Schillinger and Shamanism: A Synthesis for Music Therapies

Abstract

A component of the Schillinger System for Musical Composition called the Psychological Dial has been used as a tool to compose music to elicit emotional responses from film audiences to support or disambiguate movie scenes for over fifty years. This same dial can be used as a tool to compose music, which when combined with entrainment technologies born of shamanistic healing practices for millennia, can elicit desired emotional responses from patients in certain medical settings. Such a setting could be to relax a pre-surgery or post-surgery patient which current medical science tells us will allow their immune system to better function in the healing process.