Musopathy as a field was proposed in the 1990s by Indian Musician-Composer, Chitravina N Ravikiran.  His rationale was that Music Therapy’s culture and/or region specific approach was quasi-scientific and also limited in scope as it was more likely to provide relief for people associated with either or both.  He also argued that the results published were too broad and simplistic to be scientifically acceptable and mass-applicable.

• Fundamental Flaw of Music Therapy:  The practice of often taking music meant for entertainment for clinical studies is fundamentally wrong.  Very few studies – if any – try to evaluate the impact of the same music rendered in a completely different manner in terms of instrumentation, voices or tempo etc OR expand the studies to alter the tunes or the words to come up with globally usable health solutions.  Music for Clinical Studies must be specially created in a very sound but simple manner so that factors can be varied and studied to isolate and tabulate exponentially more accurate results. 
• Minimal Reliability:  Music Therapy studies tend to get culture and region centric and tend to indirectly portray observations as solutions. In reality, such results raise more questions than answers.  For instance, research using Western Classical, Jazz, Rock, Chinese or Persian music is less likely to impact someone not attunded to these styles of music.  Similarly, results claiming therapeutic benefits to humans, animals or plants using Indian Ragas or Hymns can offer only very, very broad findings which may either work with many similar tunes or not work at all, if the texture, tonality, speed and other factors are varied.
• Minimal Sophistication: Even in cases where Music Therapy studies have been formulated well from a scientific standpoint, they scarcely take into account the innumerable musical factors and complexities embedded even in a short segment of music, making it impossible to isolate the factors responsible for a claimed benefit.  For example, a 50 second orchestral composition of Mozart would have so many instruments playing simultaneously and how could any broad study ever assess which of these (violins/oboes/trumpets etc) were responsible for what part of the results and to what extent?  Secondly, what about similar music composed by say Beethoven or Bach?  The same goes for sophisticated melodic segments seen in Indian Classical Music, where benefits are claimed based on one artist’s rendition from a particular concert or recording. The same composition or similar improvisation can be rendered by numerous artists or the same artist may render the same piece of music in subtly or substantially different ways on different occasions.  Can all these ever be studied even over 10 years to come to sophisticated results?
• Minimal Specificity: Similarly studies involving music with lyrics fail to address whether it is the tune, the type of rhythm, the tempo or texture of the singer’s voice or the lyrics which cause improvements in one’s health.  For instance, what would happen if the same music was played in very high or very low volume in studies involving patients with anxiety or hypertension?

This is not to deny that the highest quality of Music can transcend cultural or regional boundaries and can offer several broad benefits to listeners.  But unless the mechanics behind sound vibrations are studied, one cannot get global results.  

MUSOPATHY – BASIC APPROACH

Musopathy addresses all the above issues by breaking down music from any part of the world into its fundamental universal aspects.  The fundamental aspects common to most major systems of music that use 12 tones per octave in the world are: 

• Combination of frequencies which can be successive or simultaneous which can sound consonant, dissonant (or neutral) to most ears
• Tempo or the pace of music 
• Decibel levels and dynamics: Basic volume levels of any audible sound
• Tonalities and Texture:  Broadly shrill, bass but in reality are as varied as a colour palette in a sophisticated visual software
• Beat effect: when two sources of identical music are exactly aligned or minutely not aligned

INCREDIBLE SCOPE 

Musopathy aims to conduct sophisticated studies on different parts of the brain or body of humans, animals, plants and micro entities by varying, separating or combining such parameters in clinical music that is created – or very carefully chosen even if from existing works.  Musopathy re-engineers the arena of Music Therapy with its de-regionalised and de-culturalised creations of Clinical Music for more precise studies and is therefore an exciting area with huge therapeutic as well as commercial potential. 

Musopathy can be of 2 types: 

(i) Passive or Basic Musopathy: Participants or patients are aurally exposed to Clinical Music Created for them and the impact it has on them when the fundamental factors of the same music (such as volume and tempo) are varied.  

(ii) Active Musopathy: Participants or patients are themselves taught simple Tonation Breathing Techniques (TBT) which they will practice for 5-6 minutes about 3-4 times per day during the study/treatment period and as their various parameters evaluated.