The Psychological Effects Of Music

All Art tends to the nature of music, like the nature of anything else we can discuss with any profit, is merely another way of saying its actions and reactions as they can be discussed and foretold by us. Before being able to say how music acts upon mankind as a whole, we have to inquire how music acts upon different categories of human beings. Every since Galton and Charcot, empirical psychology has dealt more or less scientifically with certain types whose names at least, the visual, the auditory, the motor, the verbal type, and their cross-breeds, have become familiar. Starting from everyday experience, we are immediately obliged to notice that there are persons in whose life it means lass and others in whose life it means nothing worth reckoning. When music interests you at all, has it given you a meaning which seems beyond itself a message, or does it remain just music? Before dealing with such conflicting answers, 1 must explain that such inquires have to steer between opposite dangers. Anatomy and psychology reveal many principles of significant interest to the musicologist and physiology, the science dealing with the functions of an organism as distinct from its structure, concerns such topics as circulation and the nervous system