ABSTRACT
Sound is so much a part of life from birth to death that man accepts it, uses it, enjoys it, but seldom questions it. Its presence is like the background music of a moving picture, largely unnoticed but leaving overtones of feeling. Music is defined as organized sound made up of varying relationships of sound and silence and perceived as continuity. Tones do not move; they occur and they are gone, but we hear motion. We can say that the experience of hearing music, then, is in both the physical and nonphysical, subjective world. Anthropologists have found musical instruments to be essential in emerging cultures, and the dynamics of musical sound have contributed throughout human history to the therapeutic use of sound. Ancients knew the hypnagogic effects of sustained vocal tones, and the Greeks used music in the preparation and actuation of healing rituals.
