[neurosciencestuff]

It sounds like music to my… brain!

It may sound like sci-fy, but mind reading equipment are much closer to become a reality than most people can imagine. A new study carried out at D’Or Institute for Research and Education used a Magnetic Resonance (MR) machine to read participants’ minds and find out what song they were listening to. The study, published in Scientific Reports, contributes for the improvement of the technique and pave the way to new research on reconstruction of auditory imagination and inner speech. In the clinical domain, it can enhance brain-computer interfaces in order to establish communication with locked-in syndrome patients.

In the experiment, six volunteers heard 40 pieces of classical music, rock, pop, jazz, and others. The neural fingerprint of each song on participants’ brain was captured by the MR machine while a computer was learning to identify the brain patterns elicited by each musical piece. Musical features such as tonality, dynamics, rhythm and timbre were taken in account by the computer.

After that, researchers expected that the computer would be able to do the opposite way: identify which song participants were listening to, based on their brain activity – a technique known as brain decoding. When confronted with two options, the computer showed up to 85% accuracy in identifying the correct song, which is a great performance, comparing to previous studies.

Researchers then pushed the test even harder by providing not two but 10 options (e.g. one correct and nine wrong) to the computer. In this scenario, the computer correctly identified the song in 74% of the decisions.

In the future, studies on brain decoding and machine learning will create possibilities of communication regardless any kind of written or spoken language. “Machines will be able to translate our musical thoughts into songs”, says Sebastian Hoefle, researcher from D’Or Institute and PhD student from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The study is a result of a collaboration between Brazilian researchers and colleagues from Germany, Finland and India.

According to Hoefle, brain decoding researches provide alternatives to understand neural functioning and interact with it using artificial intelligence. In the future, he expects to find answers for questions like “what musical features make some people love a song while others don’t? Is our brain adapted to prefer a specific kind of music?”

[neurosciencestuff]

(Image caption: Brain areas best predicting musicianship. Red: left/right anterior cingulate gyrus; Green: right inferior frontal gyrus; Blue: right superior temporal gyrus; Gray: caudate nucleus, middle frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus)

Your brain responses to music reveal if you’re a musician or not

How your brain responds to music listening can reveal whether you have received musical training, according to new Nordic research conducted in Finland (University of Jyväskylä and AMI Center) and Denmark (Aarhus University). By applying methods of computational music analysis and machine learning on brain imaging data collected during music listening, the researchers we able to predict with a significant accuracy whether the listeners were musicians or not.

These results emphasize the striking impact of musical training on our neural responses to music to the extent of discriminating musicians’ brains from nonmusicians’ brains despite other independent factors such as musical preference and familiarity. The research also revealed that the brain areas that best predict musicianship exist predominantly in the frontal and temporal areas of the brain’s right hemisphere. These findings conform to previous work on how the brain processes certain acoustic characteristics of music as well as intonation in speech. The paper was published on January 15 in the journal Scientific Reports.

The study utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain data collected by Prof. Elvira Brattico’s team (previously at University of Helsinki and currently at Aarhus University) from 18 musicians and 18 non-musicians while they attentively listened to music of different genres. Computational algorithms were applied to extract musical features from the presented music.

“A novel feature of our approach was that, instead of relying on static representations of brain activity, we modelled how music is processed in the brain over time,” explains Pasi Saari, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä and the main author of the study. “Taking the temporal dynamics into account was found to improve the results remarkably.” As the last step of modelling, the researchers used machine learning to form a model that predicts musicianship from a combination of brain regions.

The machine learning model was able to predict the listeners’ musicianship with 77% accuracy, a result that is on a par with similar studies on participant classification with, for example, clinical populations of brain-damaged patients. The areas where music processing best predicted musicianship resided mostly in the right hemisphere, and included areas previously found to be associated with engagement and attention, processing of musical conventions, and processing of music-related sound features (e.g. pitch and tonality).

“These areas can be regarded as core structures in music processing which are most affected by intensive, lifelong musical training,” states Iballa Burunat, a co-author of the study. In these areas, the processing of higher-level features such as tonality and pulse was the best predictor of musicianship, suggesting that musical training affects particularly the processing of these aspects of music.

