What Can Music Do Today?

30 months ago, I promised to publish my next book on Substack.

Today I fulfill that promise. Below I share the final chapter of my online book Music to Raise the Dead.

I’ve published the entire work in 22 installments. Each section can be read as a stand-alone essay. But taken together, they outline a secret musicology you can’t learn in music school. (...)

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The music business wants to sell... entertainment. But the audience keeps reaching for something more.

That’s why musical events in the 21st century emulate those of ancient days to an uncanny degree. Even a high-tech genre such as EDM (electronic dance music) typically comes embedded in quasi-ritualistic events where otherworldly experiences and altered mind states are pursued with an intense fervor not much different from the mindset ancient Romans brought to their mystery cults.

These rituals might be known nowadays as raves or parties, but the actual behavior—and the quest for transcendence that drives it—is very much an extension of the ancient practices described in this book.

This mixture of music, ritual and transcendence keeps recurring for a very good reason. We still have much to learn about the impact music and rhythm have on the human brain, body chemistry, and physiology, but we know enough to grasp how powerful songs can be on a merely organic basis, without paying even the slightest attention to metaphysics or spirituality. And our body of knowledge is increasing rapidly—perhaps too fast for our music culture to adapt to what we’ve learned.

Just a few months ago, a team of scientists at Stanford University discovered a new way of producing out-of-body experiences in a test subject. Normally this requires ketamine or PCP (angel dust), which induce changes in brain cells associated with this altered mind state. But these Silicon Valley scientists found they could achieve something similar without any drugs—merely by using rhythm.

They began testing this with mice. But they needed to invent a special instrument that used light to control the rhythmic firing of brain cells. The results were remarkable. “We could see, right before our eyes, dissociation happening," remarked one of the researchers.

Could this work with humans too?

A severely epileptic patient, who had dissociative experiences, gave them the opportunity to test their hypothesis. When they emulated the rhythm that accompanied these interludes they found they could trigger an out-of-body experience. Somehow the rhythm could remove the linkage between mind and body, although only temporarily.

The scientists eventually concluded that the brains of mammals may possess this capability as part of its functioning, although few have found a way to tap into it.

This is a remarkable finding. But it merely reinforces the cumulative history and alternative musicology presented in these pages. We now are beginning to understand what happens inside the body of shamans in the midst of a ritual experience or of others in possession trances. We can measure changes in body chemistry among participants in a drum circle or vocalists engaged in group singing. We now understand the significance of surprising brain scan patterns in the MRIs of jazz musicians engaged in improvisations. All this new science confirms the old myths.

The body of research accumulates with increasing rapidity. And the results all testify to the empirical reality of the journey discussed here. Science, not superstition, validates the transformative power of music and rhythm.

Put simply: the quest is real, and song is the conductor—in a high tech digital age just as much as in a traditional society. I could fill up a book with summaries of research projects of this sort, but the problem at this stage isn’t a lack of scientific understanding, but rather the troubling fact that almost none of the key decision-makers driving our music culture have the slightest awareness of what we’ve learned here, or its potential impact.

We suffer not from mere ignorance, but from a mismatch between our expanding knowledge base and the narrowing parameters of a click-driven musical ecosystem.

Let’s take the simple question: How long should a song last? The music industry is convinced that a 3-minute song is the ideal duration for a hit record. But this is simply a legacy from the early days of recordings when the technology only had sufficient disk space for a song of that length. The limitations of the medium imposed that constraint, and the companies who ran the record business made a virtue of necessity. The 3-minute song became an artistic rule.

But have you ever noticed how people play their favorite song over and over—when it’s finished, they put it on again from the start? Have you noticed how DJs at a party seamlessly move from one song to another, without any silence in-between, often using two turntables (or digital tools with the same effect) to create a smooth transition from song to song? Have you been to a rock concert where the band plays their hit song for much longer than three minutes—with the audience responding viscerally and enthusiastically to the expansive time frame?

This isn’t coincidence or happenstance, but aligned with what both ritual and science tell us. In my research into music-driven trance, I’ve encountered again and again accounts that specify a duration of around ten minutes before an altered mind state is achieved.

I’ve seen this both in anthropological fieldwork and scientific research. Even a skilled participant needs time for music to work its magic—and three minutes is rarely sufficient. This is why listeners repeat songs or construct playlists, or why bands in concert play their songs longer. They all understand intuitively that the song needs to be longer than 180 seconds.

It’s only the people running the music business who haven’t figured this out.

