Is listening to music healthy?



There are many articles about the benefits of learning a music instrument and playing but what about listening to music? In the Internet you can find scientific studies concerning the influence of music on our health. They all show that music appreciation activities have many positive aspects.
Music consumption activates reward centers in our brain similar to chocolate and helps to release dopamine and reduce anxiety and stress and even ease the pain. Some scientists say that the pain-alleviating benefit comes from the fact that listening to music distracts you from concentrating on the pain. Depending on their character, some people can be easily absorbed in their activities and they respond faster to music by experiencing all forgetting state of mind, something we would call a flow. The extreme form of it is described by Beethoven biographers, they call it Raptus, a trance-like state when he was listening to music or composing his own.
The effects of listening to music can be compared to a purring of a cat –some research showed that music can lower blood pressure and ease muscle tension. Researchers from Finland did a study on the recovery of patients after a stroke and could witness a speedy recovery of those patients who would be listening to music for 2 hours a day. We all experienced that a right music in the morning can put you in a better mood and give you more energy.
Vocal music has more direct influence on our brains. Singing to a baby has been a tradition and Dutch scientists found out that the ability to discern rhythmical patterns and pitches is inborn and they say that listening to singing or soothing music can even be the first language lesson for a child and even help to prevent the language problems in the future. Later at school teachers would often see the correlation between high language proficiency and good music abilities.
The use of music for sports is well known too, we can run faster when listening to music, our body gets in tunes with the beats and keeping the rhythm can help us to keep on moving even after we are exhausted. The pleasing factor of music can be observed in fitness centers, shopping centers and even by telephone music.
But where to start? There are thousands of different music suggestions in youtube. For activity that would require high energy like running you could find youtube suggestions with fast pop music, with the strong beats.The relaxation music would often be electronic and use isochronic tones: tones that are turned on and off with the aim of causing brainwave frequencies to fall into step with a periodic stimulus having the same frequency as the intended brain-state . The isochronic tones can be incorporated in the classical symphony recording too. BILD
But what about use of classical music for studies as a boost for concentration and clearer and faster thinking?
While writing this video blog I was also listening to this compilation of Mozart piano concertos.

If you are also looking to learn the piano, you can check Musicgny.

In comparison with the Lang Lang or Valentina Lisitsa youtubes, these classical music compilations have 4 times more clicks and we are speaking about millions! Interesting observation about these youtubes: there are no names of artists, no composers other than Mozart or Beethoven, no dates of recording, but thousands of positive comments.
And now my question to you is: what time of the day do you listen to music and what kind of music is it? It would be great if you could share your opinion with me at www.movingclassics.tv