Learn & Tell

Set the Gearshift: Phish as Catalyst to Ecstasy

Table of Contents

How does music move us to ecstasy? The answer is: Nobody knows. (And do we really need to know?) But, for the thinkers out there, here’s a possibility…

[Throughout this essay, titles of songs will be capitalized and in quotes (ie. “My Soul”). However, unless obviously intended as a reference to a song, these are meant to be read simply as words in the sentence.]

2. Some Science

Imagine a visible resonant ripple spreading out from Mike’s bass; a single pluck on the string sends a booming E-note undulation shimmering through the air. My outer ear servers to focus this wave into the middle ear, where it is further concentrated, eventually hitting the inner ear, the place where a wave becomes an electric impulse. The pressure from the ripple pushes on a membrane that bulges into a tube, creating an oscillation that moves through the fluid in this tube. The rumbling liquid now rubs across the Organ of Corti, where tiny hairs sway with the current. As the hairs switch back and forth, they trigger electrical nerve impulses that zip into the base of my brain. And here, in the brain, the final transformation takes place. What were once ethereal waves, then pulses in the honey of my inner ear, then simple electrical charges, now become translated into what we humans have termed “sound,” the sonorous sound of the bass.

The note from that guitar has now been relayed around most of my cerebrum, for “the same area of the brain that is stimulated by music is also responsible for memory, motor control, timing and language” (Knight). This triggers memories, forces me to shake my behind, and affects me emotionally, filling my heart.

Unfortunately, there are people who cannot experience music, who suffer from a particular brain condition called “amusia.” By studying these people, scientists have been able to document the pervasive nature of musical sound. Amusia refers to “any upset in perceiving, comprehending, remembering, reproducing, reading, or performing music” (Jourdain 286). That is a vague and broad definition, and neuroscientists know it, saying they are “uncomfortable with so braod a definition, but it reflects the generality by which music operates in the brain…amusia may stem from damange to many parts of the brain in either hemisphere” (Jourdain 287). Music invades every nook of our brain and this is why it can take us over so entirely.

Because of its almost omnipresent nature, music affects us physiologically, having a “marked effect on pulse, respiration and external blood pressure…[as well as] delay[ing] the onset of muscular fatigue” (Meyer 27). Since music has been documented to affect us physically, it has often been used as an alternate form of therapy for psychological and medical conditions. Dr. Fred Schwartz, an anesthesiologist at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, says that for an anxious patien, music can have a comparable effect as taking five milligrams of Valium [relax and listen to some tunes instead of popping a pill!] and that when music plays in his operating room, anesthesia requirements drop 10 to 20 percent (Brown 118). In a published study in the “Journal of Music Therapy,” the chair of the music therapy program at Florida State University, Dr. Jane Standley, Ph.D., states that premature babies in intensive care who were exposed to music were calmer, used oxygen more efficiently, gained weight faster, and required shorter periods of hospitalization than babies who didn’t listen to music. Dr. Standley also found that burn victims, and patients undergoing treatment for cancer, brain disorders, and kidney dialysis reported less discomfort when music was played during painful procedures. And, finally, patients who awoke to music after surgery required less pain medication and could wait longer for their analgesic medications than other patients (Brown 120). Scientifically, music has healing power.

But I, along with many other people, believe that music’s power can help us to mentally transcend the physical world to revewal the world of the spiritual within ourselves, of the divine, the ideal, of pure beauty. In a letter to Scudder Rice, Aldous Huxley wrote that “the most perfect statements and human solutions of the great metaphysical problems are all artistic, especially, it seems to me, musical” (Aronson 151). Whether you agree with this or not, you probably agree with Aristotle’s statement that “music is one of the pleasantest things” (44). Not only is it pleasant, it is emotionally commanding.

Music has often been declared the language of the emotions; where words leave off, music begins. If you are at all musically sensitive, even if you don’t like Phish, then you have no doubt had an experience where you were exhilarated by a piece of music, forgetting your physical environment and becoming totally entranced by the sound. How does this transition take place? Science can tell us how sound waves are processed, but how do these simple “sound” waves become “music”?

To examine how music makes us feel so good (or sad or pensive), and how Phish is one example for me of quality music, we must follow a stepping-stone sequence of explanation, each stage leading to the next like a melodic scale. If we are to wonder how music inspires us, we must start with the bass note and ask, “What is music?” Second, building on the bass note, “What is the purpose of music?” In other words, how did it survive through human evolution? Third, the middle and earthy notes, all of the theories about music in evolution revolve around the emotions; so we must define an emotion. Fourth, the rising notes, how can emotions guide us to beauty? And last, the peak of our ascendance, how can the meditation on the beautiful launch us into a state of ecstasy?

Next in Part III: What is Music?