“The novelty of our approach is the integration of computational acoustic feature extraction with functional neuroimaging measures, obtained in a realistic music-listening environment, and taking into account the dynamics of neural processing. It represents a significant contribution that complements recent brain-reading methods which decode participant information from brain activity in realistic conditions,” concludes Petri Toiviainen, the senior author of the study. The research was funded by the Academy of Finland and Danish National Research Foundation.

[imamusictherapist]

[neurosciencestuff]

Miles Davis is not Mozart: The brains of jazz and classical pianists work differently

A musician’s brain is different to that of a non-musician. Making music requires a complex interplay of various abilities which are also reflected in more strongly developed brain structures. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig have recently discovered that these capabilities are embedded in a much more finely-tuned way than previously assumed—and even differ depending on the style of the music: They observed that the brain activity of jazz pianists differs from those of classical pianists, even when playing the same piece of music. This could give insight into the processes which generally take place while making music and which are specific for certain styles.

Keith Jarret, world-famous jazz pianist, once answered in an interview when asked if he would ever be interested in doing a concert where he would play both jazz and classical music: “No, that’s hilarious. […] It’s like a chosen practically impossible thing […] It’s [because of] the circuitry. Your system demands different circuitry for either of those two things.“ Where non-specialists tend to think that it should not be too challenging for a professional musician to switch between styles of music, such as jazz and classical, it is actually not as easy as one would assume, even for people with decades of experience.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig demonstrated that there could be a neuroscientific explanation for this phenomenon: They observed that while playing the piano, different processes occur in jazz and classical pianists’ brains, even when performing the same piece.

“The reason could be due to the different demands these two styles pose on the musicians—be it to skilfully interpret a classical piece or to creatively improvise in jazz. Thereby, different procedures may have established in their brains while playing the piano which makes switching between the styles more difficult”, says Daniela Sammler, neuroscientist at MPI CBS and leader of the current study about the different brain activities in jazz and classical pianists.

One crucial distinction between the two groups of musicians is the way in which they plan movements while playing the piano. Regardless of the style, pianists, in principle, first have to know what they are going to play—meaning the keys they have to press—and, subsequently, how to play—meaning the fingers they should use. It is the weighting of both planning steps which is influenced by the genre of the music.

According to this, classical pianists focus their playing on the second step, the „How“. For them it is about playing pieces perfectly regarding their technique and adding personal expression. Therefore, the choice of fingering is crucial. Jazz pianists, on the other hand, concentrate on the “What”. They are always prepared to improvise and adapt their playing to create unexpected harmonies.

“Indeed, in the jazz pianists we found neural evidence for this flexibility in planning harmonies when playing the piano”, states Roberta Bianco, first author of the study. “When we asked them to play a harmonically unexpected chord within a standard chord progression, their brains started to replan the actions faster than classical pianists. Accordingly, they were better able to react and continue their performance.“ Interestingly, the classical pianists performed better than the others when it came to following unusual fingering. In these cases their brains showed stronger awareness of the fingering, and consequently they made fewer errors while imitating the chord sequence.

The scientists investigated these relations in 30 professional pianists; half of them were specialized in jazz for at least two years, the other half were classically trained. All pianists got to see a hand on a screen which played a sequence of chords on a piano scattered with mistakes in harmonies and fingering. The professional pianists had to imitate this hand and react accordingly to the irregularities while their brain signals were registered with EEG (Electroencephalography) sensors on the head. To ensure that there were no other disturbing signals, for instance acoustic sound, the whole experiment was carried out in silence using a muted piano.

“Through this study, we unravelled how precisely the brain adapts to the demands of our surrounding environment”, says Sammler. It also makes clear that it is not sufficient to just focus on one genre of music if we want to fully understand what happens in the brain when we perform music—as it was done so far by just investigating Western classical music. “To obtain a bigger picture, we have to search for the smallest common denominator of several genres”, Sammler explains. “Similar to research in language: To recognise the universal mechanisms of processing language we also cannot limit our research to German”.

[imamusictherapist]

Hey everyone! The fourth episode of my music psychology/music therapy podcast dives into the musical abilities we’re born with. Learn about the possible survival value of perceiving music for and music therapists who work in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with medically fragile infants. Find Instru(mental) on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or our website.

Website: InstrumentalPodcast.com

Twitter: @instrumentalpod If you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and share! Thanks :D

[imamusictherapist]

The Best Music Therapists Make Mistakes (or, What Learning to Code Taught Me About Music Therapy)

“So, why would a music therapist want to learn how to code?”

