Daily Times

German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz once said, “The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.”

Music indeed has a mathematical structure and it is exactly this mathematical symmetry and rhythm, which gives it a potent and instant ability to give us pleasure.

I once heard someone say “architecture is frozen music”. I would presume architecture is again about ratios and proportions and is very mathematical in nature. Its beauty, like that of music, comes from the mathematical rhythms so innate in music. It would seem obvious to all of us that music is capable of giving us immense pleasure and has the ability to affect our moods for better or for worse.

Other than its purely entertaining aspects, we now know of uses of music also in therapy and psychological treatments. Physicians, psychologists and therapists encourge use of music while patient is recovering from surgery and other diseases, as music is known to affect the human mind and enable the body to secrete natural painkillers and promote healing. Music does wonders to the human mind through which mind can be persuaded to heal the body.

In an American Psychological Association article, “Music as Medicine” Vol 44, #10 published in November 2013, Amy Novotney mentions that researchers are exploring how music therapy can be used to treat pain and reduce stress in a wide variety of patients, from very young premature infants to elderly patients with depression and Parkinson’s disease.

It is interesting to note music affects human mind of all ages, in a powerful, profound and scientific way. Dr Richard Pellegrino, a neurologist states, “Music can trigger a flood of human emotions and images that have the ability to instantaneously produce very powerful changes in emotional states.” This is precisely the reason young people in concerts feel the ‘high’ and get fully consumed by the rocking music. The Head-bangers Ball on MTV music channel with young music enthusiasts banging their heads continuously for long durations without feeling any fatigue amply demonstrated this point.

This also implies that other than entertainment and medicinal use, music has other effects on the human mind not yet known by common people who happen to be the very object of social engineering for which music is a crucial element. However, most of those who endeavour to discover the secrets of the science of social engineering continue to explore the power of music on the human mind from the perspective of controlling human minds for profit than mere curiosity.

Over two thousand years ago, the great Greek philosopher and scholar Plato had identified the immense power of music and its effects on both individuals and societies, “The persuasive nature of music is too potent to be entrusted to the whims of mere musicians or common people. Only those who were the most educated, the most rational—those who were fully competent, responsible listeners and looked past superficial entertainment to the greater interests of society as a whole could concern themselves with music.”

What is incredible about Plato’s comments is his very precise assessment of the potency of music and its far-reaching effects on the human mind without the use of modern scientific research methods, which are now available to scientists. Plato also goes on to outline the kind of people who could concern themselves with music. Similarly, common people and even musicians who do not have the qualities Plato outlines again must not concern themselves with music. If we look around, today, unaware of the extremely high potency of music, we take music as just an art form, oblivious of its possible deep effects on our minds.

When a thing has great healing powers and potency to bring goodness and joy, it usually also has the potential to cause harm, and music is no exception. The great Italian Operatic Composer Pietro Mascagni was indicating exactly this when he said, “Modern Music is as dangerous as cocaine.” It is no coincidence that music has always been usedin occult rites of secret societies as David Livingstone in his book ‘History of Terrorism’ points out, “The combination of intoxicants and music to induce a state of altered consciousness has been the basis of occult rites since the very beginning.” Livingstone further points out that researchers working for the Tavistock Institute on the MK Ultra Mind control Program had successfully explored uses of music to induce mental states in their audiences that would open them to specific forms of indoctrination. For the purpose of indoctrination, they found sex, drugs, and music to be a potent combination for indoctrination, and most of all, using music to reduce the listener to a state of emotional immaturity, which renders her/him susceptible to the message it contains.