Don’t know about you, but I loop the YouTube version of birds chirping not for me but for Mittoo, my 12-year-old pet parakeet, who can’t fly.
Except between eight in the night and five the next morning, he is uncaged. He roams freely across the 3BHK, surveying all he sees, and ambles.
He remains quiet when the music plays, after the initial curiosity to know the origin of such sound subsides. That’s when he shakes his head like the ancient wall clock pendulum and shifts his talon as if dancing to express his joy. After a while, he goes motionless. Music or sound has that calming effect on the avian creatures too.
Forget about Mittoo. In my mother tongue, Tamil, we say “aadara maatai aadi karakkanum, padara mattai paadi karakkanum”. Loosely translated, it says: Dance to your cattle while milking if they like it; sing to them if they like music. Productivity gains in the management jargon. Music has that soothing effect.
Umpteen times we have seen the snake standing still with its head erect when the snake charmer plays his been (flute). It is debated to this day if the reptile remains unmoved, watching the movement of the playing instrument or listening to the sound.
Maria Popova writes, “when music courses through us, we are reminded that the mind and the body are one, and that the body – like music, like feeling, like the universe itself – made of matter and time. It may even be that music is the language of time, mathematics its alphabet.” (1)
Albert Einstein, who believed his best ideas came to him during his violin breaks, called his ideation process “combinatory play” — a wilderness of associations reaching across boundaries of various theories and fields of thought, not as deliberate problem-solving but as unforced mental meanderings. (2)
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think of music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music … I cannot tell if I would have done any creative work of importance in music. However, I do know that I get the most joy in life out of my violin,” said the architect of the renowned theory of relativity, among other findings.
The role of music in Einstein’s thinking sheds some light on how he shaped his most profound scientific ideas. His example suggests that it is intimately involved with the scientific complexity of music, and he brought a unique aesthetic quality to his theories. He wanted his science to be unified, harmonious and expressed and to convey a sense of the beauty of form.
He confessed to thinking about science in terms of images and intuitions, often drawn directly from his experiences as a musician, only later converting these into logic, words and mathematics. (3)
Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander in his The Jazz of Physics, harps on the combination and the power of cross-disciplinary thinking and improvision in unlocking new chambers of possibility for the human mind’s intrcourse3 with the universe and the nature of reality.
“Music is therapeutic. A comprehensive study of nearly 7,000 patients found that music can significantly affect the outcomes of patients’ operations when listened to before, during, or after surgery. Why? Music is a non-invasive, safe, cheap intervention that should be available to everyone undergoing surgery,” wrote Catherine Meads of Brunel University. (4)
Forget about patients. Even surgeons at the operation theatres found better performance with the music playing in the background while at work. Another study at the University of Texas Medical Branch found that by listening to their favourite music, senior surgeons had a 10% reduction in repair time. In comparison, junior surgeons had an 8% reduction. The quality of work also improved.
It is heartening to note that “the way we react to music is based on the culture that we come from. Some universal features of the music itself,” Stephen McAdams, a researcher on this subject, is quoted in a scientific journal. Music or medicine? Both.
True, it must be. Both Mittoo and I enter a different zone while listening to music. It ought to be a universal fact. Music, sweet music!
Also by the same author: Gandhi’s favorite dhun, Vaishnavo Janato, as a qawwali, Sufi style, quite an incredible experience – THE NEWS PORTER
References:
(2) https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/03/25/the-jazz-of-physics-stephon-alexander/
(3) https://theconversation.com/good-vibrations-the-role-of-music-in-einsteins-thinking-54725
(4) 7 Amazing Things Science Has Discovered About Music This Year So Far.
The writer, a hardcore business and economic journalist-cum-author, dives into the entertainment world to bust his emotional stresses regularly. He lives in Greater Noida, India, with his wife and a parrot. He is reachable at ramesh@konsultramesh.com. Views are personal.
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