Functions of Music
Music therapy
Music therapy is a treatment method that involves using music to enhance health. There are many different approaches to music therapy, including creating music, listening to music, and talking about music. Although music therapy is often used to promote mental and emotional health, it may also help improve quality of life for people coping with physical health conditions.

. In the 17th century, the scholar Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy noted that music has an "excellent power ...to expel many other diseases" and he called it "a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy."

What Does Music Therapy Involve?

A music therapy session may incorporate a number of different elements, such as making music, writing songs, or passively listening to music. While music therapists often aim to foster the patient's emotional expression, there can be many other different goals in a music therapy session. These goals include relief of stress or anxiety, improvement of mood, and enhancement of quality of life for people dealing with illness.

Research shows that patients do not need to have any musical ability to benefit from music therapy.

Benefits of Music Therapy

Here's a look at some key study findings on the health effects of music therapy:

1) Music Therapy and Depression

Music therapy may help some patients fight depression, according to a review published in 2008. Researchers sized up data from five previously published studies, four of which found that participants receiving music therapy were more likely to see a decrease in depression symptoms (compared to those who did not receive music therapy). According to the review's authors, patients appeared to experience the greatest benefits when therapists used theory-based therapeutic techniques, such as painting to music and improvised singing.

2) Music Therapy and Stress

Music therapy may help ease stress in pregnancy, according to a 2008 study of 236 healthy pregnant women. Compared to a control group, the 116 study members who received music therapy showed significantly greater reductions in stress, anxiety, and depression. The music therapy involved listening to a half-hour of soothing music twice daily for two weeks.

In a research review published in 2009, investigators found that listening to music may also benefit patients who experience severe stress and anxiety associated with having coronary heart disease. The review included two studies on patients treated by trained music therapists. Results showed that music listening had a beneficial effect on blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and pain in people with coronary heart disease.

3) Music Therapy and Autism

Music therapy may help improve communication skills in children with autistic spectrum disorder, according to a review published in 2006. However, the review's authors note that the included studies were of "limited applicability to clinical practice" and that "more research is needed to examine whether the effects of music therapy are enduring."

4) Music Therapy and Cancer

Research suggests that music therapy may offer a number of benefits for people coping with cancer. For instance, music therapy has been shown to reduce anxiety in patients receiving radiation therapy, as well as ease nausea and vomiting resulting from high-dose chemotherapy.

Improving Memory With Music
You may have heard of what is commonly called “The Mozart Effect.” The original study of music and its effects on memory and intelligence published by scientists from the University of California at Irvine in 1993, there have been numerous studies done on how memory, music and intelligence correlate with each other.

It’s been common knowledge since then that classical music and memory have a connection, but we have never fully understood the reasoning behind how classical music actually improves one’s memory.
The connection between music and memory lies within the part of the brain that handles spatial abilities. When your brain processes music, especially classical music that does not involve words or lyrics, it uses the exact same pathways through the brain as the processes involved in utilizing your spatial abilities, such as taking the time to put together a jigsaw puzzle or recognizing shapes.

Relaxation effect:
Factors, such as stress, attention, and emotion, are known to affect memory. Studies have shown that classical music help in reducing a hormone called cortisone, which adds to stress. Classical music is considered as a way to enhance relaxation by releasing the appropriate neurons in the brain.
Effects on the rest of the body:
It is believed that Baroque period classical music declines blood pressure as well as harmonizes heart beat and pulse rates to the beat of the music, making the mind relax and keeping the body active. This relaxation technique allows the brain to improve concentration and affects brain wave amplitude and frequency.
Sixty beats:
Classical music that is set to 60 beats per minute kindles both the right and left parts of the brain, allowing the listener to be more inclined to processing information properly. Classical music such as Mozart and Baroque period compositions are particularly helpful. This 60-beats framework is also used by many teachers to instruct the students to the tune of a 92% rate of retaining the material.
Studies with Alzheimer’s patients:
Different studies have indicated that classical music helps memory-building exercise in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia. A research was conducted in a nursing home where two groups of residents took a name-face recognition test, with only one group having a therapist sing and play guitar with them previously. The results indicate that the group who joined in the sing-along did better on the memory test than the other group. Another study proved that Alzheimer’s patients listening to Mozart had improved memory of shapes and patterns.
Contradictory findings:
A research was conducted in which subjects were divided into three different groups to listen to composer Joseph Hayden, rock band Metallica, and white noise while studying a picture. After that, both stimuli (music and the picture) were taken away and the subjects were asked to recall details of the picture.
Researchers were astonished to discover that those listening to white noise recalled the picture the most correctly while those listening to Hayden’s symphony faltered the most in their remembrance. This gainsays previous results on music-memory studies; however, the research team confessed that external noise and communication between subjects was not monitored.
All of these studies and researches have shown that the classical music does help in improving memory to some extent. Therefore, we can say that yes, the classical music improves memory.

Punishment
Misbehaving students punished with Mozart

A school in England is using classical music to cut down on students’ bad behaviour. The head teacher Brian Walker at the West Park School in Derby runs two-hour detention sessions after school on Fridays. He forces his students to listen to Mozart and other classical music. He also makes them copy his favourite poems and they have to watch educational videos.

