دانلود کتاب Through Music to the Self: How to appreciate and experience music anew

"What is Music?

What does it do to us?

What does it reveal to us?

Today, due to our ability to record and reproduce sound mechanically, we hear a great deal of music. Are we losing the art of listening to it? Do we really benefit from it?

Peter Hamel, born in 1947, studied music, psychology and sociology in Munich and Berlin, after which he spent three extensive periods in Asia studying Eastern traditions of music.

Now a practising composer and musician, he has become convinced that through encounter with the ancient and unspoilt non-European disciplines it is possible to re-discover the natural laws and the magical powers of sound. In this practically-based book, he discusses the effects on the human psyche of Indian, Tibetan, Arabian and other Far Eastern techniques of vocal and instrumental improvisation, especially in the religious context.

Relating the exoteric sound lore of these traditions with the rational Western tradition and its modern research into harmonics, the conformity of the harmonic series to natural law is seen as pertaining on the one hand to the level of mystical experience and on the other to scientifically demonstrable psychological effects.

We therefore have the ability of chant, rhythm and melodic patterns to invoke the deeper levels of experience which transcend our subjective self-concern; at the same time these effects need not be arbitrary and accidental. Through experiment with sound, even those without musical training can awaken to a new consciousness of its powers and derive renewed strength for everyday living.

There are sections dealing with modern group music, psychedelic music and drugs, mantra, relationship of vowels to parts of the body, meditation, music therapy, breath and voice, singing and "one's own sound".

This is a book for those who suspect that music is more than entertainment or an obligatory cultural activity and who with to explore its powers as a tool for self-development."