Going into hospital for an operation under general anaesthetic is for most people a frightening experience. Doctors and musicians in Denmark have created a specially composed "sound environment" to help patients relax and recover.

Dr. Lars Heslet is Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at Copenhagen State Hospital - so he is used to working in a hospital environment. But even he maintains that hospitals are daunting places to be in:
"It's a hostile environment, with a lot of technology, very haphazard interior decoration with lots of odd colours and it's often not very clean looking. So if patients are trying to extrapolate from what they see in the wards to the quality of treatment, they will be very scared..."

Which is why Dr. Heslet has hung brightly coloured abstracts and other stimulating paintings around the wards and corridors of the Intensive Care Department of his hospital. "I want to change the atmosphere so that patients feel that at least we're making an effort here."

Inner healing forces

But it's not just the visual environment of hospitals that needs to be "less hostile". Dr. Heslet thinks you can help patients feel more relaxed and respond better to orthodox kinds of treatment by improving the sound environment.

"If you look at a patient with a fracture,” says Dr. Heslet, “it's a miracle that the forces from within can heal that fracture. So what we want to do is to recruit and enhance that inner healing force . . . and we thought of using music as an additional therapy."

Music as a healing force is not a new idea. People all over the world have for centuries used music to bring the body and spirit into harmony. In Denmark a group of two musicians and two doctors formed a research project called Musica Humana which scientifically documents the positive effects music has on patients in intensive care, in the post-operative recovery room and even for people undergoing serious heart examinations.

The rhythm of life

But it's not just any music. Oboe-player Niels Eje is the composer of the Musica Humana team and he creates beautiful, restful music based on well-tested parameters. "The basic underlying rhythm of all our music is that of the human heart-beat,” explains Eje. “It is the first rhythm we hear in life. When we are in the womb, we hear our mother's heart beat and that is about 60 beats per minute.”

To this music, which is played on both electronic and acoustic instruments, Eje carefully adds sounds of nature familiar to us all – morning bird song, the patter of rain, the wash of waves along the shore. "One of our basic methods is to use sounds which are archetypical for just being alive here on this planet because we may have a collective memory from when life began.”

Music and mental illness

Meanwhile, Musica Humana is broadening the scope of its research and investigating the effects of its music on people with, for example, depression and Alzheimer's Disease.

"It's a cheap and logical way to get more relaxed and satisfied patients,” says Per Thorgaard, chaiman of Musica Humana. “And you can use it anywhere in the world, which is a very good argument because many healthcare systems are suffering from lack of funds. So why not use this very scientifically, well-proven tool?"

The programme Musica Humana was produced by Anne Blair Gould. It was originally broadcast in July 2005 and was awarded a Sliver Medal at the New York Festivals.