This question was posed to me on a Friday night in a quiet, nondescript office building just south of downtown Portland. I’m sitting in a room with five other men, and we’re on break from an “Introduction to Programming” class being offered by a local code school, PDX Code Guild (they’re great!) And this question is totally fair because my profession and my interest in learning to code don’t typically go together. My answer has partly to do with (hopefully) upping my chances of being accepted to a to-be-determined PhD program. From doctoral students I’ve spoken with, coding is a helpful skill to have. The other part of my answer has to do with plain curiosity about this STEM skill that seems to be mentioned everywhere nowadays. I took the class hoping to get a feel for this mysterious skill. What I didn’t expect was to develop a completely new perspective on learning.

The class was a short intro (3 days/week for 2 weeks), but right from the beginning I felt super welcomed. Initially, I was a little nervous being was the only woman taking the class and because my coding experience up to then was limited to knowing three or four html codes to format my blog posts. The culture at PDX Code Guild, I was relieved to find, is super friendly and accommodating. Lessons were balanced between interactive, group coding experiences and individual labs to apply those skills. And during the group lessons, it wasn’t unusual for the teacher to overlook something himself so that we could practice troubleshooting all together. Even though most of the labs were creating very simple games (e.g., punctuation emoticon generator, rock/paper/scissors game) I was having a lot of fun!

By the end of the first week, I realized that I was genuinely reslishing something I had never appreciated before: making mistakes. I know that sounds weird. Making a mistake, being wrong about something means that I did something incompetently. Why would doing something badly be enjoyable and exciting? Something I appreciate about coding is that it’s so logical, that instructions to the computer need to happen in a certain order for your program to run. But how you build those instructions can be done any number of ways. I hadn’t realized how much creative freedom you can have in problem-solving via coding. And every time I made a small mistake and the program wouldn’t run, I had to go back, think through my ideas, and make adjustments. The immediate feedback and the challenge of translating my ideas into programming syntax made me want to perpetually try new, more streamlined ways of doing things. And when my program ran successfully it was thrilling!

This insight that better, more meaningful learning happens when you make a mistake felt revolutionary to my work as a music therapist. Granted, there are way more variables to juggle in music therapy, and our clients probably won’t respond as immediately or lineally as a computer program. But essentially, creative problem-solving is an essential part of music therapy. When I’m planning a session to reach a clinical goal, when I’m building the session when a client, or when I’m trying a new intervention, these are all times when something unintentional might happen. But, these moments of miscalculation may even bring a pleasant surprise. At the very least, mistakes give me important information that I didn’t have before. And with that information I can improve my facilitation or approach. Of course, the scope of mistakes in music therapy has its limits. Making too big of a mistake, not monitoring a situation closely, or failing to respond appropriately has the potential to result in harm. That’s the importance of clinical training: to recognize and reduce instances harmful outcomes to clients.

That being said, though, I really want to incorporate the safety I felt to make measured mistakes into my work as a music therapy supervisor for my future students. From coding, I felt like if I made a mistake, I was less likely to do it again. Making mistakes helped me remember a coding rule or concept better because I had experience with applying it and misapplying it. I think the same idea applies to being a music therapy student. For example, if a student is leading a song discussion and they completely forget the questions they had prepared in their session plan, that can feel scary. But, making this mistake might lead them to rely on reading the clients’ body language more and pay attention to shaping the discussion in a way that’s more responsive in the moment. Heck, the spontaneous discussion may flow more smoothly and better meet the clients where they’re at than the planned questions would have.

Ideally, I want my students to accept that they will do the wrong thing sometimes, not get self-conscious, and move on to try something new. That sentence is deceptively simple and music therapy training and practice is not that direct. But, learning to embrace and making mistakes can lead us to be better music therapists than if everything went according to plan. Who knew that’s why I want to keep learning how to code?

(via ImaMusicTherapist.com)

[thewriterkb]

Brain scans enhanced with pieces of gold leaf. 

