Identities and Relationships

Investigating helped me in trying to find the deeper and clear reason of why I wanted to focus on this topic “Sound Healing”. The reason I chose this topic was because I have realised that today’s youth is not really taking care of their emotional and psychological well-being. As a teenager myself I have experienced the feeling of not being worthy or wanted in this world. I have exposed myself to music and I didn’t notice until I had to think about the personal project. I have found life and meaning in music and I wanted to share that with the world. Music allows you to understand who you are. I wanted to create a platform where the youth can see and experience the power of music. I always want to see people being happy and joyful.

Goal

My goal was to research sound healing and how the properties of sound can help manipulate your emotions and how that influences your thought patterns. To learn the skill of how to notate music and to create a booklet. I planned to design my own 30 minute music composition of my own perception of healing music. The booklet was an information resource on the healing properties of music. My goal was highly challenging because I was going to research something I never knew existed and I never knew that I will actually be capable of finding more than enough information. I had to learn a new skill of notating music which I knew was a hard skill to learn because it required exceptional musical knowledge and years of training. I had to create a goal that not only needed to be achieved in a given time period. I had to create a realistic goal, a goal that I knew was not going to give me major problems on the long run. I came up with a goal that was in line with the things that interest me. I always wondered how much work goes into creating 2 minute music for a violin or 10 minute music for a full orchestra. I wanted to learn music notation but I hardly ever had the time to actually focus on learning to notate music. I saw the personal project as a chance to actually put away some of my personal time and focus on music notating.

Global Context

Identities and Relationships

According to the IB this global context focuses on exploring identities; beliefs and values; personal, mental, social and spiritual health; human relationships including families, friends, communities and cultures; what it means to be human. Breaking this global context into my own personal perception, I would say that it refers to discovering and knowing who you are, knowing what your surroundings are and how you connect with yourself and your surroundings. I chose this global context because I am more interested in self-realisation and acceptance and I have personally started my journey of learning about myself in that way. I know and understand that I am a human being and I am not perfect. This global context lightens up and broadens the concept of what it means to be human. In my personal project journey, I discovered more about one of the ways a person can use to soothe emotional pain through music.

I believe that my goal has a close relationship to this global context because I have conducted research on how music helps in restoring or finding out who you are. My research helped in clearly identifying that a person is never alone and music can also help you in restoring you to the inner circle in which we all human beings are part of. In my booklet I have clearly demonstrated how a person can connect to her surroundings. I have also demonstrated how a person’s surroundings can form part of the person’s healing process.

Prior Knowledge

I discovered sound healing by knowing what music therapy was through the research I did when I started being interested in using music for healing back in 2016. Music therapy is … In the process of doing my research, I discovered that music therapy is westernised healing of using music and sound healing is a more traditional, easternised healing of using music. I wanted to focus more on the traditional side of healing using music which is accessible and actually cheaper. What I knew as I started my personal project journey was that sound healing is a nonverbal form of healing that uses sound as a way of manipulating emotions, thoughts and areas of consciousness. Sound healing awakens part of the brain and helps a person to realise the cause of the problem, and think of ways to solve the problem. Music is part of our everyday life, how we respond to music when we hear it. (Humming back, singing along or dancing to it). What I have learnt through my research is that sound healing is more than just healing using sound. It is healing that restores you to your inner soul. I have learnt about how different instruments contribute to sound healing. I have discovered how these different instruments actually trigger different parts of the body and how that forms part of the healing. Through my research I have also looked into the brain and actually discovered how sound healing works with the brain. I can say that research has helped me in discovering the deeper meaning behind sound healing.

Research

For my research I used different varieties of source. I used a book, which gave me an insight of the topic that I chose. I used an article for more understanding of my topic looking at things that are similar to what I was looking for. I watched videos on how sound healing works in different situations. I have been a fan of TED talks and for my research I did watch a TED talk video which gave me a personal insight and experiences of a man named Robert Gupta, how he chose music over medicine. I kept record of these sources by using the stop and jot, which is a way of taking down meaningful notes and asking questions that you might need answers as you progress with the project. I also use the CRAAP test which is used to check the reliability of a source. The Stop and Jot and the CRAAP test helped me in making sure that I use sources that are reliable.