Music therapy is a scientific method of effective cures of disease through the power of music. It restores, maintains and improves emotional, physiological and psychological well-being. The articulation, pitch, tone and specific arrangement of swars (notes) in a particular raga stimulates, alleviates and cures various ailments inducing electro-magnetic change in the body.
Music therapy has a long history dating back to the ancient Orphic school in Greece. Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, among others, were well aware of the prophylactic and therapeutic powers of music. Even the Old Testament mentions music therapy where King David is said to have cured an illness by playing on the harp.
Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, used music to cure human diseases. In ancient Egypt music was used to lessen the pain of women during childbirth. Ibn Sina, a famous Arabic writer, has written in detail on this subject.
In India legend has it that Thyagaraja, the famous musician of South India, brought a dead person back to life by singing the composition Nav Jeevan Dhara in Raga Bihari. In 1729, a physician Richard Browne wrote the famous text Medicina Musica, which describes the use of music as medicine.
And one Dr Burnell has mentioned a manuscript named Raga Chikitsa in the collections of Saraswati Mahal Library in Tanjore, which deals with the various ragas that can be used for curing numerous ailments.
So what exactly is music? “Music is a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the infinite and lets us for a moment gaze in that,” observed Carlyle. Music is basically a sound or nada generating particular vibrations, which moves through the medium of ether present in the atmosphere and affects the human body.
Sarangdev mentions in his Sangeet Ratnakar that ahata nada or music is always produced by striking or aghata by a living being on an instrument of any kind. So music is a power or universal energy in the form of ragas.
Matanga (9-10th century AD) was the earliest writer to define raga. According to him, “raga is that kind of sound composition consisting of melodic movements, which has the effect of colouring the hearts of men”.
“There are four sources of raga: folk songs, poetry, devotional songs of mystics and compositions of classical musicians. While harmony is the characteristic of Western music, Indian music is pure melody. The general term for melody in India is raga or ragini,” says M.S. Randhawa in Kangra Ragmala.
Symphonies of raga have a definite soothing effect on the mind as well as the body. Repeated listening to the particular raga being chosen for a particular disease produces a network of sound vibration. The muscles, nerves and the chakras of the affected part are contracted when one impulse is given and relaxed during the interval between two impulses.
Thus, during contraction of the tissue, musical notes make the blood flow out from that particular area and in the interval there is relaxation and a state of reduced pressure is produced in these areas. Thus the blood from the adjacent area will flow there. This process is repeated again and again and the blood flow and energy flow in that part is enhanced.
This makes quick, fast healing energy from UEF (universal energy field) to HEF (human energy field) transmitted by the strokes of the different tones of raga which affects the CNS (central nervous system) because the roots of the auditory nerves are more widely distributed and have more connections than any other nerves in the body.