Music is more than just a nice pastime. Music can be a balm for the soul, but it can also promote the spiritual and social development of children. Even adults can benefit from making music – it mobilizes the brain and produces happiness hormones.
HOW MUSIC TRIGGERS EMOTIONS
The limbic system in the brain responsible for feelings is stimulated by music. Music can therefore trigger emotions, can cause goosebumps in the listener. More often, music connects with specific events that happened in our lives. When the music is played again, it triggers memories and also the feelings felt at that certain event.
For example, a Christmas song is often enough to put someone in the Christmas spirit. In this context, music works as a kind of language in which certain events are encoded. This is particularly evident in film music, such as horror or suspense music.
Download Your Kind of Music With Clip Converter
Most of us want to rekindle these memories and thus keep the music that helps us remember these experiences. In my own personal experience, I find the song on YouTube and use Clip Converter to download my choice of song to an mp4 file. This way, I can easily access the song from my phone and rekindle the memories that come with it.
HOW MUSIC AFFECTS PEOPLE
Music affects people. In fact, it changes the heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing rate, and muscle tension of humans. It also makes an impact on hormone balance. Music and sound mainly affect the adrenal gland and pituitary gland.
Depending on the type of music, different hormones are released – adrenaline with fast and aggressive music, norepinephrine with gentle and calm sounds. The latter can, for example, reduce the release of stress hormones and increase the concentration of pain-controlling beta-endorphins in the body.
Music can actually dampen pain. Consequently, it is already used therapeutically in medicine in a wide range of fields. It provides useful services, especially in psychiatry and pain therapy.
But it can also be a valuable tool in the rehabilitation of stroke patients and in geriatrics. Because making music can be like a fountain of youth for the brain because new nerve connections are formed in the process.
HOW THE BRAIN PROCESSES MUSIC
Music poses a major challenge for the brain, it could also have a training effect on memory performance.
This is partly due to the fact that music consists of a wealth of information presented at the same time. The brain needs to recognize pitches and melodies and compare them.
It must also capture the chronological sequence of the sounds. This results in beats and rhythms. Simultaneously arriving sounds it has to sort into chords. Then there is the position and the type of sound source: those who listen to music usually know whether a drum or piano is playing, and where it is in the room.
Of course, the brain must first determine this through a wealth of measurements and comparisons. Some of these tasks share the left and right hemispheres of the brain. For professional musicians, by the way, this division is often exactly the other way around – why, you don’t know yet.