User:Evorachattarn/sandbox

Music hypnosis
The discussion of music as hypnosis was a development of Franz Mesmer, a German physician who invented the theory of ‘animal magnetism’ in the 18th century, combined with the Romantic aesthetics of music that portrayed mesmeric trances to the self. It is a new conception of the self and the sensual aesthetics of music that portrayed musical mesmeric trance as a treatment to symptom such as hysteria. Mesmer would often conclude his treatments by playing music on a glass armonica.

Franz Mesmer argued that music is a matter of ‘sympathetic vibration’, just as his theory of animal magnetism where the sound vibration can communicate, propagated, and reinforced. Mesmer believe that his theory of a universal fluid and mesmeric gaze can be manipulated and contributed to health. The use of instruments such as pianos, violins, harps, and especially glass armonica were known as the instruments that featured in his treatment and liable for Mesmer's success.

The direct physical ability of hearing in human leads to the impossiblity to reject the sounds entering the ears. In fact, music has contributed to external stimuli that provoked exhilaration and anxiety. This encourage the idea of ‘losing one’s self’, which is a sentimental escape from the realm of one’s psyche. However, this idea can often be disturbing and detrimental. It sometimes lead to a harmful concern within the boundary between oneself and those who manipulate it.

Hypnotic music became an important part in the development of a ‘physiological psychology’ that regarded the hypnotic state as an ‘automatic’ phenomenon that links to physical reflex. Jean-Martin Charcot's use of gongs and tuning forks, and Ivan Pavlov’s use of bell have shown a condition reflexes in their experiment of sound hypnosis. The idea behind this experiment was to prove the automatic responses to sound and to physiologically determined the bypassing of the conscious mind. It was clear that music can be a potential threat to oneself, in which it create susceptibility to external stimuli and therefore as a danger to self-control and the sanity of an individual.

The automatic responses to sound shows the possibility of 'mental contagion' through music where anxiety is related to unrestrained fears about the impact of music to nerve. The nervous system's automatic reflexes and its connection between physical stimulation and the mind has become the main point of the discussion during the eighteen century. The impact of music on the nerve was seen as a refined context of the nerves of sensibility. However, by the early nineteenth century, music was assigned and integrated into the medical critique of modern stimulation. Some medical critics suggested that music has an ability to directly causes pathologies of the nerves, but some argued that the effect on the imagination from a musical nervous stimulation is an extension of the fear; going beyond stimulated nerves and losing the autonomy.

Music as Satanic Brainwashing
Between the 1980s and 1990s, America reaches moral panic that conjugated a corrupted version of the science of brainwashing; the belief in a literal supernatural threat (Satanic Panic) that lies within the musical genre of heavy metal. Certain books such as The Devil's Disciples stated that some bands brainwashed American teenagers with subliminal messages to lure them into the worship of the devil, sexual immorality, murder and especially suicide. The use of satanic iconography and rhetoric in this genre provokes the parents and society, and also advocate masculine power for an audience, especially on teenagers who were ambivalent of their identity. The counteraction on heavy metal in terms of satanic brainwashing is an evidence that linked to the automatic response theories of musical hypnotism.