“I Feel Fine” Music is good for you even if noise pollution could drive you to the grave.
While the new song, I Feel Fine, is successfully doing the rounds in the concerts with it’s enthusiastic reaction, we’ve scraped together and compiled some ideas also doing the rounds about the relationship between music and health. Is music good for you? Or perhaps it’s like food, maybe some music is more beneficial to your mental,physical and psychological health while other music causes more negative effects. Do we, then, need a healthy and balanced music diet to really benefit from it? Could musical addictions be bad for you?
Certainly not all music is always good for you. Mobile phones with built-in loudspeakers are a real pain in the neck and that’s not figurative, we’re talking real neck damage. Why, when there are perfectly good sets of headphones on the market, did some undesirable blob in a sound-proofed office in Matarola or Nok-ear have to decide to give teenagers another toy to be noisy in public with? The last thing anyone needs on a sleepy Monday morning on the way to a day full of deadlines, phone calls and irate bosses is the latest latin-orgy-rap fusion tinnily rattling the already rattling tin-like wagon; it’s nearly as bad as the obnoxious ringtone that cuts the smell and stupor of public transport like the plastic stirrer in the treacle-thick coffee that awaits you when you finally get to work. It does little more than add to your discomfort and increase the stress levels by a few degrees… as well as make you wonder why you still use the coffee machine.
Noise pollution causes all kinds of stress-related illnesses from insomnia to muscle tension to heart disease and this is still only the tip of the iceberg: perhaps in twenty or more years there will be enough symptoms of noise pollution for health experts to seriously insist on respectful regulations. It’s anyone’s guess why telephone manufacturers want to drive us to the grave before our time but, then again, it’s a miracle these mobiles have a life expectancy of more than three minutes, I’m often more than a little tempted to relieve my mounting discomfort on the inner workings of the barbaric gadget in question.
On the other hand, reaching for the discrete MP3 player on the way to a full day’s work or study, or choosing your favourite CD to soothe the frustration of the upcoming traffic jam doesn’t just make your journey more comfortable, the subsequent calming effect of the music helps you cope better and even drive better. Needless to say, selectiveness is the secret in this: satanic thrash metal might not soothe the nerves as effectively and, for the sake of your ears, your music shouldn’t be loud enough for other people to be able to sing along. If the bass-line makes your eyes vibrate then don’t be too surprised when people replace conversation with you for a few minutes of mime.
According to an article in The Telegraph on Sunday 19 October, experts around the world have demonstrated that music helps improve sleeping habits, relieve asthma and, believe it or not, singing helps tone your abdominal muscles as well as helping to develop healthy breathing habits.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/main.jhtml?xml=/health/2005/10/17/hmusic17.xml
It won’t be long before gyms and slimmers clubs incorporate singing exercises and you can finally say goodbye to the cardboard-textured breakfast cereal.
Ever tried a drum circle? The idea is really simple, you see informal versions of them in most city parks at the weekend: people who get together to play percussion instruments creating such an ethnic vibe it makes you wonder whether there was something special about the mushrooms you had for lunch. It doesn’t really matter if you didn’t grow up in the jungle; unofficial statistics show that the most expensive possession of the majority of art students is their authentic African drum and the closest they ever get to living in the jungle is the cockroach-friendly mouldy washing up tower in their kitchens. The trick is to just flow with it, have a great time and if it appeals to you to wave a couple of yo-yos dangerously around your head then so much the better, providing you have plenty of space and you don’t string up any unsuspecting tourists who are too busy asking themselves what they had for lunch . Some medical centres have taken to the idea have opened drum circle workshops as a form of stress release not just for patients but for the workers as well, like this one:
http://www.cleveland.com/medical/index.ssf/2008/04/drum_circles_at_metrohealth_me.html
Maybe one day, offices will provide music rooms for their workers where taskmasters and subordinates can unite in tribal unwinding.
It wouldn’t even be shockingly original: it was acceptable and encouraged to sing at work as recently as the 1940’s as a way of boosting the morale of the workers. Singing was ’seen as a sign of a happy workforce’ according to a report by the BBC. Not unlike the soldiers in the wars:
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.
How important is it, then, to feel fine like the song goes? How useful is it for us to be active users and participants of music? Why not test the theory for yourself and monitor the results. Whether it means replacing the radio for a calm CD on the way to work or replacing the chatter of the TV with one of your favourite albums at meal times and never forget the all important rule by the great philosopher S. White:
‘Whistle while you work’
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Tags: Alternative music, alternativo, britpop, Charleston, City Life, Community, Culture, Drum Circle, electronica, Health, juxtaposition, Lam Rim, liberation, life, Mobile phone, MP3, Music, Noise, piano, pop español, pop music, Release, soul, Spain, Spanish, Spanish music, Stress, Stress Management, Symptoms, Traffic, Traffic Jam
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