HOW MUSIC AFFECTS YOUR KIDS...WHAT PARENTS NEED TO KNOW
                      (c) 1995 by Greg MacKay

Have you ever noticed a behavior change in your kids after theyve 
listened to a particular style of music?  What gives?  Why should 
music have an affect on behavior anyway?  If you are like most 
people, you may not have given more than a passing thought to how 
music affects the body and the mind.  That's what this report is all
about.  We'll be looking at the wide reaching effects of music on 
the physical and mental health of our families and our home and 
work environment.  

Most people don't really think of music as having any possible long 
term effects, except for ear damage due to excessive volume.  
However, there's some compelling evidence that comes out of the 
work of scientists from many different backgrounds that suggests 
that listening to certain kinds of music can have some far reaching 
consequences to our health.   In this report, well be examining 
different perspectives about how and why music affects us, 
expressed by PhD's, M.D.'s, psychologists, psychiatrists, music 
therapists,  engineers, and even plants and animals.

One very interesting perspective comes from a psychiatrist and 
musicologist named Dr. John Diamond, who wrote a fascinating 
book called, "Your Body Doesn't Lie."  He has done a great deal of 
research in the field of Applied Kinesiology (commonly called 
muscle testing), which is the study of muscle movement and 
strength.  Dr. Diamond was particularly interested in how different 
kinds of music would influence our muscle strength.  What he 
found was that certain kinds of music could actually make the body 
lose muscle strength.  He would test subjects by having them hold 
out their arm and resist his pressure on their arm.  He would then 
test their resistance while playing different kinds of music.  He 
found that rock and roll music had a very debilitating effect on the 
deltoid muscle (a triangular shaped muscle that covers the shoulder 
joint) in the arms of  the subjects he tested.  In contrast, classical 
music had no weakening effect.  Dr. Diamond describes it as 
follows: 

"Using hundreds of subjects, I found that listening to 
rock music frequently causes all the muscles in the 
body to go weak.  The normal pressure required to 
overpower a strong deltoid muscle in an adult male is 
about 40 to 45 pounds.  When rock music is played, 
only 10 to 15 pounds is needed...Every major muscle 
of the body relates to an organ.  This means that all the 
organs in our body are being affected by a large 
proportion of the popular music to which we are 
exposed each day.  If we add up the hours of radio play 
throughout the world, we can see how enormous a 
problem this is...  I have found only two instances in 
classical music that produce muscle weakness.  One is 
the conclusion of  Stravinsky's  'Rite of Spring' and the 
other at the conclusion of Ravel's La Valse.  In both cases 
the composer was attempting to convey chaos and has done 
it quite successfully... Of all types of music that I have 
tested, only one other passage has caused the subject's 
indicator muscle to go weak,and that is one short segment of 
Haitian voodoo drumming.  Nowhere else.  Thus, the 
debilitating effect...is almost exclusively present in modern 
popular music.  As far as my investigations can discern, it 
first emerged in the early sixties.  Since then this beat has 
progressed until it is now well represented in the Top Ten of 
any week."

As you can see from the above quote,  it appears that it actually 
makes a difference in your body's strength if you listen to certain 
kinds of music.  An interesting side note to Dr. Diamond's mention 
of voodoo drumming  concerns the roots of rock music.  These 
roots actually go back to the voodoo rhythms brought in through 
slave trading from Haiti into New Orleans.  

As Dr. Diamond did further testing, he discovered that something 
very strange happened after his subjects listened to several minutes 
of rock music.  All of a sudden, they tested strong to the rock 
music.  This was very strange and perplexing until Dr. Diamond 
discovered what was happening.  He figured it out by testing 
another acupuncture meridian called the Umbilicus, which is near 
your navel and close to the solar plexus.  The Umbilicus point is a 
kind of clearinghouse for the body.  It is a place where you can 
determine what is really going on and what the body is really trying 
to tell you about its condition.  When Dr. Diamond tested these 
subjects who were now testing strong with the rock music and 
checked their Umbilicus point, he found that they would test weak 
at the Umbilicus.  

What does this all mean?  Dr. Diamond describes this phenomena 
as "switching".  It is a process where some of the messages 
traveling over the neurons of the brain going to one cerebral 
hemisphere or the other get switched and go through the wrong 
pathways, causing perceptual difficulties, stress and a general alarm 
state in the body.   OK, so what, you say.  Well, further testing of 
these "switched" people provided some astounding results.   Dr. 
Diamond describes what he found:

 "Now once switching becomes ingrained, as it were, a 
serious problem is introduced...It is as if [the] body no 
longer can distinguish what is beneficial and what is 
harmful.  In fact, [the] body now actually chooses that 
which is destructive over that which is therapeutic.  In 
this light, consider the millions of people who are 
exposed hour after hour to rock music and are thus 
continually switched and stressed.  Turning down the 
volume wont help - the rock beat takes its toll even at 
low levels.  After the switching occurred, the things that 
they tested weak for before now tested strong and vice 
versa."

