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Don Campbell is a recognized authority on the transformative power of music, listening, and author of the 1997 best-seller The Mozart Effect, and The Mozart Effect for Children.

Guy Spiro: Don, please tell us how your work with sound came about.

Don Campbell: I began as a kid in Texas who was born into a family that just loved to sing and dance. They gave me the best opportunities in church and school to learn piano and sing and play in a band. Then, through a magical cosmic gift, at age thirteen our family moved to Paris where I began to study with the very famous teacher, Nadia Boulanger. Suddenly I was thrust into a world of fine classical musicianship; performance and rigorous analysis for listening and composition.

GS: Did you stay active in church music through this time?

DC: Yes, actually I did.

GS: Interesting.

DC: When I came back to the University in the United States, I studied organ education and conducting. After graduate studies, I had the opportunity to go to Asia and spent seven years in Japan teaching at an international school with students from sixty countries. That was the pivotal point between my inner world, my outer world, the spiritual world and the true greatness of fine music. It was in the 1970s, when Ravi Shankar and new forms of ambient music and experimental music were coming to the fore.

GS: A lot of interesting fusions began then.

DC: Consciousness, Eastern religions and esoteric philosophies were then being thrown in the tossed salad of nutrition for people, and I began this very interesting observation of what is it about music that modifies consciousness, health and memory. Having children in these classes who were not primarily English speakers, or not always from the kind of cultural musicianship that I would have experienced just in the states, or just in Europe, I noticed that learning language and movement, and integration of joy, body, and emotion came through musical activities.

It was at that point that my classical background was greatly challenged. It wasn’t only about teaching music and music skills and analysis so they could become great little musicians. It was about using music to integrate mind, body, heart, expression and joy. Not to say both things cannot happen or all of these things cannot happen, but it was a time when I began to sense that there was quite a different future within the possibilities of music.

Upon returning to the United States in the 1980s, doing different kinds of work in church music and experimentation, I wrote a funny book that still sells very nicely today called Introduction to the Musical Brain. It is mostly about multi-sensory integration in early childhood, how music as a tool improves quality of learning. Since that time, the world has changed. We are understanding how neurologically, physiologically, emotionally, what goes into the ear comes out as language expression, as well as having chemical reactions for stress reduction and stimulation within the body.

In 1988 I came to Boulder and started the Institute for Music Health and Education, trying to find ways for people to be aware of what they could do with their own body and mind, through their own voice, and movement and posture. One of the most important things that happened, that completely changed my way of looking at these questions, was a meeting with Dr. Alfred Tomatis, a French physician who was an ear, nose, throat specialist. He began to experiment with the uses of sound in the ear and in the bone that would trigger different language, cognitive and communication skills. His work began in 1958 when he began to sample, strain, and filter different kinds of music and found that Mozart’s music, especially the high string or the violin concertos, had components in them, rhythmically, frequency-wise, and harmonically that could actually modify the way the brain communicates with itself, the body and with others.

He was working with many dyslexic and autistic children in those years and through decades of research, he refined an instrument called the electronic ear that does not quite give the person a musical experience, because the music and sounds are highly filtered, gated, reduced and expanded, but it does talk directly to some of the middle ear and brain functions. This is a very advanced complex system and it is really why I wrote the book, The Mozart Effect. It was Dr. Tomatis who for decades was experimenting with Mozart and that perplexing question of why is it that this one composer’s music makes a difference in our lives? It wasn’t until the ’90s that other researchers began to look at different levels of Mozart for intelligence and spatial perception and so forth. Perhaps the most important leap that Dr. Tomatis made for me was beginning to pay attention to the science of listening. Instead of asking the question of what music do we play for other people or what sounds do we make to have them experience something, it’s more about how do people take in information and filter it in an individual way, that changes and is modified by times of day, by age, by personality, by mood, and by stress. He often said to me, it’s when we awaken and focus the listening modality that the brain and the body dance together in a completely different way than when you just have passive music and sound. A lot of his process is passive, but some of it is dynamically active.

GS: Dr. Tomatis had quite an effect on your work.

DC: His work really helped me shift the whole way I thought of music from what record to play, or sounds, or go to this concert so you get an experience, to absolutely the opposite, to how am I attentive to the member of the audience, or the client, or the patient? If I have twenty children in a class, how many different listening styles do they have?

GS: Twenty.

