Your Brain on Music
Researchers have conducted experiments that show how quickly brains respond to music. As Daniel Levitin explains in This is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006) when a chord sequence is played, for instance, electrical activity associated with musical structure has been observed at 150 to 400 milliseconds. Lagging behind, relatively speaking, are areas associated with discerning musical meaning, firing up 100 to 150 milliseconds later.
Plucking Strings of Light
Artist, composer, and koto player Miya Masaoka has developed a laser version of the traditional Japanese stringed instrument. The Laser Koto features a tripod-mounted laser array that Masaoka plays by passing her hands through the beams, triggering a variety of sampled and processed sounds from a computer.
The koto, a large plucked zither with moveable bridges, has been a staple of traditional Japanese music since the 8th century. Masaoka first became interested in electronically enhancing it in the early 1990s. She had long used extended playing techniques to expand the tonal palette of her instrument—stroking, rubbing, and scratching its strings, rather than simply plucking and bending them—and electronics seemed like a natural extension of that process.
“As someone who is creating new pieces for the instrument, I just wanted it to be able to make lots of new sounds,” she says.
The Laser Koto is essentially a traditional zither retrofitted with four laser beams, which Masaoka calls “metaphorical strings.” A set of light sensors register when the beams are broken by the movements of her hands and arms and infrared proximity sensors determine how close she is to the posts on which the lasers are mounted.
Every gesture Masaoka makes triggers a sample or invokes an effect using the database of samples and music patches stored in her laptop.
Surgery Music Lessens Need For Sedatives
Patients listening to their favorite music required much less sedation during surgery than did patients who listened to white noise or operating room noise, according to a Yale School of Medicine study published in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia.
Zeev Kain, MD, professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, said previous studies have shown that music decreases sedative requirements in patients undergoing surgical procedures under anesthesia.
He wanted to know if the decrease resulted from listening to music or eliminating operating room noise.
The study included 36 patients at Yale-New Haven Hospital and 54 patients at the American University of Beirut Medical Center. The subjects wore headphones and were randomly assigned to hear music they liked, white noise, or to wear no headphones and be exposed to operating room noise.
Surprisingly, just dropping a surgical instrument into a bowl in the operating room can produce noise levels of up to 80 decibels, which is considered very loud to uncomfortably loud.
What they found is that blocking the sounds of the operating room with white noise did not decrease sedative requirements. However, playing music did reduce the need for sedatives during surgery.
Drumming Up Interest in Therapeutic Music Making
With growing evidence linking job stress to illness, finding an effective means of stress management has become a challenging international endeavor. Now a Japanese study led by Masatada Wachi, with help from US researcher Barry Bittman, MD, is showing how recreational music making can be used as an effective remedy for workplace stress.
The effects of a one-hour recreational group drumming protocol were evaluated on 20 Japanese male corporate employees, while 20 control volunteers engaged in leisurely reading for one hour. After six months, the groups switched activities. Pre- and post-intervention data were collected using mood state questionnaires and blood samples, from which individual and group mean values for natural killer (NK) cell activity and other objective measures of human stress were ascertained.
The study’s results show that group drumming in a corporate setting has great stress-busting potential. The drumming groups demonstrated enhanced mood, lower gene expression levels of the stress-induced signaling protein called cytokine interleukin-10, and higher NK cell activity when compared to the control.
The study is reported on a new Recreational Music Making website developed by Bittman and NAMM, the International Music Products Association. Visit the site at rmm.namm.org.
Music Education Resolution Passes
Members of Congress recently discussed the benefits of school-based music education for children, resulting in the unanimous passage of House Concurrent Resolution 121.
The bipartisan resolution was sponsored by representatives Jim Cooper (D-TN) and Jon Porter (R-NV). The representatives were briefed by NAMM, the International Music Products Association, on the many social, developmental, and educational benefits for children who receive music education in the school curriculum. More than 25 House co-sponsors signed on.
The resolution states that learning music in schools is important because it develops skills needed by the 21st century workforce such as critical thinking, creative problem solving, effective communication, and team work; it keeps students engaged in school and makes them more likely to graduate; and it helps students achieve in other academic subjects such as math, science, and reading.
“A lot of folks who have had the privilege of a music education take it for granted,” says Cooper. “But 30 million or more of our children across this country are being deprived of a chance to not only experience the joy of music but also the increased and enhanced learning music offers.”
Making a Difference with Music
Jourdan Urbach, 15, of Roslyn Heights, New York, is a home-schooled sophomore and a student at the Juilliard School’s Pre-College Division in New York City, and he is using his violin skills to raise more than $1 million for national charities focused on neurological illnesses.
When only seven, Urbach met an internationally renowned neurosurgeon who took Urbach on a tour of a pediatric intensive care unit. “I saw firsthand the suffering of children with neurological diseases,” Urbach says. “I left with a strong determination to bring these children some measure of peace, temporal enjoyment, a little contagious enthusiasm, and a reminder of what’s outside the ICU door.”
Urbach is one of several teens—selected from 20,000 entries nationwide—who have just been named State Honorees in the Prudential Spirit of Community Awards, a national program honoring middle and high school students for their outstanding acts of volunteerism.
Making Music Hones Language Skills
Mastering a musical instrument improves the way the human brain processes parts of spoken language, joint research from Stanford University, MIT, and Rutgers shows.
Findings of the study indicate that people with musical experience find it easier than nonmusicians to detect subtle differences in syllables. They also discovered that the brains of musicians more efficiently distinguish split-second differences between rapidly changing sounds, an ability essential to processing language.
Study co-author Prof. John Gabrieli, associate director of MIT’s Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, said, “This research shows how musical training alters the way your brain processes language components.” It also shows that mental capacity is amenable to experience: “The brain is plastic, adaptable, and trainable,” added Gabrieli.
Musicians outperformed nonmusicians in the study’s two experiments. In the first, participants were asked to distinguish between close-matched pairs of syllables, such as ba-da, ba-wa, and ga-ka. In the second, participants had to reproduce three-tone musical sequences. Musicians got the fastest tone sequences right at least 85% of the time.
“A musician’s brain,” observed Stanford researcher Nadine Gaab, “becomes more efficient and can process more subtle auditory cues that occur simultaneously.” Putting this knowledge into practice may help combat age-related cognitive decline, she added.
Music Therapists Turn to Singing
Two studies recently published in the British Journal of Music Therapy suggest that singing has great potential for the field of music making therapy.
In the first study, by therapists Felicity Baker and Tony Wigram, mood changes in four male participants with traumatic brain injury were observed following participation in 15 vocal sessions.
Interestingly, the immediate effect of each session saw participants report increases in sadness, anger, fear, and fatigue. However, the long-term benefits were increased feelings of happiness and decreased feelings of negativity.
Addressing the short-term effect on participants, the therapists suggest that singing provides catharsis for people with traumatic brain injury, who may have no other space for which to express negative emotions.
The second study, by therapists Wendy Magee and Jane Davidson, looked at the effect of singing on patients whose chronic illness has caused a loss of voice function.
The writers suggest that these individuals “may find the act of singing a highly physical experience. As such, singing may be used to monitor subtle changes which have occurred due to the disease process.”
Singing as a part of clinical music therapy, say Magee and Davidson, is not only a vehicle for emotional expression, but also an invaluable tool in gaining an understanding of a patient’s experience.
