Music can Silence your Chattering Minds

This is an English translation of an article published in Nikkan San on July 2nd, 2020, as a part of my column, “The Way of the Pianist.

「You cannot think and listen at the same time.」When I heard my yoga teacher say that, I was blown away by the beauty of its notion. I can still picture the studio and the teacher I admired so much for her poise and wisdom. Now, more than ten years later, I now know that there was a scientific basis to her statement.

Our sense of hearing is most directly connected to our survival instincts out of our five senses. So, it gets processed very quickly in our brain. It takes our brain about 0.2 seconds to be perceive the image, but our sound perception takes only about a tenth of that time, at 0.025 seconds. Our brain expedites sound processing by skipping the frontal cortex, the part of our brain that deals with logic. That is why we react to sound faster than we can think. Our head turns to the sound source instantly. The sound of an alarm jolts our body to full attention. These are our primal instincts reacting faster than our more rational, developed part of us.

Our sound cognition is emotional, and primal, beyond reason, logic and words… We can take advantage of this mechanism when our mind is overdrive. Listen to music with your full attention. You can silence the chatter in your mind. The difference between music and noise is if your brain can comfortably pick up on patterns or not. Unpredictable sound, unwelcome and surprising sounds without any regularity are not music to our brains. These can cause stress, and increase adrenaline in our system. On the other hand, birds chirping, ocean waves, melodies from our childhood, and rhythms we want to move our bodies to…these are music to our ears and brains, that can give our mind a break.

Focused listening can quiet our mind.

In guided meditation, the instructors encourage us to listen to our own breaths. The pattern of our inhales and exhales… with its regularity and calming effect, I now consider that to be music, too.

I am now live-streaming my music everyday from Monday-Saturday on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/MakikoHirata. Every morning at 6AM (PT)/ 9AM (ET), I live-stream my morning practice session for a half hour. I’ve been going through one variation per day from Goldberg Varaitions. This morning was Variation II. Tomorrow will be Variation III. Then, every Saturday from 5PM (PT)/8PM (ET) I live-stream a 30-minute concert. This upcoming Saturday will be the fourth of July. So in addition to Goldberg Variations from II-VI, I will play some Gershwin. I am committed to delivering music to the world in whatever ways I can.