Title : Music and health: Embracing the ineffability of sound and why it matters
Abstract:
The aesthetic appreciation and exploration of music with its effects on health and wellbeing is well known. Mastering a musical instrument and the impact of sound itself plays various roles in a person’s emotional regulation strategies. Contemporary research has validated sounds’ transformational capacity in relation to its ability for counteracting dysregulated emotional states, a contributing factor to disease formation. Despite this, the active function of music - especially the ability that sound frequencies have in relationship to consciousness, has received surprisingly little attention and is underexamined in the literature. Our claim is that, as a result, an important aspect of sound – its capacity as an emotional regulation strategy for purposes of raising consciousness, has been largely overlooked. The assumption in the health literature is that sound regulates a person’s emotional or mood state in that moment, reducing arousal, or the negative expressions associated with certain emotions. Portrayed in this way, sound acts as a relaxation tool, or in clinical terms, merely as a therapeutic support to other treatments. In this article, we will argue that there is a direct association between sound frequencies with their ineffable capacity to target one critical aspect of emotion – its affectivity, which shows why the previous assumption is false. This article proposes a philosophical explanation for why conceptually, sound – as a frequency generator, has this healing ability, i.e. the capacity for bypassing what Ned Block refers to as ‘phenomenal’ consciousness to reach ‘access’ consciousness. We claim the reverse may also be true: frequencies misused disrupt access consciousness leading to ill-health. We end by exploring implications of this account and why it matters.
Keywords: Sound, frequency, affect, emotion, consciousness
