Can You Really Become A Happier Person By Listening To Music ?

Music & Emotions: Can Music Really Make You a Happier Person?

The connection between music and emotions has been known since the days of the Ancient Egyptians. It was then taken up by the early Persians, Chinese, Hindus, Egyptians, Israelites, and finally the Ancient Greeks, especially Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras. Can listening to music therefore make you happy? Well the act of listening and playing music does alter how our brain work which in turn has a knock-on affect on how our body work. It is only now the beneficial effects of listening to music are starting to be understood. When used in music therapy it helps to lessen anxiety and stress in patients and offers some relief of pain. Further it has a positive effects on mood and emotional states.

"Doctors now believe using music therapy in hospitals and nursing homes not only makes people feel better, but also makes them heal faster. And across the nation, medical experts are beginning to apply the new revelations about music’s impact on the brain to treating patients" ........ MORE

Rock on Pythagoras and His Philosophy of Music

The Pythagorean Theory of Music and Color

The Ancient Greeks owe much of their knowledge of the philosophic and therapeutic properties of music to the Egyptians. Plato even suggested that songs and poetry had existed among the Ancient Egyptians for ten thousand years or more and because of their elevated nature only gods or godlike beings could have composed them. It was here also that the ‘lyre’ was born, constructed it is said by a ‘god’.

[the lyre] "…….was regarded as the secret symbol of the human constitution, the body of the instrument representing the physical form, the strings the nerves, and the musician the spirit. Playing upon the nerves, the spirit thus created the harmonies of normal functioning, which, however, became discords if the nature of man were defiled.”

The early Persians, Chinese, Hindus, Egyptians, Israelites, and Greeks used both vocal and instrumental music in religious ceremonies. It was nevertheless Pythagoras who showed the mathematical aspects of music and he is reputed for the discovery of the diatonic scale. The role harmony in music is an important feature of the Pythagorean philosophy of music

“To Pythagoras music was one of the dependencies of the divine science of mathematics, and its harmonies were inflexibly controlled by mathematical proportions.” ….. MORE