Mu­sic & Na­ture: If you pro­duce Medi­cal Reso­nance Ther­apy Mu­sic^®, do medi­cal issues then in fact be­come your main issues? Your works often bear the titles of ethi­cal val­ues such as “peace”, “ful­fil­ment”, “af­fec­tion”, “re­flec­tion”. I am also amazed at your view of ob­jec­tive medi­cine, the ef­fect of which must es­sen­tially be proved from a physio­logi­cal point of view, whilst at the same time you also use psy­cho­logi­cal terms as titles for your mu­sic prepa­ra­tions such as “re­laxa­tion”,“crea­tiv­ity”, “har­mony”.

Peter Hübner: Well, we have two issues here and I would like to be­gin with the sim­pler ques­tion of the “psy­cho­logi­cal titles”.

Par­ticu­larly in con­nec­tion with hor­mone in­ves­ti­ga­tions, mod­ern medi­cine has rec­og­nised that there is a link be­tween spiri­tual proc­esses, emo­tional con­di­tions or more pre­cisely, be­tween con­di­tion changes and physio­logi­cal con­di­tions and/or proc­esses.

This is why mod­ern medics do not see these com­po­nents in quite such a sepa­rate light as their prede­ces­sors. Of course there have al­ways been doc­tors who hold such a ho­lis­tic view, but it is only mod­ern medi­cine which has brought ob­jec­tive sci­en­tific proof of this natu­ral in­teg­rity of our li­ves. Hor­mone re­search played a key role here, since it has re­vealed a clear cor­re­la­tion be­tween an emo­tional and spiri­tual con­di­tion and the physio­logi­cal im­mune sys­tem.

De­pres­sion breaks down our im­mune sys­tems, and a deeply posi­tive ap­proach to­wards life ac­ti­vates our im­mune mecha­nisms. Those in har­mony with them­selves tend to be or­gani­cally health­ier, whereas dis­har­mo­ni­ous, frus­trated, driven peo­ple tend to­wards or­ganic ill­ness.
The cor­re­la­tion is to­day widely rec­og­nised and sup­ported.

Mu­sic af­fects us in three dif­fer­ent ways. Firstly, the di­rect physio­logi­cal ef­fect on our en­tire body, through our ears and its neu­ral path­ways into the brain. This fact has been ex­am­ined in much de­tail. Through our ears then, a di­rect struc­tural ef­fect oc­curs on our en­tire bod­ies – where­by our brain takes on the func­tion of de­ci­sive co-or­di­na­tion. This is a wide field, which covers struc­tural mu­si­col­ogy and medi­cine, ex­tend­ing par­ticu­larly to neuro-physi­ol­ogy.

The other wide field is de­rived from the fact that mu­sic af­fects our feel­ings and emo­tions in many dif­fer­ent ways, and trig­gers dif­fer­en­tia­tion, like no other known me­dium, but can also have a calm­ing ef­fect and in the worst case, can deaden emo­tions. This is the psy­cho­logi­cal po­ten­tial of mu­sic – but this as­pect of mu­sic also has a physio­logi­cal ef­fect. There is a lot of sci­en­tific re­search avail­able in this field. And eve­ry­one is aware from his or her own ex­peri­ence.

Then there is a third wide field; that of the spiri­tual and struc­tural in­flu­ence of mu­si­cal struc­tures, the in­flu­ence on thought. How­ever, our thought proc­esses are also linked to our con­sci­ence and form­ing of our will. This means that our con­sci­ence and form­ing of our will gen­er­ally de­pend more on our thought pat­terns than the other way around. The struc­tural, mu­si­cal in­flu­ence on thought pat­terns in turn af­fects our con­sci­ence and forms our will which means that our con­sci­ence and will can be in­flu­enced by mu­si­cal struc­tures through our thought pat­terns. With­out doubt, an ex­tremely im­por­tant wide socio-po­liti­cal field exists here in find­ing out which type of mu­si­cal struc­tures give rise to which type of thought pat­terns and con­se­quently how strong the in­flu­ence of mu­si­cal struc­tures is on the free form­ing of con­sci­ence, and free will.