Enhanced Study Performance - how nature sounds may help you study - part 1
Aug 7th, 2008 by andrew skeoch
I fondly remember the trauma of studying for my year twelve, high school exams. I also remember the music I listened to while I studied, choosing it because it seemed the most calming and focusing, or relatively so considering my music tastes at the time.
Since then, I have gone on to develop a keen interest in music, and how it affects us mentally and emotionally. As a practising musician, I have become aware of how music is actually a part of nature, that it is a resonance of our physical world. This enquiry has lead me to the work that has occupied me the last 15 years or more; the recording of pure nature sounds in wild places around the world, and publishing these beautiful soundscapes through our label Listening Earth.
Can our choice of background listening actually enhance or detract from our performance in studying? Well, it can certainly distract us - just imagine trying to study while listening to loud talkback radio! So it seems reasonable, and consistent with experience, that suitable listening can help put our mind in a calm and receptive state for learning.
What are the most suitable listening choices? We naturally think of music. We want music that will not be distracting as we focus on absorbing complex information and new ideas. So we can discount radio, talkback certainly, anything with an announcer, as speech will be distracting to our concentration. Similarly, songs with lyrics will clutter our linguistic mind by having us subconsciously singing along. That rules out a huge slab of contemporary popular music, leaving us with instrumental music.
Understandably, many people to think of classical music. There is great variety in classical music, however we can make one simple observations in regard to what may be suitable listening while studying…
Something fundamental happened to western art music around the beginning of the 1800s; it became an expression of drama and conflict. Think of almost any of Beethoven’s pieces; they are full of dramatic statements, explosive dynamics, musical arguments and counter-positions, titanic forces, conflicts and resolutions. Consider the image of the classical virtuoso wresting music from their instrument, fingers flying and hair awry. It is an ethos of music that continues to the present day, with our driving rhythms, visceral use of volume, cultivation of texture and noise as music, and the theatrical posturing of musicians. The drama of our human life is centre stage.
Previous to the 1800s though, in the renaissance and culminating in the baroque period, music was seen as reflecting a divine and natural balance - a harmony of the cosmos. Music was valued for its expression of internal grace and poise. This may explain why the music of Bach, Mozart and Vivaldi has come to be associated with relaxing listening (even ubiquitously through the commercialisation of the so-called ‘Mozart effect’).
However, a twist in our understanding of this old music has emerged in recent years. As modern musicians have researched the musical instruments and performance practices of the time, they have found that the music was not historically all that ‘nice and relaxing’. Indeed, an authentic, period-instrument orchestra with gut-strung violins and valve-less woodwinds sounds decidedly edgy, and capable of some furious and exhilarating music making. A few decades ago, Mozart’s music was known through orchestras playing ponderous and over-romanticised interpretations, but modern scholarship is revealing his compositions to be sprightly, Bach’s harmonies to be decidedly challenging, and Vivaldi’s violin writing to be demonically exiting.
Recently we have witnessed a return to the desire for sweet, romantic sounds in the phenomenon of ‘new age’ music. However in pruning music of its drama, using conservative harmonies, and often electronic sounds from digital keyboards, much new age music simply becomes soporific, saccharine, and devoid of vitality or creativity. There is literally no ‘gut’ in it. No doubt this is why it has become so derided.
As an aside, it is worth noting the marketing of some new age music, particularly the presentation of rational justifications as to why the music ‘works’ - a precise number of beats per minute, use of embedded tones to stimulate altered mind states, and so on. All this seems close to classic pseudo-science to me. It sounds impressive, scientific even, but is essentially unprovable. However these ideas are colourful and emotive, painting a picture of sound doing wonderful things to our grey matter. It accords with the prescriptive model of our medical age: a sonic equivalent of take two pills a day to make things better. So I am skeptical, to me these claims just read like very clever marketing.
In conclusion then, it seems that what makes music vital and engaging, are the very things that distract us when we want to concentrate and work or study. Yet with all the ambient acoustic distractions of our urban environment - traffic noise, people talking, etc - we often need something playing while we try and concentrate, if only to mask the world outside.
This is where I believe the sounds of our natural world have something unique to offer us.
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[…] part one, I discussed music as background listening to enhance your study or work space. I concluded that […]