Music and the mind

There are clear and obvious links to the mind and music, music is widely known to effect emotional states and is used both to calm and energise. Emotion lowers concentration (http://cnx.org/content/m14804/latest/), and that’s when your subconscious and emotional intelligence start to kick in. If you lose conscious conception of yourself and others around you you lower your inhibitions, slowly not caring about your ‘look’ and releasing your mind, thus enjoying yourself more freely. In an environment set up to compensate this, like a rave, it raises the atmosphere inside making for a better experience.

Music, or more specifically rhythm, can also be linked to heart rate. Your heart beats at a very constant rhythm, a healthy rate is between 60 and 80 bpm (beats per minute) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate#Resting_heart_rate). Straight away there’s a similarity, bpm. All dance music is categorized in bpm to make it easier to categorize and decide which tracks to mix between, at the end of the day a drum and bass tune is not going to mix with a dubstep tune as they are at totally different bpm’s. Music has been proven to increase the heart rate (http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n15/mente/musica.html), and there are even musical tempo terms that reflect tempos relative to heart rates: resting – ‘Adagio’ (66 – 76 bpm), ‘Lento’ and ‘Largo’ are slow (40 – 60 bpm) and ‘Andante’ is faster (76 – 108 bpm). When dancing your heart rate would be in this last category, probably somewhere around 85, which is roughly half the speed of drum and bass. This is interesting, and maybe this is why dance music feels so easy to move to, because your body naturally runs at roughly half speed, which is still in with the rhythm of the music. As I have already showed, you get half speed drum patterns in drum and bass all the time, and they work, so could your heart theoretically be beating to the same rhythm. They say rhythm comes from the heart, I say literally.

Sensory Perception

The human senses consist of 5 main elements, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, and all have an impact on how we see and perceive things around us. There has been a lot of research into the effects of depriving senses, most notably by Dr. John Lilly at the National Institute of Mental Health in America throughout the 1950′s, 60′s and 70′s. He discovered a way of lowering patients stress levels by taking away external stimuli like light, sound and gravity. With the elimination of external stimuli the central nervous system’s workload was reduced by up to 90%, promoting relaxation (http://www.answers.com/topic/sensory-deprivation).

So admittedly a rave doesn’t exactly ‘deprive’ the senses, it rather overloads them instead. Intoxicating substances like alcohol and ecstasy heighten the senses (http://www.metrodrug.org/drugs/clubdrugs.aspx), and this is what I feel enhances the experience, the immersion within your senses. From reading about sensory deprivation inducing relaxation, it is interesting to think that when overloading the senses it could build up energy. I mean, if taking one out makes you relax then heightening one could build up inner emotions when placed in the right environment and conditions. Involuntary and this would be stressful, but when choosing to be placed in the experience the music and light surrounds your senses making you part of the overall atmosphere.