Editorial

Music, Science, and Healing

Mike Denney, MD, PhD

Perhaps the most familiar poetic description of music and healing is found in the play The Mourning Bride (1697) by the English dramatist William Congreve:

Music has charms to sooth a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I’ve read that things inanimate have moved,
And, as with living Souls, have been informed,
By magic numbers and persuasive sound.

The phrase “living Souls” in this text refers to the experience of human beings who are “informed” by music. The “magic numbers” refer to Pythagoras, that friend of the hypotenuse, who demonstrated that the sounds of music were produced mathematically, in such intervals as fourths and fifths, in methodical patterns that were pleasing to the ear. This was the beginning of the “science” of music.

Long before objective mathematics and science, however, the subjective pleasing and healing charms of music were practiced throughout the world. Mythological tales, archeological findings, and studies of surviving indigenous cultures all attest to the ubiquity of music as a healing method. In her book Music Healers of Indigenous Cultures (2004), Pat Moffitt Cook describes the ancient practices she discovered in her extensive travels to Southeast Asia, India, Nepal, Japan, and North and Central America. A musician and teacher and the founder of Open Ear Center, an organization on Bainbridge Island, Washington, dedicated to cross-cultural music, Cook says, “Healing sounds are part of a ‘sacred therapy’ still practiced among holy men and women, shamans and healers among the indigenous peoples of the earth.”

In Northern India, a man named Babaji, a shopkeeper who was mystically called by a Muslim saint to be an ojha, or healer, sings ancient holy melodies, and soon his patient joins in the chant and is relieved of pain, stress, and suffering. In Nepal, Ram Tampa and Suni Ram practice “folk psychiatry” by beating on a two-headed drum, a dhyangro, and performing a hopping dance, while around their necks garlands of bells jingle in rhythm. In Haiti, Micheline Forestal, a Vodou manbo, or healing priestess, contacts the myste by listening to the divine in rocks, trees, plants, rivers, wind, and rain and then leads a group in prayers, songs, dances, and drumming as rituals to heal the sick. Among the Huichol Indians of Northern Mexico, the mara’akame, shaman priests, use peyote to enter into the spirit world and then, with accompaniment of drums, violin, and guitar, sing the acantos de curación, songs of cure for individuals, the community, and the earth itself. In Tibet, in the Bon Buddhist tradition gurus teach the Five Warrior Syllables to bring sound into meditation practices, while others play by hand the Tibetan Singing Bowls for healing.

When modern doctors and other healers try to espouse these ancient methods of musical healing, they do their best to apply science, a method that excludes the sacred. In their books and articles, some use loosely defined terms such as “vibrations,” “wave motions,” or “the etheric” to attempt theories by which to impose cause-and-effect measurements upon the immeasurable influence of music within the human body and soul. Others talk in vague terms about “sound essence” and “the healing resonance,” and one author refers to Einstein’s theory of relativity, noting the relationship of energy to mass, thereby concluding that a kind of musical “energy” has an effect upon the “mass” of the body. As though in extension of these scientific “theories,” a recent clinical empirical study by Krucoff et al at Duke Research Institute (2005), which included 748 patients who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention, concluded that there was no effect of music upon clinical outcomes—a conclusion that goes against the collective wisdom of human beings since the beginning of time.

And so it is that, as in this issue of San Francisco Medicine we contemplate music and medicine, we may notice a disharmony between the objective, scientific, and mathematical approach to music and the profound subjective experience of music within human beings. To integrate this dissonance, we might recall that although Pythagoras began the mathematics of music, he also believed that numbers themselves were magical and sacred. Relating his numbers to the stars, the planets, indeed the entire cosmos, Pythagoras declared mathematics to be “the music of the spheres.”

Thus, in addition to our science, we may give credence to the poetic nature of our appreciation of music and healing, as did William Congreve in 1697, when he said, “Music has charms to sooth a savage breast . . . living Souls[,] have been informed by magic numbers and persuasive sound.”