[Laughter]

DC: Does the nutrition of sound or the distortion of sound alter their ability to learn or feel well? A simple example is that many children with attention deficit disorder and autism have hyper-sensitivity to sound and every single sound that comes up diverts their attention. They don’t have the focus. They don’t have the ability to filter out irrelevant sounds so they can focus. It’s like having an eye that sees every word on the page at the same time and cannot track. This was absolutely mind boggling to me, and at this point it’s realizing that the music is the content and that the brain and the listening powers are the context with the world and the environment around us. This gives me a completely different psychological and even, perhaps, alchemical tool to make the work of sound and music relevant in the world today.

GS: How wide of a range to do find between individuals?

DC: Huge, absolutely huge. You can be talking to yourself and miss what your family says and what’s on TV and even be distracted when you’re listening on the phone. Your inner voice sometimes is louder.

There are different nutritional effects. Wheat can create tinnitus in some people. With age, the high frequencies go away. I work with symphony orchestras and educational environments and researchers really have not even begun to ask this question. They see it psychologically, how do you pay attention? But they haven’t really been looking at it in the more psychophysical manner, how when you’re really interested in something and you’re really fresh, that information comes in differently.

That’s true for great music and that’s why Mozart was so efficient. It is the order, the architecture. His intent is not just to relax or stimulate the body. He has a kind of a magical response that I call stimulated relaxation. It’s not a matter of go away and loosen your brain waves and go into a stressless state. It’s a matter of how do we awaken the mind and at the same time allow the body to feel natural, complete and not overly tired?

But there is a place for all kinds of music. In the new work that I’m doing in hospitals around the country, I talk about how important it is for the mind to receive different flavors and different tempos and different styles over the period of the day, and that silence is as important as sound. We’re not trying to create a world of relaxing. A parent of a child in an emergency room is hearing the same music that the nurse and doctor are hearing. You don’t want to relax half the healing process away. Being able to look at a much bigger social context is the greatest excitement I have now in my life professionally.

GS: I never did well in bars and those kinds of social situations, because I can’t follow the conversation with loud music and a lot of background noise.

DC: That’s why so many people go to bars to talk to each other; they don’t have to listen.

GS: So, does that tell you something?

DC: Sure. We’re in a wonderful society where if we really want to be with somebody, the louder the environment, the less we have to say that’s relevant. It’s not embodied, it’s not compassionate, and there’s a time and place for that celebration and that fun. I’m not mad at the world. I just find it a very curious dilemma. There are times when I just can’t be in that environment and at other times, I have group of friends and it’s enjoyable and I would not want them to be playing ambient music. We would not have nearly as good a time. But I think awakening the public environment, and this is what the Mozart effect book is really about, is just showing the different areas that we have taken to an edge. In health and education and our own environment, of how sound is an essential component and how we can use it for our good, for our family and our health.

GS: I’ve always wondered how it was that some people seem to be able to thrive in an environment like that and hear what people were saying.

DC: The amazing thing is the brain and the ear change throughout a life. We know that in high school and college students, many times that cacophony in the background kind of blocks out the outer world and they can hear themselves think.

GS: Doing homework in front of the TV.

DC: As the coordination of the brain and different processes takes place and as the thought becomes somewhat different, everyone gets it in a different way. The stress rises in this world sometimes, and physical shakeup can calm the mind. We don’t know how to be quiet in the same kinds of ways. I think there is a big problem with noise and hearing loss among young people, and the real problem I see today is about loud sounds. Whether you’re playing the flute in the orchestra, and the trombones are blowing your brains out, or you’re in the marching band and the drum is killing your daughter’s ears, or in the rock band, I’m looking at the loudness, the length of the time exposed to it, and saying this is not good for the mind and the body in the long run. I’m really an educator and I have a mission to help change the way people think and look at the world around us. I have no little magic potions. I’m not going to make any outrageous New Age statements. I’m going to hopefully give a little middle-aged wisdom to this world. I have tremendous respect for multiple systems. We have to find our own way in this world, but there’s not enough time to be negative towards the things that are not in our neighborhoods. That to me is the immense power of harmony.

GS: What’s cutting edge for you now, what are you working on?

DC: This big hospital project this will take me over for the next few years. I’m also consulting with large automobile companies in Japan and the United States on different ways to use sound and music in cars that are better for us. I’m writing a few little books just for the Japanese market and have a few smaller ones coming out in the next couple of years here in the states. It’s a really wonderful time of life. I have had the opportunity to be in a musical life for well over forty years and to be in cutting edge work. I try to be a visionary in the music, health and education world and ask new questions and help push the framework so that we have a better resonance chamber for creative, healthy and more inspired living.

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