Created by Dr. Greg Dunn and Dr. Brian Edwards via MyModernMet

thebluntreport.com/Instagram

[imamusictherapist]

Lessons From My First Year of Teaching

I’ve spent a lot of time in school (almost 20 years by my count.) And it was exactly nine months ago today that I had another first day of school, but this time as a professor. One year later and I’m even more excited to start back again in the fall. (Although, having the summer off is a great perk!) Here are the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a first-year educator:

1. There are still lots of things I need to learn.

Just because I was standing at the front of the class instead of seated in a desk, I did not know everything I needed to know for the classes I taught. Every time I sat down to write the syllabus, I’d have a flash of panic: how am I going to talk for a few hours each week on all of these topics?  It had been so long since I had learned the basics of music therapy as an undergrad, there were a lot of late nights spent reading and preparing lecture slides.

And of course, students would inevitably ask a handful of questions that I didn’t have a complete answer for. I’ve found that being transparent, stating that I don’t have the exact/complete answer to everything, and following up with more information in the next class was a good way to go. Logically, I know it’s not possible to know everything, but it wasn’t until I started teaching that I became comfortable with this fact.

2. Teaching makes me a better music therapist.

Part of my duties as a clinical coordinator include being an onsite supervisor for a handful of practicum sites. Students and I jointly lead music therapy sessions and we spend about 10 minutes afterward debriefing. Specifically, we discuss what happened in the session and strategize ways to maximize the therapeutic benefits for next week. My students are so observant and every week they’d ask great questions about why I chose a certain song, or structured a discussion in a certain way.

I hadn’t realized how much of my clinical skills are intuitive at this point. As a supervisor, my students kept me accountable and forced me to articulate the purpose behind any clinical decision I was making. Over the semester when I began handing the reins over the students, I learned how to give feedback by balancing both positive and constructive comments. So many skills are required of music therapists (playing multiple instruments, discussion leading, clinical presence, knowledge of repertoire and specific diagnoses, to name a few). Being as a supervisor gave me a fresh appreciation for my profession.

3. If you set high (and clear) expectations, students will rise to meet them.

During grad school at University of Miami, I worked harder than I ever had at maybe anything before. My UM professors and advisors pushed me beyond what I thought I was capable of, and I came out the other end with organizational skills, work ethic, and a thesis that I’m really proud of. As a teacher, I knew that I wanted to set the same high expectations for my students.

Walking into my first day as a clinical coordinator, however, I realized that I hadn’t accounted for the learning curve on both my part and the students’ parts. As they adjusted to my inexperienced and burgeoning teaching style, I was learning what was and was not realistic for music therapy students who have a million other responsibilities outside of practicum and the classes I taught. I learned to be clear about what I’m looking for and to explain the relevance of assignments to the real world of music therapy practice. By the end of the year, though, I was so proud of them for making huge steps in their session leadership, clinical writing, and ability to make a clinical argument for music therapy. I was such a proud professor as the students gave their final practicum presentations this month!

Yes, this is totally cheesy, but I’m so lucky to have found this teaching gig. I just got this semester’s evaluations from my students and this comment blew me away:

“I’m very grateful to study under Prof. Murakami and can’t wait to tell people, ‘Oh yea, Brea? She was my professor.’”

(Cue crying)

I don’t deserve that kind of reputation quite yet…though reading that comment was so encouraging. In the meantime, I know I’ll continue to grow so as to (hopefully) earn that kind of comment someday. Here’s to many more years of professor-ing!

[imamusictherapist]

Instru(mental) Podcast is out!!

Super excited to announce that my music psychology podcast, Instru(mental), now live! This podcast reviews music psychology research and also give practical tips for applying what you learn about music into your daily life. I also throw in a few music therapy examples of how I translate music science research into clinical practice.  You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Buzzsprout. Even better, check out our website (www.InstrumentalPodcast.com) to listen and find more information about the research articles reviewed. Please subscribe and share with other music psychology nerds such as yourself ;) PS- Follow us on Twitter for news and updates (@instrumentalpod)

[neurosciencestuff]

Repetition Can Make Sounds Into Music

Water dripping. A shovel scraping across rock. These sounds don’t seem very musical. Yet new research at the University of Arkansas shows that repeating snippets of environmental sounds can make them sound like music.

The new findings from the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas build upon research by Diana Deutsch and colleagues. These researchers showed that repetition can musicalize speech, a phenomenon they called “speech-to-song” illusion. Researchers at the University of Arkansas Music Cognition Lab have now demonstrated that repetition can also musicalize non-speech sounds. They call this a “sound-to-music” illusion.

