By Aparna M Sridhar

When astrophysicist and accomplished classical vocalist Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University listens to music as she tackles some of the most complex problems in cosmology, it is not to get into a mood. It is beyond that it is to get into a mode of thinking.

Bengaluru-based triathlete Anu Vaidyanathan, who finished sixth in the punishing Ultraman Canada Triathlon in 2013, has learnt Carnatic vocal and violin. She says music taught her to negate performance-inhibiting feelings like fear and fatigue, and create discipline in the way we frame our day and our problems.

For many who may think music therapy as something to do with how this raga is good for this and that raga is good for that, the cognitive or neuroscientific vocabulary in which the above feelings are expressed should come as a revelation.

Carnatic musician and neuroscientist Dr Deepti Navaratna, executive director (southern region) of the Indira Gandhi National Council for the Arts (IGNCA), and a former Harvard University professor, says that in the Indian tradition a considerable amount of empirical musicology has gone into studying the cognitive impact of swara (notes), sruti (pitch) and laya (rhythm), in their different forms and variations.

Its another matter that now there is hardly any neuroscientific exploration of music therapy in India, capitalising on the inherent strengths of classical music.

There is very little empirical experiment in Indian classical music these days. Starting from texts dealing with Sankhya philosophy to the Natyashastra to the more recent lakshanagranthas in music like Swaramelakalanidhi (written by Ramamatya of the Vijayanagar empire in 1550), the psychological impact of musical concepts has been clearly worked out, says Navaratna.

Healing Process That the mind is as powerful as the body in the healing process is universally accepted. To the best of my knowledge, while research data on active clinical use of Indian classical music in the past is limited, there are a lot of references to Raaga Chikitsa and the usage of certain ragas as adjuvants to ayurvedic therapy. Music as alternate/adjuvant therapy to aid clinical intervention is identifiable in our music practices, she says.

Taking rasa (emotion) as the main point, the dominant take on music therapy in India has been to use ragas to heal. There is a large body of literature dealing with Raaga Chikitsa, which looks at certain intervals and modes being able to produce certain outcomes.

Navaratna says that by the time Natyashastra was formalised circa 200 BCE (Natyashastra reflected contemporary thinking on this matter, in its era), the psychological impact of certain melodic structures/rhythmic patterns was worked out to the level of being able to prescribe one-jati (raga precursor) to one rasa.

In a recent electroencephalography (EEG) study on the impact of Indian classical music, especially of Hindustani ragas on individuals, Dr Shantala Hegde, assistant professor, neuropsychology unit, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, says that after listening to Hindustani ragas, 20 musically untrained subjects showed increased overall positive brain wave frequency power, higher even than that in highly relaxed meditative states.

Listening to certain ragas, for example Desi-Todi, for 30 minutes every day for 20 days, has been shown to produce a significant decrease in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, to reduce stress, anxiety and depression, and to enhance feelings of life satisfaction, experience of hope and optimism, says Hegde.

She notes, however, that music therapy is now moving from a social-science model focusing on overall health and well-being towards a neuroscience model focusing on specific elements of music and its effect on sensorimotor, language and cognitive functions.

The handful of evidence-based music therapy studies on psychiatric conditions have shown promising results. Traditional music, such as Indian classical music, has only recently been evaluated in evidencebased research into music therapy, says Hegde.

Navaratna says the key difference between studying music cognition in a brain imaging laboratory and studying it in a social sciences lab is that in the former you are looking at music not as the process but as the final outcome and most of the orientations to music therapy follow that ontological direction. In a social sciences lab, you would look at music as a product of a culture. There is a very inextricably bound relationship in the music and the cultural values that it harbours, and those are equally important for someone studying cognition.

You have to study music as culture and not as a synthetically separated thing. Empirical studies on the brains of people learning Indian classical music are very few, since the focus is on healing and treatment efficacy. Says Navaratna: There are very few studies on brains that function very well. What is happening in the brains of the people who are using their brains extraordinarily well? If you study that, then you may actually be in a better place to come up with therapeutic practices for brains that might not be up to speed.

