MUSIC, EMOTIONS AND WELL-BEING:
HISTORICAL AND SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVES
LIST OF ABSTRACTS
Louis Moritz, The Music Lesson (1808) - detail
Dr. Gary Ansdell (London, Music Therapy)
How Music Helps: in Music Therapy and Everyday Life
My presentation will take a music therapist’s perspective on music, emotion and wellbeing,
beginning with a short case example from work with a client experiencing severe mental health
problems. This excerpt links to a study exploring how musical relationships are developed in
improvisational music therapy, and how a particular aspect of music dialogue – the ‘musical
present moment’ – has potential for creative affect regulation and therapeutic change. See
Ansdell, G., Davidson, J., Magee, W., Meehan, J. and Procter, S. (2010) From “this f***ing life”
to “that’s better”...in four minutes: An interdisciplinary study of music therapy’s ‘present
moments’ and their potential for affect modulation. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 19, 3-28.
Prof. Michael Bull (Univeristy of Sussex, Media and Film Studies)
Sensory Media and the Training of Perception: At the Interface of Culture and Nature?
Much of my research has focused upon the role of music/sound in the everyday life of subjects
as experienced through a range of media technologies. From the late 1970s Walkman users, for
example, became increasingly accustomed to experiencing not just the world but also their own
cognitive states through the sound of their machines. Control of thoughts, emotions and desires
became central to their daily management strategies. In my own work I tended to locate these
desires for control within a western narrative of privatization. The qualitative nature of my
research drew inspiration from sociology and anthropology. Understanding the nature and
meaning of cultural practices - the interface between the senses and the world – in my case
through media technologies is the theoretical world that I work in. The ways in which these
cultural and qualitative specificities might interact with scientific studies of perception that draw
upon psychophysical notions of information processing, neuroimaging technologies and the like
have yet to be sufficiently explored. There are methodological barriers to surmount – to what
extent can neuroscience with its interest in ‘pure’ sensation admit the sensory world –with its lack
of scientific control - into the spaces of the laboratory for example? What kinds of
epistemological and methodological bridges are required in order to advance the study of
emotions and well-being?
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‘Music, Emotions and Well-being: historical and scientific perspectives’
Robin Brook Centre, Queen Mary University of London
20th of June 2014
Dr. Daisy Fancourt (Centre for Performance Science, Royal College of Music)
Rhapsody: A Case Study of Culture and Science:
Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka famously described culture as ‘a matrix of infinite
possibilities and choice’. This summarises the deep complexities inherent within societies across
the world; within the concept of culture. However, ‘culture’ is not just complex on a physical
level; our very definition requires careful handling as our attempts to define culture have
demonstrated how multifaceted the concept truly is. In fact, it could be argued that ‘culture’ is
not one concept, but three. This paper will outline these three definitions of culture and explore
the importance of their interactions in both the research and application of music for health and
wellbeing. Focusing in particular on the topic of music and motor, it will examine research trends
and discuss the place and value of considering culture when researching the uses of music in both
exercise and rehabilitation. This will be illustrated with a case study of a recent arts and
technology project for physiotherapy from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital: the Rhapsody
project.
Prof. Stanley Finger (Washington, Neurology)
Franklin's Armonica
In 1762, Benjamin Franklin, then in London on a diplomatic mission, wrote a letter to a colleague
in Italy describing a musical invention he was calling the armonica. Unlike wine glasses that could
be tapped or rubbed, he put glass bowls differing in size on a rod connected to a foot treadle,
thus eliminating fluids and freeing both hands for touching the spinning glasses. Franklin played
his instrument for pleasure, but also to manipulate the "passions" and to treat nervous disorders.
During the closing decades of the eighteenth century, however, some people began to allege the
armonica could cause nerve damage and nervous diseases. The issues raised are why Franklin
used his armonica to soothe passions and in an early example of music therapy, and how he
responded to claims of it causing health problems. Franklin is shown as an empiricist, whose
focus was on results not theories; as a "psychologist," who fully understood the power of
"nonsense"; and as a natural philosopher with a strong interest in medicine. He lived during era
in which more and more was being blamed on over-stimulating the nerves, but when individuals
could only speculate about nerves and invisible nerve forces.
