Christopher Baron - "The Mirror Effect"

„The Mir­ror Effect“
A Dis­ser­ta­tion writ­ten by Christo­pher Baron (M.A. Music Ther­a­py)
Uni­ver­si­ty West of Eng­land, Bris­tol 07/10/2020

https://​pan​gensem​ble​.com

In this dis­ser­ta­tion Christo­pher Baron, a formed music ther­a­pist, goes deep into the effects that music pro­duced with the PANArt Hang®-Family Instru­ments on musi­cians. After a short his­tor­i­cal intro­duc­tion he leads us over to dif­fer­ent aspects con­nect­ed to this instru­ment. The term ​„musi­cian“ here has to be seen from the per­spec­tive of music ther­a­py. It is not mere­ly a per­son that has under­gone aca­d­e­m­ic for­ma­tion in music (i.e. music school, nota­tion, solfeg­gio, score read­ing and so on) but in this case it is intend­ed as quite every per­son that gets in touch with music mak­ing, fol­low­ing the call of the cit­ed ​„innat­ed musi­cian­ship“ wich is with­out doubt part of every human being. The PANArt Hang®-Family instru­ments, through their imme­di­ate access, ease of play and the com­plete lack of ​„right“ or ​„wrong“ donates every per­son a very per­son­al and invidi­vual way to access their own inner music, their own inner pulse. A lot of peo­ple have suf­fered from music edu­ca­tion, indeed music edu­ca­tion as a stiff, time- and ener­gy-con­sum­ing task has con­tributed to many peo­ple com­plete­ly los­ing ​“their music” and turn­ing away from mak­ing music alto­geth­er. The PANArt Hang instru­ments have giv­en peo­ple back the free­dom to find direct access to their inner music again, with­out hav­ing to sub­mit to the con­straints of aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly influ­enced music, which is always asso­ci­at­ed with per­for­mance and judge­ment.

Through the direct con­nec­tion to one’s own, inner and indi­vid­ual music, it is pos­si­ble to bring the inner world of feel­ings and sen­sa­tions to the out­side, to make it audi­ble. The PANArt-Hang instru­ments thus become a medi­um between inside and out­side and help peo­ple to make their own emo­tion­al world audi­ble and to under­stand them­selves bet­ter, a mir­ror in which one can see one­self as a being: the mir­ror effect.

Christo­pher Baron illu­mi­nates and doc­u­ments this mir­ror effect using sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly recog­nised meth­ods and thus offers an inter­est­ing approach to bet­ter under­stand the PANArt-Hang® instru­ments and their effects on the human body and mind.

- Diet­mar Elsler, June 2021