familiar mechanisms
Sounds that do not exist
This is one of the most interesting effects inherent in some musical instruments and a chorus of people singing in about the same key — the formation of beats. When voices or instruments converge in unison, the beats slow down, and when they diverge, they accelerate.
Perhaps this effect would remain in the sphere of interests of only musicians, if not the researcher Robert Monroe. He realized that despite the beating effect widely known in the scientific world, no one had studied their impact on the human condition when listening through stereo headphones. Monroe discovered that when listening to sounds of similar frequency through different channels (right and left), a person feels the so-called binaural beats, or binaural rhythms.
For example, when one ear hears a pure tone with a frequency of 330 vibrations per second, and the other a pure tone with a frequency of 335 vibrations per second, the hemispheres of the human brain begin to work together, and as a result he hears beats with a frequency of 335 – 330 = 5 vibrations per second, but this is not a real external sound, but a “phantom”. Continue reading
Strengthening cathartic experiences with music
One glance at a person who has in his memory a painful experience, actualized in the present, is enough to determine the presence of this experience. Usually, a person tries to hide an emotion that is struggling towards realization, perhaps interpreting it as negative.
But the tensions that arise in a person who suppresses his emotions, help to destroy the “primary essence”, which increases the alienation peculiar to most people from themselves and others (Lowen, 1975). According to Lowen, the “primary essence” is the pleasure of life, the source of which is the freedom of movement and the absence of tension in the body. Continue reading
