they would choose better in the future, maybe listening more to their feelings and shedding fashion.
This is how music works! It gives us little pieces of advice if we pay the attention it deserves, a sort of personal meditation to get back to knowing our feelings and states of mind.
