Ravi Dykema: How did you get started in your work?

Don Campbell: I began my life as a classical musician. I was from Texas, but I spent my high school years in Paris, France, and studied with one of the foremost musicians in the world, Nadia Boulanger. I continued my studies in education and conducting in Oregon, working on my doctorate in music in Cincinnati and North Texas. I had a magical shift of mind in 1969. I was a minister of music at a Methodist church in Cincinnati, and I was invited on a mission project. Within a year, I was in Haiti for six months. I became an organist and choral director at the Episcopal cathedral in Port-au-Prince and the flavor of my music began to deepen in those years. I had already traveled and studied music in different countries. While I was in graduate school, I was doing papers on South Indian music and Vedic hymnody, as it related to Lutheran and Western hymns.

I was a child of the '60s and early '70s, and I set out to the East and lived in Tokyo for seven years, where I was director of a humanities and choral music program at St. Mary's International School. I was a critic for one of the English newspapers in Tokyo, and I had the opportunity to hear the differences between music styles in the East and West as a way of life. I became addicted to gagaku-Japanese sacred court music. When I returned to the United States after traveling around the world for nine months, spending time in Israel and Russia, I looked at what I could offer in the field of music. What was it that called me into music in a dynamic and inward context? I had studied Zen Buddhism while living in Japan. I was still conducting church choirs. By 1982, after serving as director of choral music for a large choral organization in the United States, I made a commitment that I would work with health, music, consciousness and transformation. I wrote a book, Introduction to the Musical Brain, in 1982.

I also had the fortune of meeting Dr. Jean Houston, and for 10 years, I played for her, as we traveled throughout the world doing workshops, seminars and courses in human capacities. When I came to Boulder, CO in 1988, I started the Institute for Music Health and Education, and for nine years, we developed courses in the psychology of listening, the healing aspects of the voice and composing music for the body. We also did year-long sound schools on how music affects consciousness. Being able to look at the public has always been very interesting for me, because I am not teaching music therapy. I teach the effects of music on the mind, the body and the spirit. I also look at how music affects the society in which we live-the songs we sing, the popular music we create-how does that find expression in our culture? How can we use music not only for reducing stress, but also to give us a bridge to our transformation, whether that be spiritual or intellectual? When I was doing research on the brain itself, I realized that what goes in our ears comes out of our mouth and our emotions; it is like fuel to our spirit and our movement. What is it about sound that brings transformation to us on multiple levels?

RD: Can you explain that?

DC: It starts with the concept of the voice. The first cry. The imprint upon the breath that gives expression, or ex-pression-outward breathing. It is that imprint that gives us a sense of “If I am here, I am a voice. I am a being.” Before anything else takes place, it is our cries, our moans, and our coos. It is our passionate love sounds, our railing sounds that then developed into different forms of language. The core of music is not about art and entertainment; it is about that impetus that allows the larynx to want to imprint our exhalation, our going into this world. When we hear music, whether it be the basic breath or the drum beat or the walk or the heartbeat, we begin to organize this breath. We begin to organize things within our body-the heartbeat, the breath, the blood pressure, the skin temperature, the brain waves. We begin an incredible alchemical marriage of rhythm and tone, of voice and movement that allows humanity to begin to find form around itself that is beyond survival. That is the language of emotion, the language that evolves into intellect, the language that is both subtle and expressive. That language then evolves into what we call music. Now, we live in a strange time. A hundred years ago, music was always live. It was never canned, it was never in the background, and it was never environmental.

RD: Wasn't it (music) also extremely common in most societies? Almost everybody learned to make some kind of music, didn't they?

DC: They did. It was the religion, the expression of emotion. Music became the way societies celebrated birth, grieved death or enjoyed marriage. The way you dance, the way you court or make love, all have musical, rhythmic components. A hundred years ago, the ears were very different than they are today. We had a greater sensitivity. Now, we throb our eardrums with iPods and headphones and computer sounds and cell phones. I think we've had to cut off our sensitivity to survive; there's so much auditory stimulation in our world, we've had to learn to filter sounds.

I've also focused on the impact of the voice itself. I have a new book coming out this season, Creating Inner-Harmony on using of the voice. I'm attuned to what the voice means, and how we can invite people to become better listeners. We are sometimes passive in our listening, and there are ways to use your ear and your brain to modify things within your body.

