This thread about music that produces a certain frame of mind is very
timely for me.  I have some colleagues who are interested in the recent
work that shows that phenomena that make one comfortable or produce a
pleasurable sensation follow a "1/f" pattern when plotted on a logarithmic
scale.  I wonder if anyone on this list is familiar with it and
particularly if anyone has an opinion about its validity.

Tomuki Yoshida of the National Institute of Bioscience and Human
Technology and others have been measuring brain waves produced by listening
to comforting or pleasurable music.  They have found that when you plot
the frequencies of the brain waves against the density or amount of brain
waves at each frequency on a log-log scale, you get a straight line with a
negative slope.  They also make the same plot for the music itself, so for
each sound frequency in a piece of music, you plot the number of times it
occurs.  For comforting music, you also get a "1/f" linear relationship.
Two examples often quoted from their work are the first movement of
Brandenburg Concerto #1 and the first movement of Mozart symphony #40.
They get similar results from non-musical sounds that are comforting, such
as a murmuring brook, etc.  Conversely, when listening to uncomfortable
music or sounds, the plots are not linear.

Has the professional music community looked at this stuff?  Any opinions
yet?

Bill Walsh in Auburn, AL