Music and Mental Health

Music and Mental Health?

My special guest this week on ‘Easy to read Deep Thoughts’ is Lilly Goyah. Lilly is a student at our local College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. She’s building an app to pair Christian faith-focused music with the mood of the listener.

What is Music?

This thought is interesting to consider and I’m going Deep as I think about it. First thoughts: what makes music, music? How would we define the separation between music and speaking or at what point does speaking become musical and not a simple transfer of information?

Why is music important? This thought by itself is worthy of its own paragraph. Who cares, why does it matter, we know music and humans are inseparable. Our oldest human records align with our oldest records of music. Hit a rock on beat = Music.

Mental Health?

Speaking to my above point on identifying the separation between normal communication and normal music, the separation between internal influence and external influence is similarly hard to define = the line is blurry, not discrete, and not easy to see.?

Would working in a quiet office be different if someone cranked Death Metal music? Would classical playing softly in the background be a measurable significant variable in-office team productivity? I’m asking as a question but its a loaded 1. We already know the answer is “yes.” External variables impacts internal perception and internal variables resonate with the perception of external stimuli.

Happy music makes you happy

As simple as it sounds, playing happy music makes people happier than playing sad music. Sad movies are more likely to make people sad than happy. Sad pictures are more likely to make people sad than happy. Controllable external variables CAN be used to adjust uncontrolled internal variables. Example: a happy song moment today could mitigate a sad childhood moment and its memory from 20 years ago.?

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

I picture the point in my paragraph above as an MVP or Occam’s razor could work here just as well. What's the simplest thing we could do to solve mental health issues? Years of therapy could work. Complicated could drug regimens or pharmaceuticals work too. Neither is simple and both come with measurable costs/risks.?

Music is simple, natural, and humans are naturally skewed to resonate with its simple musical solution. Why not start with music 1st is harder to explain than why.