RD: What is “The Mozart Effect?” Did you coin the term?

DC:Actually, “The Mozart Effect” was first used by Dr. Alfred Tomatis, who laid the groundwork for the field of how we listen. He developed the field of Audio-Psycho- Phonology (APP) or “listening therapy.” In 1958, he began doing research on music to help children and adults with head injuries and speech/communication disorders, what we now call “dyslexia” and “ADD” and “ADHD.” He found that some of the music of Mozart- the high frequencies of the violin concertos and many selected pieces-helped organize the brain. Much research has since been done on the effect of music on the brain and the intellect. For example, a study at the University of California in Irvine suggested that listening to a Mozart piano sonata temporarily increased spatial IQ of college students. Since then, there have been dozens more studies and thousands of debates on the topic.

For me, The Mozart Effect is much broader, and is a holistic process of learning how to listen to and utilize music for our health, our well-being and our temperament. And it's not only Mozart-Baroque music, a lot of contemporary ambient music, new-age music can all fit in a music diet. So The Mozart Effect began with Tomatis, then evolved into a vision of how we use music and sound in a healthy context to give ourselves mental, emotional and spiritual nutrition throughout the day, everyday. One outgrowth of The Mozart Effect was a company called Aesthetics Audio System, which now puts music in healthcare facilities all over the nation.

RD: Did you create the company?

DC:I did, with two partners. Our office is in San Diego, but one of our prime hospitals is here in Lafayette, Exempla Good Samaritan. We've put different kinds of music in various parts of the hospital. This music gives people a different sense of how time passes. In other words, in the Emergency waiting room, you may be there for 30 minutes or a couple of hours. If you are family, or visitors, in the surgical waiting room, it could be three hours to 12 hours. That's a lot of time to be in one place. If you're an outpatient in oncology, you probably have a 20- or 30-minute wait. The shorter the wait, the less you notice the power of the environment. We have found that we can shape music to work with the times of day, the amount of stress of the day, the number of people going through the environment. Every 20 to 30 minutes, we change styles entirely. We change keys in a certain way, and we change tempos.

So if you go into the emergency room at 2 a.m., you'll most likely hear Native American flutes and soft, ambient music. In the administration office in the middle of the afternoon, you need a little sonic caffeine, so you'll get some high frequency Mozart chamber music to give you energy. So this Mozart Effect concept has now evolved into very practical ways that we can put music in medical buildings. Light and beauty and sound can reduce the stress of the overall environment.

RD: What sort of music would you use in the hallway, compared to in the emergency room, and how would you change it every 20 minutes?

DC:First, in the hallway, it's a flow area; nobody's going to be staying there for long, so you want it light and fresh. We'll use anything from classical piano to light jazz ensemble to delicious guitar music. We change the music, because hearing the same music all day may be good for the client and the visitor, but it drives the nurses and the security people crazy. In the emergency room, we want to change the music, probably from 6 a.m. to noon, every 20 minutes, so you may have wonderful guitar and oboe music, like Nancy Rumble, or a little bit of Paul Winter, like “Sun Singer.” Then we might move to some Bach piano music, then into more of a new-age reference, ambient music. If you can think of music as pressure upon the skin, some is very light and airy and free, and the other is very compact and embraces us in a way.

People aren't in a hospital to listen to music; they're usually in a stressful situation, and we're trying to reduce stress. I was once in a famous hospital in Ohio, in one of the waiting rooms for heart surgery. There were three vending machines, two televisions playing two different channels and no natural light, all condensed with people about three feet apart. That's a stressful environment in any situation, but when you're in a hospital, in a heart-surgery waiting room with your family, it's unbearable.

The first thing we did to change that environment was put closed captions on the TV, so you had a choice to look up at it if you wanted to, without being bombarded by the sound. The second thing is we moved the three mega vending machines that were humming away all the time behind a partition, with sound absorption behind and in front of it. Then we painted the walls a light color, put a small waterfall on the side, and brought in green plants, to give people had a sense of privacy. With a little bit of music, for a little bit of money, we changed the atmosphere and lowered the tension. I've developed over 16 programs, and I've licensed more than 5,000 pieces of music to put in our computer program.

For the full article, visit: http://www.nexuspub.com/articles/2007/interview_don_campbell_julaug2007.htm and find out Don Campbell's answers to these additional intriguing questions: