Sweet Sound of Music

Does listening to music help the learning process? Sumit Paul presents his view. Additionally, Dignity Dialogue also highlights what the research studies indicate.

- Sumit Paul

Recent neurological studies in England and America have found a link between music and higher learning. Music helps grasp a subject in a comprehensive manner. When we study and listen to music of our liking, our grasping process gets activated. Memory is a fluid phenomenon. The fluidity of music adds to it. Music also helps memorise things in a better way. That’s the reason all the 6,236 verses of the Koran can be memorised and one can become a Hafiz-e-Al-Furqaan. All the verses have a musical quality to them. The trance-like quality of music expands the human brain’s assimilation capacity and processes it for further and finer understanding of a subject.

Albert Einstein would always listen to the great Sebastian Bach’s lilting compositions and Dr. Edward W. Said would write and propound his theories listening to Ludwig van Beethoven’s ethereal symphonies. In his book ‘Philosophy of Music’, Ernest Crayon analysed music’s effect on a person and how musical notes, played in the background, help a learner have a better understanding of the subject. While teaching Islamic Theology at Karachi university some time ago, I met Lahore university’s former HoD of linguistics, Dr. Parminder Singh Baweja, an authority on singers Mohammed Rafi and Talat Mahmood.