Magical Music

Photo URL

Recently, my roommate and a group of her classmates organized an event about the “power of music.”  They arranged for performances and speakers with a main focus on music therapy.  While I don’t doubt that it works, I don’t completely understand why or how it does.

The American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) defines music therapy as “the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program.”  According to AMTA, trained professionals determine the client’s needs and assign a type of therapy.  This could involve singing, dancing, creating, listening to or moving to music.

Berklee School of Music offers a degree in music therapy.  Their definition, similar to AMTA’s, is “the applied use of music to measurably improve people’s lives by assisting them in making positive life changes. Music therapy is the functional and scientific application of music by a trained music therapist to enhance an individual’s social, emotional, educational, and behavioral development.”  Since they describe it as a “scientific application,” it implies that this has been proven to work as well as that each treatment goes through the trial and error, hypothesis and testing of the scientific procedure to see whether the prescribed treatment works.

Photo URL

AMTA claims that the idea of using music to help with healing has been around for centuries.  However, they date the first reference to music therapy specifically at 1789 when an article called “Music Physically Considered” appeared in Columbian Magazine.  Then, in the early 1800s, there were two medical dissertations discussing music therapy.  During the World Wars, use of music for therapy became more widespread with musicians traveling to hospitals and playing to the wounded soldiers.  AMTA said that there were noticeable responses from the patients to the music.

Eventually, they began training people to officially become music therapists.  Now colleges offer degrees in music therapy and places like Hershey Medical Center use music therapy.  Hershey states that “music therapy has been shown to improve the quality-of-life for adults and children with disabilities or illnesses.”

The design for an experiment proving that music therapy works would be quite simple.  Block people according to their ailment or disability and randomly assign people from each block to either the group that receives music therapy or the one that doesn’t.  Although the patients cannot be blinded to the fact that they are partaking in music therapy, you could make sure that they do not know that it is part of an experiment or that there is another group.  Also, the people taking the data would not be told who had participated in music therapy and who had not.

Photo URL

However, this experiment might not be necessary because the DANA Foundation says that there have been so many experiments that lead to the rejection of the null hypothesis (that music doesn’t help) that it has become accepted that music therapy is effective.  Additionally, they state that some of the mechanisms are starting to become clear thanks to the development of brain-imaging techniques.  Before these techniques were available, music therapy was rooted more in the social sciences which believed that the healing was based on the emotional connections, said DANA.

Now that researchers can watch the brain’s response to music, they are finding that music does more than that.  DANA said, “First, the brain areas activated by music are not unique to music; the networks that process music also process other functions.  Second, music learning changes the brain.”

Photo URL

The parts activated by music are also activated for “processing language, auditory perception, attention, memory, executive control, and motor control.”  When people listen to music, these parts of the brain are activated, and complex interactions between the different parts may occur.

For more information on how exactly it works, see the DANA Foundation website.

Now that scientists are sure (although never 100% sure) that music therapy works, they are looking at how it works for each individual situation and how to individualize the therapy.  The process is ongoing as they test out new types of therapies and explore the possibilities to see just how many “miracles” (which are actually very scientific) music can work in our lives.

And I think, even if there weren’t a biological mechanism for music therapy and it was having a placebo effect, the fact that so many people believe so strongly in how much it helped their lives, including my roommate, means that it’s a worthy endeavor.  In the end, what matters are the lives it changes, and music is one of the most powerful tools for change.

Photo URL