Music Preferences, Music Engagement and Healing

Abstract

Present paper aimed to explore and understand the nature of engagement of college students with music, their music preferences and their experiences of 'healing through music'. A questionnaire, consisted of nine questions including trio of closed, open-ended and open-ended questions with partial pre-coding, was administered on two compare groups, music listeners (n 1=44) and music learners (n 2=45) of college students (N=89) from two universities. These two comparable groups were found having effect in terms of differences in students' nature of music engagement, their music preferences, and their subjective healing experiences. Findings of this study provide insight about the musical taste, the relationships between affective state and music listening, and the manifold and multilevel healing experiences with music of both music listeners and learners. These findings may be useful in designing the music intervention plans to alleviate the human sufferings and in turn to promote psychological health and well-being in so called normal population.