We’ve all heard the adage about how music can tame the savage beast, and I’ve witnessed up close how the right tune can temporarily lift the fog of even a severe neurological disorder. When my father’s Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia progressed near the end of his time, the best remedy was to play an old favorite by an artist such as CCR. Not only would he spring back to life — he’d start dancing, smiling and singing along in a voice I never knew he had before.
Music therapy is real, and new experiments continue to provide exciting results. Case in point: Peppino D’Agostino’s new project, Calm the Storm. It’s a collaboration with musician and psychologist Dr. Barbara Minton, a board-certified neurofeedback specialist with expertise in reading brain scans. The soothing music on Calm the Storm is intentionally composed to help normalize brain networks associated with chronic pain, migraines and insomnia, and uses electroencephalogram (EEG) technology.
First, it sounds gorgeous! D’Agostino plays with a delightfully delicate touch on a nylon-string acoustic guitar, and Minton recorded her accompaniment on the pipe organ at San Francisco’s iconic Grace Cathedral, with its heavenly ambience.
Secondly, test results on a small group of volunteer listeners are quite encouraging, as many enjoyed real pain relief. And according to D’Agostino’s account of their first live gig, the experience can be transformative.
Calm the Storm contains a booklet with instructions on how to get best results from listening. The album is available from Music and Healing.
We spoke with Peppino about the development and results of Calm the Storm.
How did you get involved with Calm the Storm?
Dr. Barbara Minton approached me because she discovered that music with certain frequencies and bpms [beats per minute] could influence people that suffer from mental health issues, including migraine headaches and insomnia.
We got together in October of 2024, and I composed nine pieces of music within given parameters. The bpm was 60 through 90, and the guitar notes had to be between the low E string and the A at the fifth fret of the first string. So I had this canvas to work with, and I decided to use a nylon-string guitar.
You normally play steel-string, so I assume you chose nylon-string to get a mellower sound while playing with a very nonaggressive fingerstyle attack?
Right. Steel-string has a brighter sound, and the nylon-string is much smoother. But even playing a nylon-string and paying careful attention to the attack of my fingers on the strings, we still had to smooth things out in post-production. Anything that stands out can have negative effects on the listener, so it was very important to have a phenomenal sound engineer, Masaki Liu, who understands how to use techniques in Pro Tools such as putting a tiny fade in at the start of a note to make it sound even smoother, or using volume automation to duck the string noise of my hand sliding between fretboard positions.
What was the goal from a compositional standpoint?
Dr. Minton told me there are plenty of apps, such as Calm, that people use to relax, and the new-age kind of music they use is like water washing over your skin. It’s intentionally not very memorable, more textural than melodic.
For this project the idea was to create something that could trigger the brain and keep its interest. The intention was not to make the listener fall asleep but to relax. Therefore, the music is soft, with essential melodic content that’s engaging but not distracting, like a good movie soundtrack. It’s all slow, except one bossa nova called “Cool Breeze” that’s a bit different.
The music needed to be harmonically interesting as well. Too many predictable chord progressions become boring, so while some of them are rather predictable, some are not in order to keep the brain engaged.
People will judge this project, but from my standpoint it was challenging to respect these parameters and, at the same time, come up with relevant melodies.
How did the compositional process go down?
Dr. Minton needed to be there to guide me and keep me in line, which was a little concerning because I’ve always written on my own whenever and wherever inspiration strikes. In this case I had to put on my composer hat and be in a room with her eight hours a day. She was very respectful and mostly quiet, witnessing me and making occasional suggestions such as, “Can you try that melody an octave lower?” Or “Now let’s write like a church hymn in the key of E.” That yielded “Fairfield Hymn.”
When the compositions were ready, she added her pipe organ parts at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Ultimately, there’s the big sound of the pipe organ including the very low frequencies from the foot pedals combined with the delicate sound of my nylon string.
How do you feel about the results?
She collected data on her patients that suffer from migraines, and some of the results were rather remarkable. If they were in the middle a migraine, the music basically distracted the brain and put it in a state of relaxation. So it was effective from a scientific standpoint.
Now, it doesn’t work with everybody, and it’s not approved by the FDA, of course, but it made me very happy to find that this music has a positive medical impact on people.
I got to experience it for the first time when we played a live gig during a healing retreat at a Universal Church in Boise, Idaho. The audience was instructed to close their eyes and remain quiet throughout the entire performance, which was a bit strange for me. By the end of the concert, most of them wound up in what I can best describe as like a trance, while others were moved to tears.
The idea moving forward is to bring the same experience to wellness centers all over the world. And we’re going to start working on another album right away with a focus on making music for relief of PTSD.