This underscores the role of repetition in generating a musical mode of listening and shows that the effect does not depend on the special relationship between music and speech, but can occur for broader categories of sound.

The findings were published in the journal Music & Science. A preprint copy of the paper is available on the web.

In their article, “The sound-to-music illusion: Repetition can musicalize nonspeech sounds,” doctoral student Rhimmon Simchy-Gross and music professor Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis demonstrate that repetition can musicalize environmental sound, whether the clips are presented in their original sequence or in a jumbled version, contrasting with previous research on speech, where the effect only occurred for exact replications.

“This difference suggests that what works as a repetition depends not just on the acoustic characteristics of the sound, but also its function,” Margulis said. “Jumbling speech sounds disrupts the words’ meaning, but jumbling the components of a string of environmental sounds doesn’t change the fact that it sounds like water dripping or a shovel scraping across rock.

“Composers and performers have been playing with repeated sound samples and speech for more than 50 years,” Margulis said. “Like so much else in the cognitive science of music, this research is inspired by actual musical practice. It uses new experimental methods to pursue some of the ideas about repetition’s special role in musicalization outlined in my 2014 book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.”

Researchers used digitally excised clips of 20 environmental sounds, ranging from a bee buzzing to machine noise. They played each clip a total of 10 times to measure the reaction of participants, who rated them along a spectrum from “sounded exactly like environmental sound” to “sounded exactly like music.” The degree of musicality participants heard in the clips rose with repeated exposure.

“In other words, sound that initially seemed unambiguously like environmental noise, through the simple act of repetition, came to sound like music,” Margulis said. “The sounds themselves didn’t change, but something changed in the minds of the listeners to make them seem like music. This finding can help future studies investigate the characteristics that define musical listening.”

[scientific-women]

Go beyond bias training

Ambiguity in expectations and evaluations harms progress, say Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and colleagues.

[imamusictherapist]

Instru(mental) Trailer

A podcast about music and the mind. Reviewing music cognition and music science research and sharing practical takeaways from a music therapist's perspective. Follow us on Twitter: @instrumentalpod

[imamusictherapist]

Hey everyone, I know I’ve been quiet on this page for awhile, but I wanted to let you know I’m starting up a new endeavor: podcasting! My podcast is called Instru(mental) and focuses on covering music psychology research in an approachable way. Every episode will feature practical takeways from a music therapy perspective. You should definitely check out the trailer and be on the lookout for the first episode coming out June 1st!

[imamusictherapist]

Stuff I Did as a Music Therapist for the First Time in 2017

The new year is just about here and every blog, website, and podcast seems to be doing a “Year in Review” post; I’m not above jumping on that bandwagon too. For a twist, I’m focusing on the new experiences I had in 2017. It’s based on a tradition I do every year on my birthday where I list everything I did for the first time in the previous year of my life. I’m a Sagittarius, so by my birthday I’m already in a reflective mood. This practice reminds me that I’m still growing as a person, even if I feel like a boring, old lady who is a few cats away from being an introverted shut in. Just kidding, I’m not a pet person. (It remains to be seen if the rest turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

In the same spirit, here’s a non-comprehensive list of music therapy things I did for the first time in 2017:

1. I defended my original research and presented about it at two new conferences

A year of writing, 92 participants, and a week of becoming nocturnal led up to my thesis defense last March. There was an element of ceremony to my defense that I really appreciated, giving a weight and the feeling of formality to my defense. I bought a new dress for the occasion, my friends and family showed up (either in-person or virtually), and listened as I debuted by results. More than anything, I loved the feeling that I was sharing with the world a small piece of knowledge that no one had known before. Yay research!

My thesis research then got accepted for talks at the World Congress for Music Therapy in Tsukuba, Japan and the Society for Music Perception and Cognition’s conference in San Diego, California. In addition to the excuse to travel and visit new places, I had the simultaneous feelings of being a badass (people think my research is cool and has rigor!) and an imposter (people are gonna tear my research apart during the Q&A!) These feelings were tempered by the actual experience of being a part of the scientific community. I felt like my work appreciated, but also given valuable feedback within the context of both fields. If you're curious to learn more, here's a link to my thesis manuscript.

