Think about a time when you were sitting at a classical concert and listening to the instruments warming up. The cacophony of sound was disconcerting probably to say the least, but once a single person tapped a tiny wand a few times and began to wave it around, magic began to happen. The magic didn't just happen on the stage, it cascaded off the stage like a waterfall and soon had the audience enraptured. The music transported the audience mentally to an entirely different place. At least that's how it happens for many people.
If you are familiar with a piece of music it can take you many places. Those places are often familiar. Your mind drifts back to a time when you heard that particular piece, or maybe (if you are a child of the sixties and seventies) you might harken back to a laser light show that augmented the music that was a part of your altered state of mind. Or maybe it wasn't like that for you.
Perhaps you hear Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" and it takes you to a childhood performance and you "see" performers dancing about in rhythm to the music. Or maybe it's a Bugs Bunny moment as he directs the orchestra through Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody. Or maybe you've never heard a piece before. In any case if you allow yourself, your mind is going to be swept away to some degree. You are entering a meditative state and you're not even trying.
But it doesn't have to be classical music really. It can be jazz, rock, hip hop, country or any other style or type you care to name. The fact is that for some reason human brains are very receptive to rhythmic sounds and some of mankind's most amazing creativity is exhibited in music.
Of course, every sound is not for every person. We all have our particular tastes in music and one man's trash is another man's treasure to borrow a phrase. The hypnotic quality of music often will have you pulling into your driveway at the end of a work day and not even remember the ride. You are taken away to a different state while Aerosmith, Gershwin or Motley Crue play and possibly you sing along. Music, as they say, calms the savage beast, but it also soothes the modern man. And that seduction, by another name is meditation and it, like Calgon, takes us away.
