Musical Catharsis across Time. A Comparative Exploration from Ancient Greek Music Theory to Brain Entropy

Many direct and indirect philosophical sources from ancient Greece report the impact of musical catharsis. Aristoxenus of Tarentum appears to be remarkably insightful, as he intuited that the cathartic outcome does not depend on an intrinsic property of the combination of certain sounds (ethos), but it is an event emerging from the engagement between music and listener, anticipating certain contemporary insights. Recent studies on turbulent dynamics and brain entropy hypothesis have provided a theoretical framework for understanding the effects of musical catharsis. The healing process is hypothesised to be contingent on the reorganisation that occurs due to the disruption of metastability, induced by immersive musical listening.