Mr. Walker says his main aim is to stop noisy pupils spoiling lessons for well-behaved students who want to study. He said the students staying behind are “not the smokers, the truants or the people who are late… It’s those who have slowed the learning process in class for everyone”. Mr. Walker explained this was unacceptable “because it is robbing the rest of opportunities”.

Brain Walker believes the detention reminds students that education is something to value. “It helps them see they are part of something begger that will enhance their life chances,” he said.

The head teacher thinks students actually learn from being kept behind after school:

Hopefully, I open their ears to an experience they don’t normally have and…don’t want to have again, so it’s both educational and acts as a deterrent.

Music has had success elsewhere in reducing bad behaviour. In 2004, it reduced crime on London’s subway by 25 per cent. Researchers from a Belfast university found it helped stop elephants misbehaving. However, one West Park Student called Kieran said: “An hour of Mr. Walker’s music is a real killer.”

Express Yourself Through Music

It is clearly the most powerful tool used for expression. It doesn't judge or discriminate, and there's always a piece for you. This, of coursehumans. Music has become an important part of society throughout the world as people use it to express themselves. All it takes is to listen to the very different and contrasting genres of music we have today. Each different type of genre conveys different meanings. Jazz is associated with relaxation, the blues with sorrow, and so on. Whatever instrument it may be, your voice, or a piano, you are expressing yourself.

Music provides a great source of communication. For example, if speech was the only form of communication, and there was no smiling, sign language, or music, life would prove to be very dull and unfulfilling. Most music has a purpose, in which the composer/performer is trying to relay a message to their audience. This is especially noticed on the radio, with song after song, each displaying its very own message. Some artists use lyrics in their songs to express explicit messages or to make people think about life and its various lessons. Others want to inspire people, invoking the emotions within, while others are use their demeanor and emotions to relax their listeners. Many songs I have heard have accomplished their goal of seizing the listener. No other song I've been in touch with has taken hold of me like Billy Joel's "Piano Man". I believe it to be a classic song and never tire from listening to it. The magnificent and captivating vocals and the smooth flow of the piano brings a sense of happiness and joy about me that is incomparable.

Expressing yourself through music can help you keep in touch with...

Music and Your Body: How Music Affects Us and Why Music Therapy Promotes Health

Research has shown that music has a profound effect on your body and psyche. In fact, there’s a growing field of health care known as music therapy, which uses music to heal. Those who practice music therapy are finding a benefit in using music to help cancer patients, children with ADD, and others, and even hospitals are beginning to use music and music therapy to help with pain management, to help ward off depression, to promote movement, to calm patients, to ease muscle tension, and for many other benefits that music and music therapy can bring. This is not surprising, as music affects the body and mind in many powerful ways. The following are some of effects of music, which help to explain the effectiveness of music therapy:
Brain Waves: Research has shown that music with a strong beat can stimulate brainwaves to resonate in sync with the beat, with faster beats bringing sharper concentration and more alert thinking, and a slower tempo promoting a calm, meditative state. Also, research has found that the change in brainwave activity levels that music can bring can also enable the brain to shift speeds more easily on its own as needed, which means that music can bring lasting benefits to your state of mind, even after you’ve stopped listening.
Breathing and Heart Rate: With alterations in brainwaves comes changes in other bodily functions. Those governed by the autonomic nervous system, such as breathing and heart rate can also be altered by the changes music can bring. This can mean slower breathing, slower heart rate, and an activation of the relaxation response, among other things. This is why music and music therapy can help counteract or prevent the damaging effects of chronic stress, greatly promoting not only relaxation, but health.
State of Mind: Music can also be used to bring a more positive state of mind, helping to keep depression and anxiety at bay. This can help prevent the stress response from wreaking havoc on the body, and can help keep creativity and optimism levels higher, bringing many other benefits.
Other Benefits: Music has also been found to bring many other benefits, such as lowering blood pressure (which can also reduce the risk of stroke and other health problems over time), boost immunity, ease muscle tension, and more. With so many benefits and such profound physical effects, it’s no surprise that so many are seeing music as an important tool to help the body in staying (or becoming) healthy.
Using Music Therapy:
With all these benefits that music can carry, it's no surprise that music therapy is growing in popularity. Many hospitals are using music therapists for pain management and other uses. Music therapists help with several other issues as well, including stress. For more information on music therapy, visit the American Music Therapy Association's website.
Using Music On Your Own:
While music therapy is an important discipline, you can also achieve many benefits from music on your own. Music can be used in daily life for relaxation, to gain energy when feeling drained, for catharsis when dealing with emotional stress, and in other ways as well. This article on music, relaxation and stress management can explain more of how music can be an especially effective tool for stress management, and can be used in dailly life.

For more ways to relieve stress in daily life, subscribe to the free weekly About.com Stress Management Newsletter; you'll find research, tips, and tools that can help you to cut down on the stress you encounter in your life, and develop effective strategies to better manage the stress that you do experience. In addition, these 25 stress relievers provide a variety of ideas you can use right now, and these personality tests can tell you a little more about your style of dealing with stress, and provide you with stress relief techniques that work especially for your situation.

To represent country/festival/heritage

To unite/encourage people * Gives hope to others (tsunami & earthquake victims) * To make them feel loved (strong 求生意志) * To unite people (war, to 对抗 enemy)