In a switched state, a person is potentially craving things that are 
destructive to the body and shunning things that are life giving.  I'll 
bet that you've seen such behavior in your kids and wondered 
where it was coming from.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to 
imagine potential consequences on an individual, family and societal
level if people's bodies are craving things that are 
destructive to them.   Examples of such destructive consequences 
could be:  increases in violence, suicide, drug use, or more subtle 
consequences like eating an improper diet, drinking too much 
alcohol, developing a poor self image, etc.

Dr. Diamond gives another example of the craving or addictive 
nature of rock music.  He relates a case history of a factory that 
manufactured sophisticated electronic equipment.  Concentration 
and clear headed thinking were essential on the factory floor.  The 
factory management was persuaded to try switching the type of 
music being played over the speakers in the factory.  Up until that 
point, a great deal of rock music was played.  The management 
changed to a different type of music (Note:  Diamond doesn't say 
what type it was) and found to their delight that productivity 
increased and errors decreased immediately.  The only problem was 
that the employees were very dissatisfied with losing their rock 
music.   Diamond sums it up as follows:  "The rock beat appears to 
be addictive; repeated exposure to it causes one to seek it.  It 
becomes the beat of choice.  It is as if the switching introduced by 
the rock beat has become the normal rather than the abnormal 
physiological state."

When I learned of the phenomena of switching, I decided that I had 
to verify it for myself.  I was also concerned with whether there 
could be some influence on the results by the listening preference of 
the person who was the subject in the experiment.  So, I devised a 
test where I was wearing headphones and in which there was 
played a tone of "white noise", which sounds like static.  This was 
played at a volume sufficient to keep me from hearing what other 
music was being played in the room through speakers.  A friend of 
mine, experienced in muscle testing, then proceeded to test my 
muscle strength while he spun the dial randomly on the radio 
receiver hooked up to the speakers.  My arm remained quite strong 
until suddenly it fell to my side like a dish rag.  It was so profound 
a difference in strength that I started laughing hysterically.  I just 
couldn't believe some sound coming out of a speaker could do that 
to me.  But, sure enough the offending piece of music was actually 
a Beatles song called "Come Together" - a seemingly innocuous 
enough piece just to listen to it.  However, it obviously was having 
some affect on my body that went beyond the auditory pathway.

It was after this test that I realized that our bodies are actually like 
one big ear or like an antenna.  They pick up vibrations, sound 
waves and other energy effects and disturbances which we may not 
be consciously aware of, but that affect us all the same.  I had been 
trying to play classical music on my headphones when going to 
health clubs to work out, thinking that as long as I was listening to 
classical music on my headphones, I was doing great.  However, 
after discovering that  music affects the whole body and doesn't just 
come through the ears, I avoided being in places (such as my health 
club) where they  played loud rock music.

Well, now you may be saying at this point, "Well, Greg just doesn't 
like rock music - he just doesn't understand."  Actually, I had been 
in a rock band for eight years when I found out about what the 
music was doing to me and my audiences.  I liked rock music for 
most of the same reasons that everybody else does.  However, I 
found that rock music fell into a category similar to allergic foods.  
You've probably heard someone say something like, "I like corn 
but it doesn't like me."  You could substitute the word rock for 
corn in the previous sentence and you'd have an accurate statement.  
With rock music, it really isn't about music preferences at all.  In 
reality, it's about trying to gain control of our bodies, minds and 
lives instead of having our energy and our own control of our 
behavior slowly drained away from us.  It is also about how much
we're going to tolerate the much overlooked hazard of sonic pollution.


PLANT AND ANIMAL STUDIES

It is often fascinating to watch how nature responds to changes in 
the environment.  If you pay attention, nature often will tell you 
what is beneficial to leading a healthy life and what is not.  Nature 
has told us which types of music that she likes through some very 
interesting experiments with plants and animals.  What is great 
about these experiments (especially the plant studies) is that a 
skeptic can't say, "well, a person tested weak to certain kinds of 
music because they don't really like that kind of music." (this is one 
reason I used headphones to block out the music in my experiment).  
With plants and animals, you eliminate the argument of subjective 
liking and disliking of certain kinds of music.  The other nice thing 
about these studies is that you can try them yourself at home.  Ive 
been an advisor to science projects where the effects of music on 
plants was demonstrated.  

A researcher named Dorothy Retallack did some pioneering studies 
into the effects of different kinds of music on plants.  Using strictly 
controlled conditions, she kept her plants in large closed cabinets 
where light, temperature and air were automatically regulated.  She 
found that in under four weeks,  three hours a day of acid rock, 
playing through a speaker in the side of the cabinet was found to 
stunt the growth of and damage philodendrons, squash, and corn 
plants.

Retallack also studied groups of petunias exposed to two radio 
stations.  One station was a semi-classical station and one was a 
rock station.  At the end of the second week, the petunias exposed 
to the rock music were leaning away from the speaker and growing 
erratically while the petunias listening to the classical station were 
all leaning toward  the speaker.  All the plants exposed to the rock 
station died within a month. 

