Plato in the Timaeus already claimed that there is a strict relation between Armony, Mathematics and the Structure of Reality: to create the universe, god takes inspiration from the "gaps" between the notes, so that Reality itself becomes a "product of art", something with an intrinsic musical value - in this tradition we cannot of course forget to mention Pithagoras and his school.

In our days, the achievement through music of new perceptual and mental states was put forward by at least two different traditions: on the one hand, we have the "esoteric" work by Hans Kaiser - interpreting human anatomy using the laws of Armony -, on the other we have the psychedelic rock and the german cosmic music. At the end of the Seventies the english and german musical scenes explode with a brand new set of sounds and attitudes: while the Pink Floyd succesfully mix rock and symphonysm in “A Sauceful Of Secrets” and merge emotions with artificial sounds (“More”), the Tangerine Dream (founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese) pioneer the great season of the german cosmic music; after the debut album, "Electronic Meditation", the group becomes finally popular with "Phaedra", that reaches the 15th position in the U.K. chart.

A unique and final definition of symbolic music is thus not easy too find: a part of its soul is made of archaic influences, the power of symbols on our mind and a kind of contact with the "metaphysical" reality; another part, important as well, is made of psychedelic rock, in its struggle to both achieve new states of perception and to convey with sounds the sense of "infinity". However, if by just listening to some kind of melody we can enhance our cognitive abilities, symbolic music looks like a perfect candidate to achieve the desired result.

In Semi-Immortality, The Mind Does not Lie and The Mathematics of Models of Reference the concept of "models of reference" has been thoroughly introduced, explained and formally developed. The models of reference are "just" the basic elements of all our thoughts and emotions: our senses perceive a situation, which triggers a series of thoughts, which in turn produce specific actions. This is the essence of models of reference, that "live" inside our mind and are triggered by signals from our senses.

iLabs research are based on the working hypothesis that our mind can be fully understood using this concept: deductive reasoning, creativity, decision making, instincts can all be explained by the activation of specific models of reference. "Mental maps" - to use technical jargon from clinical psychology - are nothing more than connections between models of reference, networks of concepts that help our mind give structure to our experiences.

If this is true, by activating through words or - why not? - a sounds, the right sequence of models we can reach the mental "mood" we desire - from absolute attention to profound relax -, just as pulling the right strings in a puppet can recreate any bodily attitude. Only knowing each and every line of our software, we will be able to literaly "program" our mind: while waiting for that exciting moment, we can fruitfully use lateral tools - such as meditation and PNL - to discover first, important connections between stimuli and models of reference.

Decades of research in psychoneurophysiology confirmed over and over again a thesis that the "oriental" culture has been knowing and exploting for centuries: mind and body are heavily connected, so that - literaly - our body influences what we think and our thoughts influence what we do. In this perspective, meditation is a privileged, symbolic tool to discover, heal, modify what lies behind the curtains of our mind. The tracks of Symbolic Music were composed in a sort of meditative state, trying to associate to mental symbols suitable universal sounds that may help others to reach that particular cognitive and emotional situation.

Music as an enhancer of cognitive performance has been thoroughly studied by many research programs in recent years; on the other hand, many of us know from everyday experience that certain melodies can improve our ability to reach better results when facing a problem in specific areas. Symbolic Music is all this and much more, since aesthetics is merged with the power of symbolic representation: we firmly believe that "going" with our mind in those areas where our best abilities - the abstraction needed for a theorem, the creativity needed for a picture - reside can be made relatively "easy" if we listen to a music that was explicitely designed to trigger the rigth sequence of models of reference.

A complex work such as a melody activates countless models of reference - at the end of the day, our judgement ("I like it", "I don't like it") depends on this long series of triggers. Notwithstanding the variability between individuals (people like different genres and songs), the uniformity of reactions to specific types of sounds is astonishing: if part of our models are the results of the environment, society, personal background, a certain number of "primitive" models come directly from our DNA. It is by stimulating just these latter models that Symbolic Music tries to create in the listener the desired effect.

Antonella was born April 12, 1961. She graduated in Psychology from Lubiana University, with a dissertation entitled “To Die without Fear. Death in our Culture and Two Proposals to Face it”. Her main interest of research are mind-body interactions: at the core of some among the most spectacular applications of iLabs methodology there is Antonella’s ability to understand how mind influences body and vice versa. Complete Profile