Humans have long suspected that music is a kind of medicine. Plato and Aristotle believed song could purify the soul and promote mental health, and the ancient Egyptians treated their sick with chanting rituals. Today, neuroscience is starting to reveal the mechanisms by which music triggers healing in the brain; already it has been shown to help a range of issues from chronic pain, autism and depression to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Studies are also demonstrating how we might all use sound to diminish anxiety, soothe and uplift the mind — and that it could perhaps even lead to personal transformation.

“La Monte Young and Terry Riley would stage all-night concerts in New York loft apartments where people would lie down and listen to the music,” says pianist Christina McMaster, who has tried to recreate these happenings at King’s College London. She has collaborated with the university’s mental health specialist Professor John Strang on the Sound Mind project, a series of “lying-down” concerts based on the mind-altering style of music created by the Hypnotic School of 1960s New York who used an innovative looping and repetitive pattern of notes to induce a kind of trance in the minds of listeners (prefiguring the genre of trance music). McMaster describes the repetitive phrasing as “like mantras, that bring people into a deep listening state in which they are fully present”.

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain On Music, likens the Hypnotic School’s sound to the drumbeats in shamanic ritual, which “cause the brain to give in to the rhythm, turn off its inner chatter, and create an altered state of consciousness”.