2. I facilitated my first “miracle” music therapy experience

Music therapy is not magic, it’s a clinical therapy that’s informed by evidence and best practices. But a lot of times music therapy gets marketed as something that can reach people that are unreachable, helping clients make breakthroughs that aren’t possible through other means. And while I’ve gotten the chance to see some amazingly positive client responses in my sessions, I’d never had a client go through a dramatic, jaw-dropping transformation in my sessions. Not that I measure my effectiveness as a therapist by these “miracle moments”, but I did get the impression that every other music therapist I knew had such a story in their back pocket.

That changed this year when I was working in neurorehabilitation during my graduate practicum. I was co-treating with a speech language pathologist (SLP). The client was a woman who was largely nonresponsive to others after experiencing a traumatic brain injury. According to the SLP, this client had been in rehab for months without making progress. In conjunction with the SLP, I started a musical improvisation to work on sensory orientation. As I began sporadically starting and stopping my guitar playing, the client began laughing, like she was in on the musical joke I was playing with her. She started joining in the back-and-forth with a shaker and some vocalizing that flowed for about 10 minutes. At the end of the session, the thanked me for the music in a complete sentence, something her SLP had never seen her do before. It goes without saying that the SLP was floored and became a believer in music therapy that afternoon.

I have mixed feelings about this “miracle” the music and I facilitated. It was such a beautifully affirming moment for the client and my identity as a clinician, but did the client’s dramatic response mean that I was a better music therapist? Had I not been as effective of a music therapist in my previous five years of clinical work? In the end, I’m grateful that the music I created an environment that encouraged the client to express herself and that the experience helped make an advocate of another therapeutic colleague. Still, I don’t rely on this experience to justify my work.

3. I became a professor

Although I enjoy doing clinical work, I know my strengths lie in the academic side of the field with researching, writing, and teaching. I was so excited, then, when I accepted my first faculty position as the clinical coordinator at Pacific University right after graduation! Officially becoming an academic came with a move to a new city and a new habit of wearing high heels (I’m pretty short, and need all the help with height I can get). But more importantly, becoming a professor came with a deeper feeling of responsibility for my students than I felt as a teaching assistant.

Sure, I’ve supervised and graded and taught before, but during my first semester as a professor I felt much more responsible for my students’ learning. I became a mentor and model for my students and their expectations for professionalism and practice in a field they hadn’t yet fully entered. At the same time, I started navigating and learning my teaching style. How strict would I be in enforcing attendance and homework policies? How hard of a grader would I be? How would I negotiate with students when my expectations weren’t met? These are all questions I’m still answering as I prepare for next semester’s classes, but I can say for certain that I really enjoy teaching. I know it’s a cliche, but I’m definitely learning from my students everyday I step into the classroom.

In the end, I’ve seen enormous growth in myself as I reflect on 2017. More importantly, perhaps, I’m looking forward to 2018. I’m planning on starting a private practice, publishing papers, and propelling myself into a PhD program soon. Cheers to the new year!

[neurosciencestuff]

Creating music by thought alone

“The Encephalophone is a musical instrument that you control with your thoughts, without movement,” explains Thomas Deuel, a neurologist at Swedish Medical Center and a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, and first author of the report.

“I am a musician and neurologist, and I’ve seen many patients who played music prior to their stroke or other motor impairment, who can no longer play an instrument or sing,” says Deuel. “I thought it would be great to use a brain-computer instrument to enable patients to play music again without requiring movement.”

The Encephalophone collects brain signals through a cap that transforms specific signals into musical notes. The invention is coupled with a synthesizer, allowing the user to create music using a wide variety of instrumental sounds.

Dr. Deuel originally developed the Encephalophone (patent pending) in his own independent laboratory, in collaboration with Dr. Felix Darvas, a physicist at the University of Washington. In this first report, they describe their development of the instrument, as well as their initial studies showing evidence of how easily the instrument might be used. This preliminary study showed that a trial group of 15 healthy adults were able to use the instrument to correctly recreate musical tones, with no prior training.

“We first sought to prove that novices–subjects who had no training on the Encephalophone whatsoever–could control the device with an accuracy that was better than random,” says Deuel. “These first subjects did quite well, way above chance probability on their very first try.”

The Encephalophone can be controlled via two independent types of brain signals: either those associated with the visual cortex (i.e. closing one’s eyes), or those associated with thinking about movement. Control by thinking about movement may be the most useful for disabled patients, and Deuel plans to continue researching this application. But for now, this current study shows that, at least for this small group of novice users, control by eye closing is more accurate than control by imagining movements.

