Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Power of Music

The power of music is unlimited and the benefit that we can get from music is endless. Dan Elllsey, a gentleman who was born with cerebral palsy discovered that he could express himself by listening to music and composing music as well. Ellsey composed his music through a computer system called Hyperscore, invented by Tod Machover. Hyperscore was developed with the idea of how our brain responds and processes the music. Basically, our brains are very sensitive to music and they were developed to process rapid tones, which are very much similar to languages. Furthermore, our brains are wired to process music. For instance, listening to our own favorite music will trigger the thinking centre in the brain cortex, as well as the motivation and reward system in the brain. This explained that music is essential need of the human’s body, because the brain gave the same response to food, water and sex. In extension, music has medical potential as well. Doctor used music therapy to help handicapped patients to recover their talking and walking ability, and it can reduce the physical pains of a patient as well.

Music is pretty much bonded with the life of a human. We use music to celebrate events, signify something, even the great composer – Ludwig van Beethoven, wrote a symphony dedicated to Napoleon. Music has the greater influence to humans compared to languages. Music is a universal language, a language without words. We should encourage the usage of music therapy to the public and explore more new music therapy methods as well. Music is something very easy to get and most of the time you can just get it for free. Moreover, music is something very organic and harmless to a human’s body. There are no signs of side effects found from the patients after they go through music therapy. Something that is free and organic will save a lot of money for the patient. There are numbers of factory in the world were built to produce medicines. As a result of minimizing the usage of medicines, we can reduce the global warming problem by reducing the requirement of the medicine factory.

There is more positive potential that we can find in music that is waiting for us to explore. We should realize that there are plenty of solutions to cure a patient and chemical medicine isn’t the ultimate option. 

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