Article written by Lauren Johnston.
Yes, you did read that correctly, music, an everyday staple in our lives, could potentially be a form of medicine. I know some of you are thinking that using music for medical benefit is absolutely nuts! No one is saying that music is going to cure cancer, or that if you listen to a certain genre that your common cold will just disappear, BUT, what researchers are saying and finding out through experiments and research is that it can help in certain ways and for an array of different medical issues.
According to the American Psychological Association, researchers are exploring how music therapy can help improve health outcomes among a variety of patients, including premature infants and people with depression and Parkinson’s disease. As an infant, the first week or so of your life is spent listening to beeping ventilators and infusion pumps, the snake like hiss of oxygen, the whirlwind of carts and chattering among as doctors, surgeons and nurses make their way through the hospital corridors, but researchers have found a way to mute those noises, the once impossible noises that we were unable to drown out. By playing lullabies in the nursery it may soothe pre-term babies and their parents, and even improve the infants' sleeping and eating patterns, while decreasing parents' stress.
Researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center's Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine conducted the study, which included 272 premature babies 32 weeks’ gestation or older in 11 mid-Atlantic NICUs also known as Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. They tested a range of instruments and found 3 different genres/types of music that helped soothe the young infants, a gato box which is a drum-like instrument used to simulate two-tone heartbeat rhythms, an “Ocean Disc” which is a round instrument, invented by the Remo drum company, that mimics the sounds of the womb and a lullaby selected and sung by the baby's parents. Research found that the singing was the most effective out of the three, while the singing also increased the amount of time that the babies stayed quietly alert, and the babies general sucking behavior (no they weren’t badly behaved, it just means how they went with their dummies) improved most with the gato box, while the ocean disc enhanced sleep. The music therapy also lowered the parents' stress.
Studies show that music has been used as a form of treatment for everything from strokes to various types of chronic pain to dementia and other neurological disorders. A Cochrane study of 23 clinical trials concluded that music can have a beneficial effect on blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, anxiety, and pain in people with heart disease. Music has proven over and over again that it does have medicinal benefits, with the help of professional music therapists, doctors, scientists and researchers we have been able to help soothe and relieve millions of people over the last few decades due to such a simple thing, so what if we could make this kind of medical help free to everyone at any given second that they need? Maybe even with just a touch of a button?
These days we have a million different music streaming apps, I have previously done an article just on these apps, but have you noticed that these music streaming apps suggests what users might like to listen to, based on their tastes and what’s popular with people near them? People even make different playlists for different things such as going to the gym, going to work, going to bed and so on. Now what researchers are trying to do is test the possibility of if those apps could predict exactly which song would be best to help you focus, or to slow your heart rate after a run.
That idea is called The Sync Project, a new company based in Boston. Its main goal is, as CEO and co-founder Alexis Kopikis puts it, “To figure out if music can truly be used as medicine.” Music’s effect on the mind and body has long been acknowledged, who hasn’t tried to use music to influence their mood? Kopikis says it’s only now, though, that the technologies in both the music and health industries are advanced enough to provide the opportunity for this research. The Sync Project currently takes the form of an online and mobile platform that pairs users’ music-streaming services with their devices such as Fitbits and the like to track how music might be interacting with their body. The Sync Project, which was officially launched at the 2015 South by Southwest conference, is still in its early years. Currently it is only being tested within a small group of scientists and researchers. No one from the company is saying how many right now and with plans to roll out to bigger groups, and then on to the people of the public, later. The idea, though, is that your device, like a FitBit, would track such things as steps taken, heart rate, and sleep patterns then you would connect to The Sync Project app on your phone, which would bring your music via Spotify, iTunes, or another music service along those lines. Then you would go along your day as per usual, all while the app tracks the different songs you were listening to and what you were doing at the time, relaxing quietly to Sam Smith or working out at the gym to Fall Out Boy. From that the app sends of all of that information to inform yourself along with sending it to researchers and scientists – what type of music will help you fall asleep faster or focus better on a set task. The Sync Project hopes to focus on certain aspects like peoples sleeping patterns that could potentially lead to larger case studies for scientists and researchers who are studying similar and related conditions.
You don’t need to have a reason to listen to or make music other than the pleasure or catharsis it gives you. But if it also helps you deal with pain and anxiety, lifts you out of depression for a while, helps you with some other physical or psychological problem or motivates you to exercise, more power to it. Unlike new drugs or medical procedures, music needs no government approval or clinical trials, it’s usually free or inexpensive, and can’t hurt even if it doesn’t help. If musical self-help isn’t enough, consider asking your doctor about more formal music therapy.
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