🍄 Will Music Be a Drug?

We’re feeling supersonic. As neuromodulation and the global electroceuticals market improvs towards a projected $35.5 billion by 2025, is health’s mood music changing for the better?

Jul 21, 2023

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📘 ALICE book Tuning into Frequency: The invisible force that heals us and the planet.

Precisely how music heals in so many ways is still mysterious, but increasingly it’s the subject of emerging science. The U.S. National Institutes of Health has teamed up with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and earmarked $20 million for research to pinpoint music’s effects on brain circuitry, how it might be prescribed to treat neurological disorders and other ailments but also to improve the health of everyone.

Hello, we’re ALICE and we are always in a state of wander.

Just like a musical instrument, we too can be tuned. Ancient cultures believed music could heal the body and soul — which now strikes a chord with the science surrounding sound.

Making noise in the fields of nanotechnology, biology, and radio physics comes a new drug genre called “electroceuticals”, or “electromagnetic pharmacology.” From treating autism to dementia and depression, the potential is uplifting and researchers are tuning in. Conventional oral drugs end up in nearly every cell in the body before making their way to their intended target, where as electroceuticals are expected to hit their mark. The goal of bioelectronic medicine is to restore healthy patterns of electrical impulses. Adjusting how neurons fire to treat neurological disorders, for example, or to stimulate cardiac tissues to generate artificial heartbeat.

Researchers from Rockefeller University and Rensselear Polytechnic Institute have developed a new system dubbed “radiogenetics” too, which could potentially control cells and genes in living animals without wires, implants, or drugs. So far, they have successfully used electromagnetic waves to turn on insulin production to lower blood sugar in diabetic mice. Their system relies on a natural iron storage particle, ferritin, that when exposed to a radio wave or magnetic field opens up an ion channel in the body, leading to the activation of an insulin-producing gene.

Sound is being re-engineered by scientists and sonic thinkers. From neurostimulation to music as medicine to therapeutic ultrasonic waves, we are finally beginning to fathom the healing power of frequency.

Does music hold the key?

The Great Soundscape

‘Alexa, play my insulin dose.’ It’s not too far-fetched to imagine drugs of the future as frequency nanodevices, wirelessly programmable by a smartphone app. Ingestible and biodegradable electrical meds and wearable electrical bandages that can bring precise and personalized treatment to patients.

While still experimental from a clinical perspective, frequency remains one of the most sustainable, non-invasive, and potentially economical modalities in treating, or alleviating, so many ailments, pains and mood disorders. If you think about the idea that we are made of energy, that there are electrical currents running our biological systems, and that sound can create physical forms, it seems likely that frequency can be a positive force for repair, reconstruction, and renewal.

Your Brain on Music

There are some promising studies that have shown how music can help heal, encourage social interactions, trigger memory, lower depression and anxiety, work alongside anesthesia during spinal surgery, and even help premature babies gain weight quicker.

How is music healing? It stimulates the secretion of certain neurotransmitters, including dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins and the hormone oxytocin while decreasing the level of circulating stress hormones such as cortisol. These substances play a role in blood pressure, as well as heart and respiratory rates.

While music therapy is often lumped in with sound therapy, the evidence backing music therapy is more robust. Studies show that humans are hardwired for music and that music activates many global regions of the brain. Researchers are now using biofeedback and machine learning to identify how music’s structural properties (such as beat, key, and timbre) specifically impact biometrics such as heart rate, brain waves, and sleep patterns, developing a new “wellness music” as precision medicine.

Getting Hits

The deep reach of YouTube and streaming services such as Spotify introduce us to a new kind of alternative music therapy: binaural beats. What makes its sonic experience unique is that the right and left ears each receive a slightly different frequency tone, yet the brain perceives these as a single tone. What a trip. Listening to binaural beats for a recommended period can affect a person's behavior and sleep cycle. A review of twenty-two studies found a significant link between more prolonged exposure to binaural beats and reduced anxiety. Additionally, the practitioners did not need to mask the beats with white noise for the treatment to have an affect. Studies have also shown binaural beat audio used successfully to help with preoperative anxiety in patients undergoing general anesthesia for day case surgery, as well as to improve confidence, concentration and long-term memory.

