The style of music that best supports transition is very different from that of the conventional music that fills our daily lives. It is arrhythmic, meaning without rhythm. Our living bodies function according to rhythms every second of the day. Heart beat and respiration are just a few of these. Our daily lives are surrounded with rhythms. Right now I am listening to the rhythm of the fan that is running inside my computer tower and the tick of the clock in my family room to mention just a few of the many rhythms that envelope me. Someone who is dying is trying to pull away from the rhythms of life, within and without. I create spaces in my music for the dying. It can be a space where there is silence or a space that is filled with the tone of one note that is held on to indefinitely. The “At Peace” CD is a good example of arrhythmic music and it is the style that I use when I am singing as a professional therapeutic bedside musician for a transitioning patient.

The tempo of music for the dying should be slow. Someone who is dying has a body that is little by little slowing down or shutting down. That person may as well be slowed down mentally or physiologically by medications. To sing at a pace that is part of our everyday fast-paced life would be unsettling to a dying patient. For the patient who is experiencing rapid heartbeat or rapid breath rate, the slow tempo encourages them to relax and slow down as well.

The volume of the music should be soft. Hearing is the first sense to develop in the womb and under normal circumstances it remains with us until we take our last breath. I believe that an unresponsive dying patient whose eyes are closed has a heightened sense of hearing, just as a blind person has the heightened ability to hear. You never want to risk that the live or recorded music would be too harsh or jarring for a dying person.

The music must be soothing. Low tones sooth and relax. High tones excite and energize. This is why the Guided Angles Ministry music is sung and played in low keys and pitches.

Music for the dying needs to incorporate these four S's:

• Spaces - arrhythmic
• Slow
• Soft
• Soothing - low tones

Professional therapeutic musicians use the elements of music in many other ways as well to support transition. I have incorporated in the Guided Angels Ministry music what I know the average untrained Singer can grasp and use to comfort the suffering of the dying. I know this through my years of experience in training others to sing for the dying. Singers using this Program provide comfort through music; they are not providing therapeutic music. Only a trained professional therapeutic musician is capable of delivering live therapeutic music.