Music and Its Influence on Behavior
I. Introduction Background Information Music is a phenomenon that has been there from the past and it will continue to exist as long as man continues to exist in the society. Music portrays virtual images and human beings use it as a means of communication.
Music is the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity” and “vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony”. Thesis Statement According scholars studying this area, different types of music plays a crucial role in influencing the behavior of human being through psychological and therapeutic effects on the brain. II. Psychological Effects of Music Psychologically, music needs all part of the brain for proper processing. In addition, music affects all ages psychologically.
For this reason, music plays a crucial role in increasing skills in children resulting to improvement of their studies. According to Yoon, music helps children in connecting the two hemispheres of the brains since it involves all parts of the brain, resulting to the improvement of certain skills like communicating feelings. This is because of the significant neurological development music causes in children. Another example is the relationship of music and mathematics. In this case, when children are learning to play an instrument, the dynamics they follow are also similar to the dynamics used in mathematics.
Therefore, music immensely improves learning. Secondly, music psychologically affects people emotionally, resulting to either negative or positive behavior. Levitin states that inclusion of music in advertisement or commercials is to create a certain feeling among the viewers. In addition, guardians use music in form of a lullaby to create an emotion feeling of sleep in children. For this reason, music affects emotions of people of all ages. In the case of affecting people negatively leading them to become criminals, there is no enough evidence to prove this theory meaning that music cannot make a person to be a criminal.
III. Therapeutic Effects of Music Music plays an immense role in treating people. I this case, music has therapeutic effect on humans. First, music can have homeopathic or allopathic affect a human being. Haake states that music can have homeopathic effect on human beings. In this case, music will enhance the emotions of a person.
For instance, when people are working and they start listening to music, the morale in the working stations will significantly increase. On the other hand, Haake states that music can have an allopathic effect. In this case, music tends to change the mood of a person. For instance, a person may use music to change his or her sad mood into a bright mood. Therapeutically, scholars find that music is applicable in healing certain illnesses.
According to professions of this study, music is extremely effective in treating people who have mental disorders. For instance, people with Alzheimer and other brain injuries can use music a therapy to progress their treatment process. Scientists state that music is effective in treating children with disabilities. For example, children suffering from social or behavioral disorders like autism can be treated using music as one of the strategies. IV. Influence of Different Music Genres on Human BrainAccording to studies, different genres of music tend to affect the brain different resulting to different behaviors in people.
Merriam-Webster is defining several genres of music depending on the beats and the tone of the music. These genres are; classical music, pop music, rock and rap. However, three main categories of music genres exist affecting the human brain differently resulting to difference in behaviors. The first category is the popular music containing hard beats with negative messages in the lyrics of the song. According to scientists, popular music tends to affect the youth negatively.
Statistics of popular music in the past few years show that lyrics of this music contain a lot of violence and abuse of drugs. In addition, these lyrics are enhanced by the use of music videos. As a result, this leads to increase in juvenile delinquencies in the society. Secondly, based on the different studies, pop music tends to affect the mood of the listeners. For example, when a person is listening to popular music the negative moods tend to prevail diminishing the positive moods. Classical music is the second category of music affecting the human brain.
Classical music is the soft music that often has positive messages in the lyrics. In this case, classical music has positive effects on the brain leading to certain behaviiors. According to those people who listen to classical music, they tend to have a higher spatial IQ and cognitive abilities. For instance, those children who listen to Mozart songs tend to develop this high spatial IQ and cognitive abilities as they grow up. In addition, researchers are stating that those children listening to classic music appear to be more creative when they listen to classic music during a drawing class unlike when they are listening to popular music.
Classical music also affects the brain positively. In this case, a person who has a dull mood will tend to brighten the mood once he or she starts listening to classical music. Therefore, due to this effect of the brain, classical music has significant effect in catalyzing the healing process of people suffering from mental illnesses. The third category is the background music. This is the music that plays at the background while a person is performing certain tasks. Presently, many people state that they cannot work without listening to music.
In this case, factors like the music type, task and the individual determine the effects of music to their behavior. Generally, scientists agree that music increase the performance of performing duties at the office. Classical music tends to improve concentration and accuracy while a person is performing his or her duties while popular music tends to create aggressiveness and motivation at work. In marketing, popular and classic music play different role as background music. For example, studies done by Areni and Kim noted that people who are drinking wine when listening to classical music as their background music tend to drink more in comparison to when they are listening to popular music as the background music.
V. ConclusionAccording to the above analysis, it is clear that music plays a critical role in affecting the human behavior through psychological and therapeutic effect of music on the brain. Psychologically, music tends to improve the skills and overall learning of children. Therapeutically, music tends to affect the brain positively depending on the music healing a person’s mood. Clinically, music affects the brain positively resulting to treatment of mental illnesses. Those scholars who wish to pursue with this study should concentrate on evaluate the different effects popular music and classical music to the human brain resulting to certain behaviors.
This is because not many studies have been done in this area to prove certain theories. However, all scientists unanimously agree that music plays a crucial role in affecting the human behavior.
