Cultures all over the world use music to enter trance states of consciousness, the focus of a popular course
“Music is necessary, but it doesn’t cause trance,” says Rich Jankowsky. “Music creates the conditions for trance.” Here, a trance dancer in a stambeli ceremony in Tunisia in 2009. Photo: Matthieu Hagene
You are listening to a piece of music that envelops you. As it plays, your inner chatter is quieted, your attention fully on the music. It could bring a mood of peacefulness or nostalgia or happiness, but it’s a feeling, not a thought, as you are lost in the music.
Understanding the ways that people are affected by and interact with music across the globe is one of Professor Rich Jankowsky’s goals for his class Music, Trance, and Consciousness. Early in the semester, he gives his students a task: disperse across campus to find a spot to sit quietly and listen with earbuds or headphones to music that deeply engages them, sitting still and focusing only on the music.
When they get back to the classroom, the students fill out a questionnaire about their experiences. Even though the goal is not necessarily to try to experience a trance state, a few have had what they describe as profound experiences, while the majority are only somewhat affected by the music.
The takeaway from the exercise is important: music may affect us, sometimes leading to what feels like an altered state of consciousness, but there are many factors at play. “Music is necessary, but it doesn’t cause trance,” says Jankowsky, A95. “Music creates the conditions for trance.”
Trance is a bodily experience, in which a person becomes less conscious of themselves and their surroundings, complete with chills and shivers and the feeling of your blood pumping in a more palpable way, he says.
It provides “access to knowledge that would not otherwise be attainable in your everyday life. You need intentionality and focus to get yourself into a kind of headspace, if you will, to then let yourself accept this experience,” he says. “It’s a special place where everyday life is kept at bay, and you are conditioned to focus on specific things.”
Iframe
tuftsuniversity · Spirits, Trance, and Dance in Tunisia
Professor Rich Jankowsky describes Tunisian stambeli music and its relation to trance, along with a field recording he made in Tunis in 2009, with musicians Salah el-Ouergli (gumbri, lead vocals); Belhassen Mihoub, Noureddine Soudani, Lotfi Hamami (shqashiq, response vocals).
Research suggests that your inner monologue—the talk in our heads—stops “or at least is suppressed in trance. Your sense of self is suppressed as well, which opens you up to experiencing the world in a different way,” he says.
The setting is crucial, too. A ritual space, it has to take place outside of “the chaos of everyday existence,” Jankowsky says. That enables people to focus on the minute of details of the music and ceremony.
Lily Stern, A25, a dual degree Tufts and New England Conservatory student, says the class fit perfectly at the intersection of her two disciplines, psychology and music. A cellist, she’s now incorporated ideas from the class into her own musical practice.
“I have a deeper understanding of the mechanics of what goes on in terms of inducing an altered state of consciousness,” she says. “A huge part of the reason why music can do this for people is it makes us feel things. It induces emotions, which can alter your sense of reality and time. I’m trying to figure out how I can maximize that for my audiences.”
Healing Rituals and Trance
The class examines a very wide range of music styles, from South American shamanism and Pakistani qawwalis to electronic dance music and Tunisian healing ritual songs, exploring the different approaches to understanding the connections between music and trance and consciousness.
“I realized there was this whole system of understanding about what music can do to you and for you, in so many different contexts,” says Rich Jankowsky. “There are specific ritual contexts in which music affects people in very profound ways.” Photo: Alonso Nichols
“My goal is to challenge preconceived notions and stereotypes about trance and about the cultures that cultivate those forms of healing,” Jankowsky says. “We spend some time looking at raves—for some students, that’s what attracts them to the class. They understand that they have probably fallen into some state of transformed consciousness through music, which is not very far from the higher arousal trance states.”
Jankowsky’s interest in trance-related music has deep roots. When he was an undergrad at Tufts, his roommate was Tunisian American, and he visited his friend’s family in Tunisia, beginning a lifelong connection with its music and culture.
“I realized there was this whole system of understanding about what music can do to you and for you, in so many different contexts,” he says. “There are specific ritual contexts in which music affects people in very profound ways.”
He delved deeply into how Tunisian trance and ritual music is used in healing and spiritual ceremonies circles in his books Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia and Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form, which received the Alan Merriam Book Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2023.
He shares his experiences with music and trance with his students, playing music he recorded from healing and religious ceremonies. The music in Tunisian Sufi rituals relates predominantly to religion—Sufism is a mystical approach to Islam, often at odds these days with strict interpretations of Islam. (In fact, many of the Sufi shrines he frequented during his research were attacked by militant Islamists in the years immediately following the 2011 revolution in Tunisia.) Sufism offers “this sense of transcendence and achieving another level of consciousness through spiritual inspiration,” he says.
Stambeli is very different—a ritual that focuses on possession by external spirits that’s distinct from religion. It’s about “creating this pact or alliance with the spirit that’s understood to be afflicting you,” Jankowsky says. “The offering you make to the spirit is your body. You give the spirit this rare opportunity to engage with the human world of music and dance—that’s how it’s understood. And hopefully in return, the spirits will leave you alone for the remainder of the year.”
Biopsychology major Sarab Anand, A25, was struck by the connection between music and religion. A Sikh, he says that “Sikhism is a religion that has a lot to do with music as a central form of worship, or something that is centered in meditational practices. Through this course, it’s been cool to see how my own experience can relate to this idea.”
Anand says it’s interesting, too, the difference in many students in the class, for whom listening to music is a more individual affair, while “in my experience listening to music is in communal settings. For me, music has always been daily worship in hymns, where it’s a call and response, and that feels right at home.”
Your Entranced Brain
When he plays trance music in class, students might think it is boring more than anything: repetitive sounds dominate. In fact, there are gradual changes in the music that students don’t even notice until Jankowsky plays it again.
Trance-inducing music is widespread, and besides being linked with religion or healing practices, it’s also associated with shamanic rituals, be they from Indigenous peoples in the Americas and beyond, and even what’s called secular trace music, such as EDM—electronic dance music in raves, for example.
Jankowsky also points to neuroscience approaches to music and trance, and their relationship with consciousness. Brain scan technology is helpful in illuminating some of the effects, he says, but it has its limits. “You can’t exactly bring people into a lab and have them experience a high arousal ritual healing trance,” he says.
Still, neuroscientists have started to find workarounds. One team working in Indonesia used portable EEG caps to monitor brain activity on a group of dancers in a ritual trance. They found that those who reported falling into trance showed a significant increase in alpha and theta brainwave activities—alpha waves are more concerned with learning and mental coordination, while theta waves are associated with relaxation and a state between wakefulness and sleep. “So the contradictions and paradoxes of trance just multiply,” says Jankowsky.
EEG monitoring has been used on self-described shamans from different parts of the world, “and researchers found a pronounced shift from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere,” he says. That supports the idea of diminishing the autobiographical self, associated with the left hemisphere, while the right is associated more with sensory motor experiences and not so much with analytic thought.
For Gwen Draut, A25, who’s double majoring in cognitive brain science and music, the class has “made me think about how to pay closer attention to music,” she says. “I feel like sometimes I can just be listening to music and singing along, but I’m not actually in it, if that makes sense. It’s definitely made me think more about that, and how to engage more deeply with it.”
