The Benefits of Corporate Drumming!

• Creates unity, team spirit & group bonding
• Encourages cooperation above competition
• Breaks down barriers between people
• Promotes equality in the workplace
• Anyone can participate, all ages and diverse backgrounds
• Lifts the energy and motivates
• Enhances imagination and creative thinking
• Promotes relaxation, relieves stress
• Improves communication and listening skills
• Stimulates left brain/ right brain coordination
• Excellent forum to communicate company vision
• Unique, highly memorable and FUN!

The Healing Power of Rhythm

“Sound reaches down to the cellular level. It is most likely that sound patterns are really the dance of molecules and atoms”
(Dodd 1989)

• The latest studies on drumming and relaxation have shown that drumming increases the Alpha and Theta brainwaves associated with deep states of relaxation or meditation, and this occurs even for first time drummers after only twenty to thirty minutes.
• This is the exciting paradox of drumming: the ability of rhythm to excite and arouse, and also have a calming effect.
• Rhythm has been used for thousands of years as a means to create and maintain health and well being. The therapeutic value of music has been recognised and employed since a very early stage in the history of mankind and medicine. Within many cultures the power of music to challenge disease is undisputed.

Rhythm and Entrainment

“ We tend to resist the notion that a force that is as intangible as rhythm can exert such power on our bodies, yet the accumulating evidence is compelling and convincing”
Gioia, Healing Songs

• Entrainment is the concept that two or more rhythmic cycles that are similar become synchronised when they are near each other. For example, an experiment took place where two clocks were placed near each other and started at different times. The clocks eventually ticked in unison. (Dutch scientist Christian Huygens,1665).
• Entrainment is a universal physical force in nature. It exists because everything, the whole of the natural world is in vibration.
• There is a relationship between sounds and the very essence of the material world.
• Music is vibration. A string produces a tone by vibrating at a specific speed and becomes audible by making the molecules of the surrounding air vibrate at the same speed. When these vibrations meet the human ear complex perceptual and cognitive operations in the brain lead him/her to conclude the tone.
• Drums and percussion are especially potent in promoting entrainment. We are vibrating beings and when we drum we share a pulse, we produce an experience of entrainment. It actually makes us more similar to one another on a physical cellular level. (Leonard 1978). June Boyce-Tillman, “Constructing Musical Healing” Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London and Philadelphia, 2000

History of Music and Healing in Western Culture

• Pythagoras realised music exists on a physical level, measuring the mathematical proportions between tones and intervals. He discovered a series of laws on the relationship between the length of a string and its pitch. He concluded that music was based on the laws of nature.
• Music became associated with the cosmos and gained a spiritual dimension. Even the planets were believed to vibrate in the same frequencies as music, known as ‘the music of the spheres’.
• This was the core belief from Antiquity through to the Renaissance. Man was considered a ‘musical instrument’, harmonic proportions permeated the human body. Music was considered a therapeutic tool capable of restoring balance in the physical body.
• In Ancient Greece the central purpose of music was to unite everything into a single order emanating from a divine source.
• Plato believed the soul of the universe is united by music. Music was linked with the divine and truth.

Music and Healing in Traditional Cultures

• Drums and percussion are of paramount importance in traditional healing techniques across many cultures.
• In many societies music plays an important part of the rituals designed to resolve disputes and heal the community.
• Ancient Hindu scholars claimed the universe arose first as sound: sound gave rise to light, and light to matter.
• Contemporary Native American healers use songs and drumming as part of their healing prayers in the sweatlodge.
• In Africa, the roundness of the drum represents the whole universe, and its strong steady beat is the pulse, the heart of the universe. Even making a drum is a sacred act and there is a spiritual significance attributed to the tree from which the drum is made.
• The power of sound is used in ancient chanting traditions of both East and West.