Binaural Beats

Not just a one hit wonder, binaural beats were first discovered in 1839 by the meteorologist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, an expert on everything from magnetism to distribution of heat over the Earth, which profoundly influenced our modern study of climate change. Dove put a student in a room, and on one side, he placed a tuning fork, with a listening tube that ran from the fork to the student’s ear. He placed an additional tuning fork on the other of the room, running a tube up to the student’s opposite ear. Dove reported that even though the two forks didn’t vibrate at the same frequency, the student could hear the difference but as one combined sound, a slow beat that is now known as a binaural beat.

In 1973, Gerald Oster presented a series of relevant research and laboratory findings on binaural beats in Scientific American. He described how the rhythm of the binaural beat equals the difference between the two tones and, if sustained, that this rhythm can be entrained throughout the brain. This was an important fact because it showed that if the right frequency is selected, it can produce particular states of electrical activity of the brain.

That’s Entrainment, That’s Entrainment

A simple way to understand brain entrainment is to think of Cross Fit: you use a range of different tools such as weights or rubber tires to train different muscle groups. Brain entrainment is the process of training for your brain waves by using light of pulsating sound—in this case, binaural beats. Spotify has 250,000 (and counting) monthly subscribers to its Binaural Beats playlist. On YouTube, you can choose from a mood menu of binaural beats for deep focus, super intelligence, rapid healing, creativity, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, to cleanse infections, to attract abundance—you get the picture. (Medical News Today has a comprehensive list of the frequency and benefits of binaural beats on the brain)

Electric Avenue

We have been tapping into the body’s electrical network for centuries. Nerve stimulators have been used to treat conditions such as epilepsy and depression for decades.

In 1833, the English inventor Michael Faraday, discovered electrolysis, a technique that uses a direct but weak electrical current to drive a reaction. And in 1891, Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla experimented with the use of frequency in heating deep body tissues in the United States. Scientists have since expanded on these original studies, and today we know that electrical stimulation activates the same pathways of the electrical signaling that happens naturally in our bodies. These electrical signals regulate many of our cellular functions, such as hormone production and muscle contraction, and pass through nerves between the brain and the organs where the cells are located. The frequencies of these currents determine how active the cells are in performing their assigned functions. Today, bioelectric therapy makes that frequency strong enough to help the cells perform.

Higher Frequency

The pioneering fields of biophotonic diagnosis, biophysics, biofields, and biomagnetism flicker with the notion that the body is electric and that light is the way our cells communicate. An awareness that we have an alignment of energetic pathways are both ancient and contemporary ideas and the premise of vibrational medicine, or vibrational healing. Modern science takes this all a step farther—or, to a higher frequency—with the emerging field of bioelectric medicine or electroceuticals. (More on that in Alice’s Electric Humanity.)

There are some key players advancing our vibe with electro-pharma, one being Galvani Bioelectronics (startup born from scientists at GlaxoSmithKline and Alphabet’s defunct Verily Life Sciences). Galvani is developing implantable components that are laparoscopically implanted and controllable by an app.

Got A Nerve

A growing method of bioelectric stimulation is neuromodulation, which alters nerve activity through targeted delivery of a stimulus, such as electrical stimulation, to specific neurological sites in the body. The core premise is to stimulate or reduce the activity of specific nerves with either external sensors or implanted devices that can be activated when needed.

Neuromodulation is not: the way Dr. Victor Frankenstein experimented with electricity to bring a dead man back to life in Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 novel.

Neuromodulation is: a more precise and controlled electrical stimulation sent to specific nerves that are meant to target cells in an organ. The expected outcome is to stimulate or regulate the body’s immune and metabolic responses.

