(Newswire.net — March 15, 2017) — Reno, NV – At a recent TEDx Talk at the University of Nevada, a breakthrough country music artist revealed its scholarly side, in an effort to show how powerful music can be.
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. It started as a conference in 1984 where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, but today it covers topics ranging from science to business and versatile global issues.
Cam is a performer who left a mark on country music with the introspective and dream-analyzing hit single “Burning House”. But before she was shot to fame, she earned a Psychology degree and worked in labs at UC Berkeley and Stanford.
As a country music star and an academic, she addressed the healing power of music in her speech “Life can be tough. Music can help.”
Aristotle and Plato were among the first to write about the healing influence of music. Humans have been making music since the Stone Age, as archaeologist discovered evidence of its presence in every human culture. As Cam notes, “even when the primary concern was not getting eaten by a sabertooth tiger”, wooden flutes were crafted, suggesting that music was a factor in our daily existence.
The speaker referred to a scholar, Leonid Perlovsky, who said that unlike language that creates differences between cultures, music unifies people since a song can emotionally move a person by its tone, even if he or she does not understand the lyrics.
“Our psyche requires both,” the artist and academic adds.
Cam also presented the fact that music improves test scores when it comes to children. When solving a math problem, those who were in a room with music scored better than those in a room without it. Furthermore, musical students took longer suggesting that music helped them focus and led them to better scores.
Furthermore, the artist read a touching message from a fan who found comfort in her song after suffering the loss of her brother. When her autistic son, who is non-verbal, saw his mother crying over the song “Village”, for the very first time he felt empathy and embraced his mother to comfort her. He even said “Fly, Fly” which is how he called her brother, proving even further the depth of the connection they shared.
These are well-known facts which have been confirmed by studies. Where conventional medicine has failed, music therapy has sometimes provided relief, according to the Scientist. Perhaps music’s strongest feature is that it interacts with the diverse regions of the brain, and that is how it can help Parkinson patients to move by humming a song as it decreases the level of anxiety. It can soothe a girl’s heart with meaningful songs. It can even mitigate boy’s anger, inability to concentrate or feelings of inadequacy by making him play percussion instruments or perform in a band. Even a toddler’s developmental delays can be stimulated through beat, tempo and improvisation.
Science finds explanations of these effects of music therapy in the principles of neuroplasticity.
But perhaps the most powerful component of music is the social benefit derived, which can even help patients combat depression and heal emotional suffering, the Gazzette reports.
And the academic side of Cam refered to the state of cognitive dissonance, when desires don’t line up with reality, which is pretty much the basis of every sad country song such as Cam’s “Burning House”. The artist spoke about her own experience, saying that she felt ashamed for treating someone badly. And by having people come to her to tell her their stories because of this song, she had realised they had helped her heal and still feel like a good person despite of that.
Therefore, Cam’s speech shows music can be an efficient group therapy tool that humans developed to help soothe the soul.
“Music carries the burden of our heartbreak,” she explains in her speech. “It allows us to process grief. It reminds us that good things are coming and it lets us know that we are not struggling alone.”
“Are you getting the most you can out of music?” Cam asks and concludes her speech by saying to the audience to “Let music do its job.”
Cam is nominated for New Female Vocalist of the Year at the 52nd ACM Awards, airing live April 2nd at 8:00 p.m. ET on CBS. On April 7th she’ll begin opening shows during George Strait’s Las Vegas residency. She is currently writing and recording her second album, the follow up to 2015’s Untamed, Rolling Stone News report.