World of Music: Our heartbeats are rhythm and our voices melody (Part 16)

Ghada Abdelrehim

We talked at length during the previous fifteen episodes about introducing music therapy, explaining its origin, development, goals and methods of use, and sailed into this wonderful science to clarify its aspects as much as possible, as well as explained that the goal of using music for the health, happiness and comfort of man is something known worldwide. It is recognized that music is not only a recreational thing, nor is it confined to the field of philosophy or worship, but was used to influence the mental, emotional, physical, and involuntary movements, as it is the language of feelings and emotions, changing feelings and emotions in all forms, funny or sad, quiet or violent, driving to calm and contemplation or driving to enthusiasm and revolution.

Music and therapy are two companions that have not separated throughout human history. Music is one of the oldest means of therapy, so it has been used since ancient times in a primitive way. Then it developed to what it has reached in our era, based on studies and experiences that accept further development.

We dealt with music therapy in the Greek, Coptic, Roman and Arab civilizations, explained the stages of music therapy during the last quarter century, and talked about musical responses. We emphasized that all living creatures respond to music, even if the degrees of this response vary. This was expressed by the great Arab scholar Al-Farabi, who said, “In the nature of animals and humans, if they are happy, they vocalize in a certain manner, while if they are affected by fear, they vocalize in another manner.”

Then recent studies were launched to confirm the same fact. In the studies of Max and Jackson, it was possible to measure the kinetic currents inside the body during emotions to music. These changes are hidden by the clothes, while sometimes these emotions appear in a clear way in the form of tapping a leg, hand, or something else.

Listening to music creates emotions as a result of different responses based on the transmission of nerve signals to the brain, and the response is reflected in a certain way. After many experiments, it was proven that the different emotions are complex reactions of the body as a whole, and in particular the central nervous system.

Because mental and organic diseases, from a clinical point of view, are often closely intertwined, making it difficult to treat one without the other, and therefore it is necessary to treat the patient as a whole.

Every organic disease affects the psychological state of the patient, and the psychological and moral state of a person greatly affects his willingness to contract a number of organic diseases.

Music in general is a human element, as its tones flow and penetrate into the soul and body to give the desired effect, until it reaches the final goal, which is to find the desired behavioral change.

After all of the above, we reviewed the ways of using music to treat autism, speech, orthopedic and psychological diseases, and we were left with nothing but to give a practical statement for those sessions that the music therapist performs.

Music therapists start with improving phonemic awareness and quality of life, the duration of the session is 20 minutes, and the desired goals of that session are for the child to be able to improve his phonemic awareness by reducing the child’s difficulty in learning some letters of words, increasing the child’s awareness and uttering some sounds, and increasing the child’s awareness to hear the pronunciation of some letters and words. In this regard, the following means are used: keyboard, board with the lyrics of the anthem, band\ instruments, metronome, and letter cards. The steps of the session include:

Asking children questions about how much they love music, whether they like and care about the music education class, whether they have fun in the music room with the sounds of instruments and singing.

We begin to tell “the story of music in our lives.” The story revolves around the importance of music in our lives, that music is found within us and our organs, and its movements indicate harmony and internal rhythm. So, our heartbeats are rhythm, and our voices are melodies. Music is nothing but rhythm and melody. Each of our names has its own rhythm, as our names have music and our words have music. Our voices are different from each other, because every sound has its own tones that differ from other sounds. Even our steps have a rhythm.

Even water has its own sound and tone, trees and birds have sounds and tones, and all living creatures have different sounds, tones and rhythms. At the end of the story, we must know that music is inside us, in our names and in the environment around us; it is not just music in the music education room, and we must know that music is composed of rhythm and melody.

Melody is the melodic element associated with the sharpness of the voice, i.e. the pitch of the voice, such as the difference between the father’s voice and the son’s voice.

Rhythm the temporal element in music, which determines the length or shortness of notes or their division of several times. For example, the time and rhythm of the name Ahmed differs from the name Mustafa in time and speed.

Next week we will start detailing the first treatment session.