Ex-rocker discovers secrets of tranquility

Date Published: {J}

Most of us who feel the need to relax at the end of a stressful day or week will probably open a bottle of wine or head to the pub for a beer. On those nights we find it difficult to sleep, there are always little pills to help us.

These short-term measures, however, don’t tackle the underlying problems of stress or insomnia. But Australian composer and musician, John B Levine, who is coming to Galway next month, promises that he has a better solution – one that doesn’t involve taking chemicals. Instead, it’s about listening to a certain type of music known as Alphamusic, which alters our brainwaves to create a calmer, more relaxed state. It’s like meditation, he says, but it’s easier to fit it into your life.

John, who now lives in England, originally trained as an electronic engineer, but always had a passion for music.

“I loved music since aged six when I got a plastic saxophone,” he says. “I wanted to make music and to make people happy.”

John also loved science and electronics and, to satisfy his parents’ wishes, he did an electronics degree, although he subsequently fulfilled his desire to have “music as a profession and electronics as a hobby”, when he trained in classical music composition at the University of Sydney. He then spent several successful years working in commercial music, playing with bands like INXS and Midnight Oil and writing jingles for advertising agents Saatchi and Saatchi and Coca-Cola.

Then his life changed.

“My father started dying slowly of stress-related illness. He had diverticulitis, diabetes, a couple of heart attacks and a stroke and he died at the age of 58. The doctors said it was stress related, but nothing we did or gave him could help.”

John had studied meditation and was taught how people’s brain waves slow down as they go into a deeper meditative state.

“With my science background that made sense,” he says. “I used try to explain it to my father, who was in Intensive Care but by then it was too late.”

His father’s death led him towards wondering whether the techniques used for meditation could be adapted for music. And by that he doesn’t mean what passes for the ‘relaxation music’ you hear in many spas and massage parlours. In fact, he is scathing about it.

“I heard New Age ‘relaxation’ music and it made me cry, it was so bad! It made me angry.”

He singles out CDs that contain whale and dolphin ‘music’ for special ire. He finds it unbelievable that these can be regarded as the basis for ‘relaxation’.

“Whales talk to whales and dolphins talk to dolphins. Their communication is not for relaxing people.”

As part of his music degree, John had studied the psychology of music and the physiology of hearing. With this expertise in analysing music, he listened to ‘new age music’ with a technical ear.

“I analysed why it didn’t work, melodically, rhythmically and production wise . . . and bored my friends about it. They told me to stop talking and do something.”

So he did – with caution – he didn’t want to add to what he describes as ‘noise pollution’ by producing bland CDs.

John had a recording studio in Australia where he wrote his music for TV commercials. It was there he conducted experiments to see what relaxing music should sound like.

“As a composer, you don’t start writing music before you know what your aim is, so I had to choose my aim.

“In my head I saw images of a PowerPoint presentation I’d had at meditation classes of brain waves slowing down. I wanted to do that.”

After experimentation, John established patterns of musical sound that invited the brain to settle into an Alpha state.

Alpha waves were discovered by German neurologist Hans Berger in the early 1900s and John explains that they occur when our brain is in a relaxed state.

The Alpha state is calmer than the Beta state, which occurs when we are awake and involves excitable peaks and troughs. If we continually emit Beta brainwaves, then we cannot unwind.

Brainwaves change a person’s hormonal balance, he explains, and different hormones affect the body in various ways. For instance when you are continually in the Beta state, you get stressed and your immune system goes down.

Beta waves in the brain cause the release of cortisol in response to stress. This diverts blood away from the parts of the body that aren’t required for ‘fight or flight’. And since the stomach and many parts of the brain are not required for this, their energy supply is diminished, leading to other problems – everything from digestion to concentration.

John claims that’s where his music can help. He says the unique sound pictures he paints, bring listeners to alpha state of relaxation within four minutes. As a Westerner, he opted to use instruments his listeners would be familiar with. So for his CDs, he plays a Steinway concert grand.

In the past 25 years, he has recorded nearly 30 albums, some designed to aid sleep and some to help people concentrate.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.