Something There to Remind Me

New neuromodulation studies deep dive into dementia and memory loss. Scientists at Boston University published a study that showed they were able to improve the working memory in adults ages sixty to seventy-six using a harmless form of electrical brain stimulation. Think of your working memory as your immediate mental calculator. It’s the part of the brain system that holds information for short periods, and is used to make split decisions, recognize a familiar face, or do simple arithmetic. Working memory is known to decline with age, even if you don’t have the onset of dementia. The culprit in this form of memory decline may be that the electrical brain sync between the prefrontal and temporal regions is slowing down. In this study, the control group of older adults showed improved working memory after the electrical intervention, and the effect appeared to last for fifty minutes after the stimulation.

What’s It All About, Alice?

Let’s face it: We have all self-medicated on a playlist at one point in our life. And soon we will trade in that anxiety app for a neurostimulating dose of flow state with just a tap. From the research labs of bioelectric medicine to binaural beats of brain entrainment, we are living in an ultrasonic world. Music, sound and frequency surrounds us and lives within—the most accessible and universal healing modality. Perhaps all life, from the architecture of our bodies to the design of a leaf on a tree, is just frozen music waiting to be turned on.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.
—Bob Marley, musician (Good Reads)

Leading Indicators

🧠 Can Music Mute Pain?
Music can help modulate the perception of pain that your brain responds to by blocking the messages of “pain.” Sync Project (personalized music platform backed by Bose Corporation) has collaborated with top neuroscientists and musicians to further test how music muffles pain. It comes in line with recent research showing that music affects the same neural pathways that are regulated by psychostimulants and other drugs. As the opioid crisis continues in the United States and globally, music therapy is a promising step for patients who are addicted to opioids and other pain meds, to help transition to a lower dose of drugs. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) has identified “non-pharmacologic management of pain” as a leading scientific priority. This is aligned with the priorities of other health-care practitioner organizations (such as the American College of Physicians), which aim to identify and deploy evidence-based non-pharmacological solutions for pain.

🧠 Recovery Unplugged
There’s an addiction care organization where music is motivation and medicine. America’s Recovery Unplugged seeks to make music a cutting-edge tool in the treatment of substance abuse by combining traditional elements of treatment such as detox and counseling with musical therapy techniques. Recovery Unplugged uses music-assisted treatment as a nontoxic, noninvasive therapeutic option during addiction treatment, and has experts on staff who can apply proven music interventions to replace the feelings one used to get from alcohol and drug use.

🧠 Tuning Fork Your Body
You probably know that two-pronged metal tuning fork used by musicians to tune their instruments. It releases a perfect wave pattern. Dr. John Beaulieu, a pioneer in sound healing (and founder of Biosonics) and Dr. George Stefano conducted research that shows the biological healing effects of using ‘biosonic’ tuning forks. In energy medicine and sound healing, therapists use calibrated metal tuning forks to apply specific vibrations to different parts of the body, intended to release tension and promote emotional balance. This works similarly to acupuncture, using sound frequencies for point stimulation instead of needles.

🧠 And The Beat Goes Aum
Chanting, enchante! There’s a science to how chanting affects our physical, mental, and emotional wellness. A study published in the journal Scientific Reports found that religious chanting can induce positive feelings and calmness, which lead to relaxation. Compared to the resting state, studies have shown that religious chanting increases the stability of cardiac activity, and regulating the cardiovascular system, which illustrate the mechanisms that can be used to help with positive stress-reducing effects.

🧠 Turn on Repeat
The music therapy field officially emerged in 1999 as neurologic music therapy (NMT), attracting start-ups who leverage digital tech with new tools to track our brain waves. Music helps with neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change over time with training. Researchers have demonstrated that repeated listening to personally meaningful music induces beneficial brain plasticity in patients with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer's disease.

🧠 We Like the Sound of This
Soporific to euphoric, ASMR (“autonomous sensory meridian response”) is one of the Internet’s best new breakthrough acts. Scientists see ASMR as a potential part of therapy for mental health or stress management. A study from the Department of Psychology at Swansea University, in the U.K., showed that 98 percent of participants who watched ASMR videos claimed to feel relaxed, 82 percent said they helped them sleep, and 70 percent used them to reduce stress. The same study found an increase in “flow,” or concentration during a task when listening to ASMR.

