Early Indian Music

In recent years the connections between the cognitive centers of neuroscience and the devas, the Vedic gods, of mythology have become clear. This makes it possible for us to revisit early texts and understand them in a new light. Not only are we able to find new meaning in the language of myth, but we can also obtain a deeper understanding of music. Music’s influence on the mind is well known. Stammerers with acute disability sing perfectly as soon as they abandon themselves to the tune of the song. Some Parkinson’s patients, who are frozen on one side with tics and chorea on the other, become perfectly coordinated when they play music. Even the EEG from their two hemispheres becomes synchronized as if by an inner music, something that medication is unable to achieve. We are told that the gods especially like music because, unlike ordinary language, it is not constrained by linear rules and the burden of commonplace associations. The word gāndharva was used in the Vedic times to describe musical language and the gandharva were the mythical beings who had mastery over it.