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[Silviiro]

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[Korpo]

Difficult to say.

"Losing yourself in the music" sounds more like unawareness than awareness. The point of mindful meditation is to stay present, not to click out.

If you were on the contrary present in every moment of the music, appreciating every sound, being totally focused on the music, this would constitute a proper meditation object, but I'm not sure whether it would be a primary one. IMO that would be totally different from "losing yourself in the music". It would be more like "intensely but relaxedly focussing on the music with your full awareness". This might require staying with the breath and the music at the same time to stay focused all the time, but that's just my guess.

There are tunes and chants that help activate energies in the human body, and they can be played and sung along the meditation, but are not the meditation focus IIRC. There are also ways to chant that you can focus on, similar to the "Resonant Tuning" exercise of the Monroe tapes. These enhance the breath with vibration to make your insides vibrate and increase your body awareness and your focus on the breath.

Take good care,
Oliver

[iadnon]

In ancient (and not so ancient) tribal rituals, rhythmic and loud music was used to achieve trance states. That's because when you feed up one of your senses it's easier to turn inwards. For example, I cannot meditate appropriately if I'm not listening to some music (usually background one; some sort of ethnic music).

[nightdrift17]

I read it somewhere that whenever you are doing two things at a time (like listening to music and meditating), your mind is actually switching between the two at a very fast rate.
The book sid that fr some people it could helpful as otherwise they would think many random things and now there are only two. But eventually it said that such practiice has to be given up as it does compromise on your true abilities a bit.
I don't remember what book, but it was about meditation.

[Tom]

If you enjoy listening to music, there is nothing wrong with just enjoying some music. Going for a walk and bringing an MP3 player along is really nice. I prefer books on MP3 rather than music, but the idea is the same. It doesn't have to be about meditation and spirituality.

Eric Pepin (Higher Balance) suggests meditating with music because the music will be distracting and with practice you will get used to doing your meditation around it. He suggests changing styles of music as you adapt to one so that it will again be distracting for a time. When nothing pulls you away from your meditation, he says it is okay to drop using music.

Usually I read that silence is best for meditation.

As for trying to meditate on music, vipassana comes to mind ... but you will probably not be able to actually enjoy listening to music that way.