1
The Effects Music on Humans
Historically, music has remained among the arts that most influence the lives of humans
in different ways. Many people spend a lot of time, money, and energy on music. They claim
that music makes them happy, cheers, inspires, educates, consoles, and enthralls them. In prayer,
love, compassion, sorrow, illness, entertainment, and meditation, music creates suitable
environments with which negativities are eliminated from human lives while positivity is
encouraged. As explained by Schäfer, Peter, Christine, and David, the numerous functions
performed by music on the human body can be narrowed down to two perspectives.
The first of
these affect the individual while the other concerns an individual’s connectedness to other
persons. They include the regulation of arousal, achievement of self-awareness, adjustment of
mood and attitude, socialization, enhancement of creativity, and physiological healing.
The first outstanding effect of music on human bodies is its ability to enhance creativity
and make humans smarter in cognitive and social aspects. In the processes of creating,
memorizing, and performing various tunes, lyrics, and melodies, human brains get
multifunctionally and vibrantly engaged.
According to Groarke and Michael, this vibrancy
increases the brain’s capacity to solve challenges and broadens the scopes with which humans
approach day-to-day encounters in life. Resultantly, individuals who listen to divergent genres of
music consistently tend to take shorter time to generate smart solutions to challenges as opposed
to those who do not. This function is further tied to the fact that the soothing and comforting
nature of some genres of music help to heal anxiety and other mental illnesses. Physiologically,
music achieves healing by controlling pulse and respiration rates while minimizing
.Schäfer, Thomas, Peter Sedlmeier, Christine Städtler, and David Huron. 2013. "The
Psychological Functions of Music Listening". Frontiers in Psychology 4 (511).
doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00511.