And the industry has grown further out-of-touch with each new technological shift. Consider that the payout structure of streaming—now the major source of revenues in the music business—rewards artists who fill their albums with short songs. Tracks on Spotify count as streamed if someone listens for just thirty seconds. This arbitrary decision punishes artists who perform longer songs—but those are the songs that satisfy our deep-seated desire for longer, more immersive musical experiences.

There’s no surprise here: the music business runs on money, not the alpha and theta brain waves of trance-like experiences. When a choice needs to be made between the two, cash flow seals the deal.

It’s tempting to dismiss these considerations as irrelevant. After all, how many music fans really want to go into a trance or make a journey to another realm of existence? Mom would have told me to stay away from that crowd. That ain’t the way to have fun, son.

But on a purely theoretical level, this subject can’t be so easily dismissed—if only because it deals with the most profound philosophical mystery of them all, namely the bridge between mind and matter. This is the deepest rabbit hole of them all, and has bedeviled philosophers, psychologists, theologians, neuroscientists, and every other kind of thinker who peers into the biggest of big issues.

A recent theory, proposed by Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler, goes so far as to claim that consciousness is built on rhythm. “Synchronization, harmonization, vibrations, or simply resonance in its most general sense,” in their words, create our very sense of self—and I note with interest that these are all terms with musical associations.

They continue:

“All things in our universe are constantly in motion, in process. Even objects that appear to be stationary are in fact vibrating, oscillating, resonating, at specific frequencies. So all things are actually processes. Resonance is a specific type of motion, characterized by synchronized oscillation between two states. An interesting phenomenon occurs when different vibrating processes come into proximity: they will often start vibrating together at the same frequency. They “sync up,” sometimes in ways that can seem mysterious….

Examining this phenomenon leads to potentially deep insights about the nature of consciousness in both the human/mammalian context but also at a deeper ontological level.”

In other words, rhythm may not be just the pace of reality, but reality itself.

The implications of this emerging perspective are too large for a book on musicology, no matter how ambitious. But one overarching fact is clear: music and rhythm have a power to transport us that may seem magical, but is as real as can be—perhaps even woven into the structure of the universe.

Are there limits to the musical journey? Is there a boundary beyond which it no longer operates? The title of this book even considers a trip outside the conventional demarcating lines separating life (as conventionally defined) and whatever exists outside it—in other words, music to raise the dead.

Is that legitimate, or even possible? (...)

Researchers increasingly validate and quantify these beliefs—proving music’s efficacy in improving endurance, lessening strain, and inspiring performance. And for a good reason. We now know that music impacts body chemistry, brainwaves, mood, heart rate, body temperature, grip strength, blood pressure, and many other parameters.

I offer these details on athletics as a single case study in how music empowers individuals who aspire to heroic achievements. But the same story could be told for a range of other disciplines.

• Most surgeons nowadays rely on song playlists during procedures, and believe it improves concentration and results.

• Computer programmers also rely on music while they write code, and many of them have enthusiastic stories to share about the benefits they have gained from working to musical accompaniment.

• Soldiers apparently need their music too—why else would government spending on military bands represent the single largest federal expenditure on arts and culture year after year?

• Or consider the case of astronauts, who invariably bring music with them on their missions, even to the surface of the moon. And when NASA sent its Voyager probe into the far reaches of the universe, the authorities decided to include a gold-plated copper recording featuring the songs of planet Earth.

You may wonder why extraterrestrials need to hear Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B. Goode” or Blind Willie Johnson’s slide guitar on “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” But music has been part of every heroic journey in the past, so it would be odd to leave it off this longest of strange trips.

I should perhaps apologize for focusing on glamorous professions, such as astronauts and brain surgeons. I do this for dramatic effect, and because these examples reveal the capacities of music to propel vocations of the most demanding sort. But the vision quest and its music are accessible to all, just as much to a cook or factory worker as to an Olympic athlete.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Ted Gioia

[ed. See also:

MUSIC TO RAISE THE DEAD: The Secret Origins of Musicology
Table of Contents
Prologue
Introduction: The Hero with a Thousand Songs
Why Is the Oldest Book in Europe a Work of Music Criticism? (Part 1) (Part 2)
What Do Conductors Really Do? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Is There a Science of Musical Transformation in Human Life? (Part 1) (Part 2)
What Did Robert Johnson Encounter at the Crossroads? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Where Did Musicology Come From? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Can Songs Actually Replace Philosophy? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Were the First Laws Sung? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Why Do Heroes Always Have Theme Songs? (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)
What Is Really Inside the Briefcase in Pulp Fiction? (Part 1) (Part 2)
Where Do Music Genres Come From?
Can Music Still Do All This Today?

The first ten chapters were about music history—revealing ways music has served as a change agent and source of enchantment in human life.

But the last chapter asks whether this still can happen today.