Underlying our discussions in our Music Life and Times podcasts and in our soon-to-be-released book, What You Learn Learning Music, is how making music brings a special, unique kind of joy into your life. Interestingly, researchers have found that playing music has much the same impact on us as listening to music: improves your mood, reduces stress, sharpens your focus, and connects you with other people through shared emotions and memories.
Some additional detail on those effects, including medically proven facts:
• Music triggers the brain to release dopamine, the chemical that makes you feel happy. While some music educes emotions of sadness—think Andrea Bocelli singing so beautifully that he brings tears to your eyes—hearing a song you know and love or with a bright tempo can lift your spirits. Researchers have found that a bright, speedy tempo can increase your heart rate and wake up your nervous system. Your day can turn from bad to good based on a single favorite song. As the tagline of my friend James Casto’s Home By Dark concerts reads, “A song can change your life.”
• As to stress, music can slow your heart rate and lower your blood pressure. Researchers have learned that listening to music can reduce the stress hormone cortisol in your body. Certainly, playing music can have the same effect.
• It has been demonstrated that listening to music helps your brain stay alert while you work. Playing music requires alertness, that you remain focused on communicating the message and emotion of the music to your audience.
• While going to concerts or music at parties will bring you together with like-minded individuals, playing music becomes a conversation among friends. For musicians playing together to sound good, they have to listen to each other, give each other space to express themselves. That is a shared community. Even if you’ve never met each other before you take the stage, if all goes well you will have a relationship by the end of the evening based on sharing, understanding, and respect for each other and the music you have preformed together.
Everyone has their favorite music, their favorite songs. For most people those songs are associated with memories, such as of a first love. As a musician, playing allows you to express emotions built on memories or even influences on your life that you don’t think of while you’re playing but are ingrained from past experiences.