Can you listen to music?

You are the only note

In the eternity of silence

Your dance is creating

A new song,

Who are you walking towards the lake?

Rolando Toro

Hello! In this delivery of words where I channel the sentipensar of corporalities, I want to share reflections on the power that music has in the brain.

Music accompanies my walk as an inheritance of the women who are part of my life. There are certain moments of the day when I close my eyes to see my mother singing my name while caressing my hair or when I hear Nino Bravo screaming at me passionately. Also remembering my nona speaking in Italian while sewing dresses or cooking mustard. Today I have the fortune of a pianist mother-in-law who entertains me with Bach concerts.

All the experiences with which my heart smiles have an energetic vibration, a pulsating rhythm, so that my Being displays a movement that is dance.

In the cosmos there is a beat, a universal sound, which is a luminous and common language for all humanity: music.

“In the beginning there was the Word and through it everything was done,” says a quotation in the gospel, according to Saint John.

The sound «Om» has its origin in ancient India and is considered the primordial sound of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, as described in the Vedas. This sound is believed to represent the totality of existence, the union between physical and spiritual, and is seen as the root of all sounds and creation itself.

Etymologically, the word music comes from the Greek, it means “Art of the Muses”. If we review the legend of Orpheus, son of the god Apollo and the muse Calliope, inherits from them the gift of music and poetry. When he played his lyre, impressed men gathered to hear him and pacify his soul.

From a scientific approach, it is Pythagoras and his mathematical universe that we know the expression “Music of the Spheres”. It derives from the harmony existing in proportion of the parts of a Whole. The philosopher believed that there was a parallelism between the acoustic intervals considered to be the basis of music and the distances separating us from the planets. Their discovery is attributed to the use of the monochord (a single-string musical instrument).

Galileo Galilei, besides being a renowned Italian scientist was a passionate lute musician. He claimed that music and mathematics shared principles related to harmony and rhythm, concepts which he then connected with the natural, becoming a pioneer in the study of sound. Their work laid the foundations for understanding the frequency, length and amplitude of the wave, among others.

An ancient theory from the time of Confucius says that music was based on the ideas of the philosopher Ling-Lun. According to legend, the emperor Huang-Ti wanted to establish the relationship of music with cosmic laws. For that he gave Ling-Lun the job of finding out what the authentic sound was. The mathematician embarked on a long journey through remote forests in which he established, as the basis of Chinese music, a pentatonic system by cutting a bamboo cane.

“The consciousness of unifying music with cosmic principles and the origin of human history is very old. From the dawn of time, man perceived that the universe was governed by rhythmic patterns, by phenomena of pulsation and vibration, all that seemed to be ordered within a harmonic plan as a cosmic symphony.” expresses in his notes, Rolando Toro.

In modern times, it is the Argentine neurologist, Facundo Manes, who in 2015, hypothesized that music can help us move together, thus verifying an evolutionary benefit of the species. “When people move together they tend to act more altruistically,” he says.

Music releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, reward and motivation that acts as a stimulus (such as food, sex or drugs) in our brain. This is why music is a universal mode of communication that is related to emotion. It is a language common to everything that is alive.

In the field of therapeutics, music therapy emerged in the mid-twentieth century in Europe but it was not until 1996, at the World Congress held in the city of Hamburg in Germany, that it was defined as a facilitating tool to promote communication, Learning, movement and expression for physical, emotional, mental, social and cognitive benefit. «The non-verbal nude, unveils and there is no possibility of not expressing» says the pioneer of music therapy in Latin America, Rolando Benezon.

Music is not just what we like to hear, but a common code for everything that exists in nature and the cosmos. Thus, feeling part of a universe that dances with vibrations and pulses, interspersing supernovae, luminaries and planets in interstellar space changes the link we have with life.

We allow ourselves to listen to the music to dance to the rhythm of the biological pulse that makes us part of the Whole. Thus, when we put the body in motion we are not only dancing but we activate physical skills of coordination, listening, balance and strength that complement the action of certain areas of the brain related to emotions, movement and memory.

We are emotional beings in a Musical Universe spiritually connected with All that beats. Resonating with that vibratory sense allows us to regain the power of listening to music.