🧠 Catch Some Hz’s.
Studies have shown binaural beats paired with ASMR can be sleep inducing. The combined two auditory stimuli (the 6 Hz binaural beat and ASMR triggers) induced the brain signals required for sleep, while simultaneously keeping the user in a psychologically comfortable state.

🧠 Bach-To-Bach Hits
A new pitch for classical music as a de-stressor: A Swiss study from a team at Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Zürich, found that sixty healthy female subjects with a mean age of 25.3 years who listened to classical music before a stressful event recovered from the stress faster than those who listened to rippling water or simply relaxed quietly.

What Else We Are Wondering…

🔍 Hospital Sen
Humanizing the hospital experience by improving its sound is goal of Japanese musician Yoko Sen, founder SenSound, a social enterprise to reimagine the acoustic environment in hospitals. During the pandemic, she partnered with Philips to change the sound of their most popular patient monitor.

Sen had a sudden segue into healthcare sound design. She ended up in hospital unwell in 2012 and was overwhelmed by the cacophony of noise. Sen was connected to four different machines, each emitting a different sound. Now she creates soundscapes that patients pick with simple hand gestures, using movement sensors to translate a wave of a hand into the sounds of ocean waves, for example, gentle raindrops or a short symphony.

🔍 Listen to the Doctor
Why does a baby’s cry flood a mother’s body with a storm of stress hormones? How can a song stir up such emotion? Renowned neurologist and Ayurvedic expert Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary explains how different types of sound impact the human body and brain uniquely, in ‘Sound Medicine: How to Use the Ancient Science of Sound to Heal the Body and Mind’ (2020). He explores the physiological effects of sound vibration and traces the history of sound therapy and the use of specific mantras. Travel through the structure of the mouth, ears, and brain to understand how sound is translated from acoustic vibrations into meaningful neurological impulses.

🔍 Heart Acoustics
About 100 million heart cells fit into a space the size of a sugar cube – making them the most densely packed in the body. The cells communicate with each other and beat as one. The challenge for tissue engineers can be that when packed too tightly, cells don’t get sufficient nutrients but when too loose, can’t get their beat. Cardiologist Sean Wu, Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford, has set up with Utkan Demirci, an acoustic bioengineer and Professor of Radiology, to conduct the cells differently. They have used acoustics to pack the cells very densely and still maintain an ability to control and tune their organization. The acoustic signal creates Faraday waves in the heart cells, which can then be controlled.

🔍 Splish Splash …
… I was takin’ a sound bath. The underlying science of this relies on that fact that brain waves can be modified by externally produced sound frequencies in the entrainment process, and that sound can be used to tune brain waves to specific frequencies to help reach a desired state of mind. Theoretically, the synchronized sounds of singing bowls or gongs awash you in one harmonious and continuous frequency that may help adjust or calm your thought patterns. Organizations such as the Consciousness and Healing Initiative are creating means for validating and further the understanding and real-world applications of subtle energy healing practices, including sound.

🔍 Pink Noise
Noise has its own set of sonic hues. You will recognize the shushy static of “white noise”—it sounds as if are between radio channels and is often used as a sleep aid— but did you know that “pink noise” has lulling potential too? Nature is full of pink noise, including wind, steady rain, and the sound of our heartbeat. It sounds a notch deeper than white noise, flat and lower in its “shhh” tone, but research shows that it can also reduce brain waves to increase stable sleep.

🔍 New Gen Meds
Musicians making meditation apps resonate. Especially when they have scientific advisors as a sounding board. Founded by a group of music artists in London, SPOKE combines music, binaural beats and spoken word. Healing frequencies are used in every soundtrack alongside, for example, Lo-Fi Hip Hop, soothing beats, alpha waves and ambient world sounds. Each artist has been trained by neuroscientists, psychologists, and therapists to make their episodes as effective as possible.

👁‍🗨 Singing during surgery? Watch a patient sing 'Moana' soundtrack during brain surgery (CNN)

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