The Art of Slowdown Pt.2
If you managed to read Part 1 on The Art of Slowdown and you’re back for more, then welcome back! If you haven’t yet read our launch post, you can read it here.
I must start by saying that in no manner am I any sort of expert, but you could say that with over two decades of working in the Hi-Fi industry and more than four decades of being a music fan, and with owning and playing quite a number of instruments, plus DJing and producing electronic music, I’ve had my fair share of musical experiences & musical moments. Be it purchasing my first system when I was 14, or watching a customer's face light up when they hear a great system for the first time; their eyes come alive and a smile often appears when they experience their favourite track in a way that they never have had before. If you think back to your own experiences with music, music has some sort of power at a fundamental level.
To understand why music has such a potent effect on people, we have to understand what music actually is. And to do that, we need to understand sound. And prior to that, is hearing.
Did you know that hearing is one of first senses to develop in the womb after touch? It’s fascinating to me how we map-out our world via our senses, responding to sound, touch, taste, smell and sight, but sound is a huge part of how I map my world. It’s also a critical piece in The Art of Slowdown – when we listen and not hear, we are quieter and less anxious.
From my research, and personal experience of being a father, a fetus will begin to respond to sound around 5 months at the same time as the auditory system and brain are developing. Interestingly, the auditory system requires a wide range of sounds to develop properly, such is the incredible interconnectedness of our brain/body function. At this stage the fetus will be able to hear low frequencies, although it’s hard to distinguish between those sounds, but over time, the young baby will develop the ability to differentiate between a wider array of sounds. As the hearing develops, so does the range of sounds that it can hear and respond to. Around 6 months is usually when parents start playing music and talking with the mother’s womb and also when the baby will respond to the sound of their parent’s voices or music, with kicking. I remember this moment really well. The feeling of the first real communication with your baby in the womb, is an incredible moment…And a lot of parents move onto reading to, speaking with, and playing music to their wife’s tummy!
After being born, a baby’s world is a universe of sounds. What makes us unique as a species, is also the fact that we are so “programmable” when we are born. All the critical parts of the brain responsible for the main body functions are hard-wired, but the rest is left totally open, ready to respond to and build a completely wired brain, designed around their environment, sounds, interactions and relationships. We are truly born to absorb like a sponge, our immediate environment. Now if this is the case, it’s logical that music played to a developing baby would result in our brains being wired in a positive way, right? Well, this is exactly the case. According to *Carlota Nelson from Brain Matters, “Music makes a big difference to the baby brain. One study from the institute of Brain Studies detected that after babies listen to music, their auditory and prefrontal cortexes look different. These are the regions of the brain in charge of processing both music and speech”.
In studies by various scientific journals and in information from a UNICEF parenting report, listening to music does change the brain, and has huge benefits, such as:
Helping to regulate stress and develop positive moods, and control lover mood changes
Developing vocabulary, creativity and imagination, and improve “flow”
Build positive skills such as learning to share and empathize (due to release of formation of dopamine and oxytocin)
Improve concentration and productivity
Help develop key skills such as spatial intelligence, very helpful in developing interest in mathematics, engineering, architecture and computer science
If we now move to the elderly, we can also see similar effects. There have been many studies on how music helps the elderly with memory recall. In care settings, it’s very common practice to play music that is motivating, positive and of a time and relevance for residents to easily recall. Again, this is proven to help with stress levels and keep dementia patients in “the present” by improving working memory and recognition memory. Often residents will sing along to the music, even when they are unable to remember much of the present. Something in music has the power to connect the brain with memories, like a key that unlocks areas of the brain that have been damaged by disease. Powerful stuff.
I’m not sure we’ll ever truly know how much of a role music plays in the developmental stage of human or indeed throughout our lives, but it does seem that all the science leans towards listening to music being incredibly beneficial all throughout the stages of our lives.
Now, moving onto the basics of sound and how we hear…
It’s likely that we have two ears. And if they are working as intended, those ears have some key “moving parts” responsible for the capture of sounds waves. These are little bones called, the malleus, the incus and the stapes. But just before we process these sound waves, the shape of our ear is perfectly designed to allow us to efficiently capture the chosen sound, our heads can also move towards the location of sound for optimal efficiency, then the soundwaves move down through our eardrums as vibrations. These little bones then amplify the vibrations and send them to the cochlea, an odd little shaped creation in the ear filled with fluid. There is an elastic partition within the cochlea call the basal membrane, this moves like a wave and tiny little hair cells that sit on-top of the membrane capture detect the vibration. Interesting fact: the hair closest to the centre of the membrane detects low frequencies like an organ or kick-drum, and those further to the outer area, closest to the end of the cochlea detect higher-pitched sounds, such as a violin or symbol (or a baby crying). These hair-like cells (Stereocilia) bump against each-other and open-up so that chemical signals can be released to allow an electrical signal to be released into the brain via the auditory nerve. The brain will then, through a process of learning, allow the listener to understand and identify what they are listening to…
If you had never heard Jimi Hendrix play the guitar, you’ll most likely always remember the moment, especially so if it was played on a good Hi-Fi. The phrasing, the ability, the genius and the fluency is simply mesmerising. In that moment, your brain tagged and filed away for future reference. The next time you heard Jimi, you were then able to recall very easily that it’s Jimi Hendrix. If you have ever listened to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s version of Voodoo Chile (Slide return), you may be mistaken to think that it was Jimi. Both are amazing versions of the track BTW, and now we are talking about purely personal preference!
If you’re interested in reading more about sound, music and the science behind how we hear and what music is, there are many, many studies on the subject that you can read. I find the whole subject matter fascinating – as you can tell! One of my favourite books is by a fascinating individual called, Daniel Levitin. His book, “This Is Your Brain On Music” is a MUST for any music/Hi-Fi fan that wants to understand more about the subject.
Why am I going into this much detail? I want to provide a baseline for how we hear and why it’s important to listen to music. We can then explore more about why we are seeing more people “slowing down” in the next article and the direct correlation to us re-connecting with the power of music societally. This of us in the Hi-Fi space have always understood this, but the mainstream is now understanding the true power of music as a fundamental.
Shall we explore more about MUSIC in the next article?