We wake up to and endless parade of violence , riots, strife, and mayhem and most of us simply want a safer world for our kids.

In my studies regarding comfort and music, healing and music and the salubrious effects of music on trama victims, I can only use one word to describe what I observe.

Alchemy.

We have come light years in advancing music and healing. In the next ten years, I firmly believe music therapy will become a customary course of medicine. In keeping with this thought, I offer an excerpt from an article that caught my attention several years ago. To me, the message is only getting more relevant as the world gets crazier.Music should make sense,. Music should heal. Music should inspire. Music has a mandate.Musicians have a social responsibility and the ones I know and love live up to the highest ideals in humanity. With this lofty ideal in mind, here is a quote that I wanted to share with you from this article:

The hope of music’s curative powers has spawned a community in the United States of some 5,000 registered music therapists, who have done post-college study in psychology and music to gain certification. Active primarily in hospitals, nursing homes, special needs classrooms and rehabilitation units, music therapists aim to soothe, stimulate and support the development or recovery of abilities lost to illness or injury.

While music therapists use a mix of improvisation and proven techniques to help patients, neuroscientists are looking to uncover the scientific basis for music’s healing powers. They are trying to understand how music can help rewire a brain affected by illness or injury, or provide a work-around for injured or underperforming brain regions.

By doing so, they hope to better identify which patients might respond best to music and what musical techniques might best help them to regain lost or compromised function.

“Music might provide an alternative entry point” to the brain, because it can unlock so many different doors into an injured or ill brain, said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, a Harvard University neurologist. Pitch, harmony, melody, rhythm and emotion — all components of music — engage different regions of the brain. And many of those same regions are also important in speech, movement and social interaction. If a disease or trauma has disabled a brain region needed for such functions, music can sometimes get in through a back door and coax them out by another route, Schlaug says.

 The above referenced data constitutes important new developments in exploring why Music developed. Was it a repetition of a mother’s heart, or perhaps percussiive instrumenst meant to scare off perdatory beasts?  My gut tells me that music is not of human origin. It exists in the animal world and pre dates ,,,, us.