There are many aspects of Carnatic music from an alapana (form of melodic improvisation that introduces and develops a raga) to a neraval (when the artiste takes a line from a composition and sings this line over and over, with a new variation each time) that reveal the potential for research in the Carnatic idiom. An alapana is the result of a lot of what we call embodied knowledge.

We have to look at different processes of the mind implicit memory, executive control and so on. The questions that I would formulate would be what are the kinds of memory involved in the Carnatic performance, how much of the material that people use in their alapana is actually novel and how much of that is learnt from compositions? asks Navaratna.

Sound of Music Any cognitive study of the classical music mind has to study the source of that creativity. How does a Carnatic or Hindustani musician create novel phrases? If one were to ask a musician how they do a swarakalpana (raga improvisation within a particular tala), they will probably say that its the product of years of saadhana, and that it does not involve thinking actively on stage. There is a certain muscle memory that kicks in from having sung swarakalpanas some 40,000 times. The moment you are doing it, creativity happens in a very different way. It happens from many unconscious processes of the mind, says Navaratna.

Similarly when one is doing a neraval, one has to deal with several structures and constraints, keeping the tala and the laya, and using the prosodic structure well. You cannot break phrases in the wrong places, the emotion has to be kept alive and you have to orbit that line of the krithi to higher and higher levels of emotional charge, while you are also doing a lot of mathematical manipulations that involve daunting mental processes. If we know how the brain works in such complex situations, then you may be able to apply that in learning disabilities, adds Navaratna.

Dr Geetha R Bhat, a child mental health practitioner and veena player, engages with what she calls music intelligence in her work with both normal and special children. She says due to its multi-sensory demands, classical music contributes to helping children learn how to both process and react to sensory stimulation.

The coordination of rhythm (tala and laya) along with the melodies (raga) is a combined complex activity which engages both hemispheres of the brain. Sanak Kumar Athreya and his wife Dr Sowmya Sanak have started the Svarakshema Foundation, an initiative focused on reviving Indian music therapy. Athreya believes that Indian classical music has innumerable components of music, each standardised, structured and easily adaptable to a therapeutic module. However, the components for therapy are different from those that are useful in a stage performance. Performing something complex on stage is attractive, but in therapy one has to break the music down into components that are useful, and therefore not many musicians are drawn to it.

Athreya is an advocate of using the ancient art form of Konnakkol for therapy. Konnakkol is the art of performing percussion syllables vocally in Carnatic music. The fast movement of syllables in rhythmic cycles creates interest among children. When we are treating children with special needs, especially autism, we observe that more than any other constituent of music, fast recitation of Konnakkol instantly attracts their attention, and creates an ambience for therapy. The practice of this art form in its authentic tradition is as good as alternative speech therapy.

For instance if a child has a problem saying th reciting tha ka | tha ki da | tha ka thi mi motivates the child to learn the sound. Konnakkol helps in enhancing memory and developing cognition among children.

Konnakkol is an effective tool in behaviour management too. Many children with special needs are prone to mood-swings, anxiety and meltdowns. Irrespective of the childs interest in music or ability to perform pieces, selective compositions of Konnakkol act as an earthing point, quickly defusing the situation, says Athreya.

It is not about teaching Konnakkol to children, but about using the practices in Konnakkol to initiate learning in other spheres, stresses Athreya. The creative aspect of Indian music where one is producing new patterns all the time helps in opening up new neural pathways, and in some cases of Alzheimers and dementia, it can be more beneficial than learning a new language, he notes.

It is clearly important to move beyond the simplistic stimulus-response model, which reduces music therapy to just mood improvement or marginal cognitive impetus. Music is capable of a much more creative and transformative partnership with the brain.

The writer is the editor of Saamagaana: The First Melody, a magazine on classical music.

More here:
How neuroscience is reinventing music therapy - Economic Times