The Encephalophone is based on brain-computer interfaces using an old method, called electroencephalography, which measures electrical signals in the brain. Scientists first began converting these signals into sounds in the 1930s and, later, into music in the 1960s. But these methods were still difficult to control and were not easily accessible to non-specialist users.

In a collaboration with the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), Deuel has built upon such research to make the Encephalophone more musically versatile, as well as easier to use.

Deuel and his collaborators are already working with more people to see how much users can improve with training. Deuel also plans to begin clinical trials of the Encephalophone later this year to see whether it may be useful or enjoyable for disabled patients.

“There is great potential for the Encephalophone to hopefully improve rehabilitation of stroke patients and those with motor disabilities,” Deuel says.

[neurosciencestuff]

Learning with music can change brain structure

People who practiced a basic movement task to music showed increased structural connectivity between the regions of the brain that process sound and control movement.

The findings focus on white matter pathways – the wiring that enables brain cells to communicate with each other.

Positive implications

The study could have positive implications for future research into rehabilitation for patients who have lost some degree of movement control.

Thirty right-handed volunteers were divided into two groups and charged with learning a new task involving sequences of finger movements with the non-dominant, left hand. One group learned the task with musical cues, the other group without music.

After four weeks of practice, both groups of volunteers performed equally well at learning the sequences, researchers at the University of Edinburgh found.

Significant increase

Using MRI scans, it was found that the music group showed a significant increase in structural connectivity in the white matter tract that links auditory and motor regions on the right side of the brain. The non-music group showed no change.

Researchers hope that future study with larger numbers of participants will examine whether music can help with special kinds of motor rehabilitation programmes, such as after a stroke.

International research

The interdisciplinary project brought together researchers from the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Music in Human and Social Development, Clinical Research Imaging Centre, and Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, and from Clinical Neuropsychology, Leiden University, The Netherlands.

The results are published in the journal Brain & Cognition.

The study suggests that music makes a key difference. We have long known that music encourages people to move. This study provides the first experimental evidence that adding musical cues to learning new a motor task can lead to changes in white matter structure in the brain. - Dr Katie Overy

[imamusictherapist]

How would you simply define music therapy in the situation of when people ask you what it is. I want to major in music therapy and I often get asked what it is and I don't know how to sun it up because there are so many parts.

Hi Eve-Splendid,

First off, sorry for the delayed reply as I just checked my inbox and saw your message, but there was no alert :(

To answer your question, you will get lots of interesting looks from people throughout your studenthood/career when you say that you’re doing music therapy, so get used to it. It can also get tiring after awhile, especially when people think they know what music therapy is, but have a misconception or are miseducated about the field. My advice when answering these questions is to answer in a friendly way that encourages their curiosity. (I’ve also met people that met a defensive music therapist before me and had a bad taste in their mouth when I told them I was a music therapist).

Anyways, the quick way to answer the “what is music therapy” depends on the situation. How much time do you have? How interested and invested is the person in your answer? Sometimes, people are asking because they are being polite at a party, and other times, you can tell you’ve just blown someone’s mind that such a cool profession exists.

Answers I give can range from:

Music therapy is a healthcare profession that uses music to help people with non-musical needs

Music therapy is the evidence-based use of musical interventions to meet a clinical need

Music therapy is the best profession ever! I get to use music to help people!

Each of these answers, of course, I pair with an appropriate example. Such as:

You know how sometimes you can’t help but tap your foot to the beat of a song? That bodily response is actually happening automatically. As a music therapist, I use the same principle to help Parkinson’s patients organize their gait, rather than shuffling or tripping.

You know how sometimes you hear a song that you’ve haven’t heard in forever and you remember where you were and how you felt when you listened to that song last? Music therapists can use that same “time travel” aspect of music to help Alzheimer’s patients with life review and help them get in a positive mood.

Have you ever not been able to get a song out of your head? Sometimes I’ll take advantage of your brain’s ability to learn music quickly to write a song that helps a child with a learning disability retain information that might be hard for them to remember.

Each of these examples pairs a musical experience the person has (probably) already had so that they’re connected to their own experience and then explaining how the same idea can be extended to help people with some non-musical issue. 

Hope this was a helpful primer for your music therapy “elevator speech”, good luck!

All the best,

Brea of I’m a Music Therapist