A third experiment was conducted with some fascinating results.  
Retallack used groups of beans, squash, corn, morning glory and 
coleus plants.  These plants were divided up into groups that had 
the music of Led Zeppelin and Vanilla Fudge played to them; 
another group had contemporary avant-garde atonal music played  
to it; another group was kept in silence and an additional group had 
peaceful devotional music played to it.  Retallack found that after 
ten days, the group exposed to Led Zeppelin and Vanilla Fudge 
(hard rock music for those not aware of these musical groups) were 
all leaning away from the speaker and after three weeks these plants 
were all stunted and dying.  The plants exposed to the avant-garde 
atonal music were leaning 15 degrees away from the speaker but 
they had medium sized roots.  The plants left in silence had the 
longest roots of these three groups and grew the highest.  However, 
the last group that had the devotional music played to it produced 
plants that not only grew two inches taller than the plants left in 
silence, but they grew toward the speaker!  I think nature was 
making a statement here.  

Some other fascinating research was done by  Dr. T. C. Singh, the 
head of the Department of Botany at Anamalia University in India.  
Dr. Singh discovered that classical music caused plants to grow 
twice as fast as plants not exposed to classical music.  He then went 
a step further and found that a music instrument creating sound 
waves will cause the protoplasm of cells (the fluid medium inside 
all cells - plant, animal, human) to increase its motion.  Dr. Singh 
found that violins produced the most movement of the protoplasm.  

Another discovery of Dr. Singh has far-reaching implications.  
When he tracked the plants that showed  vigorous growth in 
response to the music, he found that later generations of their seeds 
produced plants that also showed increased growth. Think of the 
implications!  This means that the music somehow altered the 
chromosomes of the plants!  What could this mean for music that is 
harmful for the plant - or for our bodies?  Some of the animal 
studies shed even more light on this subject. 

I came across a very interesting magazine article in the April 4th, 
1988 issue of "Insight Magazine" about a study done by physicist 
Dr. Harvey Bird from Fairleigh Dickinson University and 
neurobiologist Dr. Gervasia Schreckenberg from Georgian Court 
College in Lakewood, NJ.  Dr. Bird is very interested in the effects 
of sound and music on our bodies.  I subsequently got a chance to 
meet Dr. Bird and discuss his work and his theories.  He and Dr. 
Schreckenberg had teamed up to study the effects of music on 
laboratory mice.  They subjected one group of mice to incessant 
voodoo drum beats, one group to Strauss waltzes and one group 
was kept in silence.  The experiment used music played at low 
volume so that volume was not a cause for any behavioral changes 
observed.  Over the period of the experiment, they tested the 
different groups to see how well they could run through a maze to 
get to their food.  This was a measure of their cognitive ability - 
their ability to remember the maze over time.  

Bird and Schreckenberg found that the group that listened to the 
voodoo music had a very difficult time with the maze that increased 
over time to the point where they were totally disoriented and 
unable to complete the maze.  The other groups had no problem 
learning the maze, with an edge given to the mice listening to the 
waltz music.  Even when the mice were given a break from the 
music for three weeks, the group that had previously listened to the 
voodoo music "still could not remember how to get to their food, 
while the others found it quickly with no problem," said 
Schreckenberg.  This was pretty compelling evidence of the effect 
of different kinds of music on mental functioning.  But the best 
evidence was yet to come.  

When the mice brains were later dissected at the end of the 
experiment, it was found that  the mice that had been listening to the 
voodoo music had abnormal structural changes in their brain cells!    
The neurons in their brains were growing to the wrong areas.  They 
were basically showing wild growth without making connections 
with other neurons as they are supposed to.  There was also 
abnormal amounts of Messenger RNA, a chemical that the brain 
uses for storing memories.  Wow!  Real physical evidence of brain 
damage as a result of exposure to harmful music!   Finding 
abnormal changes to brain tissue like this proved that music can 
affect areas deep inside the brain, which other activities dont affect.  
Schreckenberg further commented, "We believe that the mice were 
trying to compensate for this constant bombardment of disharmonic 
noise.  They were struggling against the chaos.  If more connections 
among the neurons had been made, it would have been a good 
thing.  But instead there were no more connections, just wild 
growth of the neurons....Everything in life goes in a rhythm, even 
the life of a single cell.  All the biochemical reactions are rhythmic.  
If that harmony is disrupted by some kind of disharmony, then it 
can cause detrimental effects.  And, regarding the extension of the 
results with mice brains to human brains, Dr. Bird added, "What we 
are seeing here is the effects of disharmonious music on mammalian 
brains.  And, insofar as human beings have mammalian brains, we 
cannot preclude the possibility that disharmony may affect human 
brains as well."

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Please let me know if you found this report interesting and you'd like to
see more.   

Greg MacKay
Green Light Technologies
AOL:  GREGMACKAY    (or gregmackay@aol.com - from the 
Internet)
Compuserve:  75201,3206    (or 75201.3206@compuserve.com  - 
from the Internet)