Dr. Penelope Gouk (Manchester, History)
“One of the Greatest Pleasures on Earth”: Music, Wellbeing and the Passions in Early
Modern English Thought
Abstract: In this paper I explore English thinking about music’s potential as a medicine both
before and after the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. The first work to address this
theme was Dr Timothy Bright’s Treatise on Melancholy (1586), but it was not until 1727 that the
apothecary Richard Browne published the first English treatise substantially devoted to music’s
effects. This was followed twenty years later by Dr Richard Brocklesby’s Reflections on Antient and
Modern Musick, with the Application to the Cure of Diseases (1749). All three authors agreed that the
“spirits” were the key to understanding how music could affect body and soul, and they all
conceptualised the motion of the spirits as if the body were a machine. Yet there were important
differences between Bright’s Renaissance worldview and that of Browne and Brocklesby, who
lived in a post-Newtonian age. Thus while Bright focused on the spirits active within the body,
Browne and Brocklesby linked the animal spirits flowing through the nerves with the spirits that
Newton postulated were acting as a medium for light, electricity and also gravity. Another
difference in outlook is that Bright’s understanding of health and sickness was ultimately
attributed to an imbalance of the humours. By contrast the other two authors anticipate Robert
Whytt’s Enlightenment view that disease was chiefly due to the state of the nerves. In sum, I
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‘Music, Emotions and Well-being: historical and scientific perspectives’
Robin Brook Centre, Queen Mary University of London
20th of June 2014
show that these works offer a glimpse into how scientific ideas changed towards music as a
means of maintaining health and curing disease in the early modern period.
Dr. James Kennaway (Newcastle, History)
The Physiology of Musical Emotions in Aesthetics and the Medical Critique of Music
The neurological basis of musical aesthetics and musical emotions has been the subject of
widespread interest over the past twenty years, extending way beyond neuroscience into the
Humanities. As I want to show, this is by no means the first time that physiological explanations
have been influential in discussions of music’s effects. Already in the eighteenth century, when
cosmological and metaphysical conceptions of music were in sharp decline, medical ideas
provided the basis for one model of listening that focused on the sympathetic nervous system. By
the early nineteenth century, however, a new Idealist aesthetics of music rejected this
physiological view for one based on the disinterested appreciation of form by the mind. Whereas
for many in the mid-eighteenth century, all music had been a matter of nervous stimulation,
physiological accounts of music’s emotional impact were increasingly restricted to music that was
regarded as sensual, trivial or effeminate. In much nineteenth and early twentieth-century musical
aesthetics, from AB Marx to Hanslick and Ernst Kurth, one sees a dichotomy between serious
music that addresses the mind and pathological music that merely titillates the nerves. The paper
will look at this interaction between music, aesthetics and medicine to illuminate the historical
background of today’s emotional and neuroscientific turns.
Dr Andrea Korenjak (Vienna, Music)
Music as Treatment of the Illness of the Gemüth in Viennese 19th Century Mental
Institutions
This paper will give an overview of the use of music for the mentally ill in the specific 19thcentury Viennese context, and will discuss the culturally- and historically-bound notions of the
Gemüth, mental illness, and well-being through music. In 19th-century Vienna, the idea emerged
that music could be beneficial in the treatment of the so-called Gemüthskranke [“patients suffering
from an illness of the Gemüth”]. Whereas today the term Gemüt[h] is almost arbitrarily translated
as “mind”, “temper”, “disposition”, or “soul”, in the historical context this term is clearly
circumscribed and strongly determined by the “spirit of the time”. Basically, it is historically
accepted that the “ideal state” (of the “soul”, the “mind” and the “affects”) is “calmness of the
Gemüth”. One of the most important proponents for the use of music in Viennese psychiatric
institutions was Bruno Goergen, who headed the Viennese “imperial- royal lunatic asylum” from
1806 to 1814 and who employed music in the treatment of the mentally ill. In 1819 Goergen
founded the first Viennese private “lunatic sanatorium”. Goergen pointed out that he had chosen
“a big, beautiful, vaulted salon in his house especially for gatherings, carefully-directed
conversations, games and in particular for music and literature appropriate” for Gemüthskranke.
Generally, in mental institutions music is regarded far more as an “occupation”, “useful
entertainment” or “amusement” rather than as a “therapeutic agent” in the modern “music
therapeutic” sense. In addition, it is important to remember that the “Private Sanatorium
Döbling“, as well as private mental homes in general, were accessible only to wealthy clientele
and the nobility respectively.
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‘Music, Emotions and Well-being: historical and scientific perspectives’
Robin Brook Centre, Queen Mary University of London
20th of June 2014
Dr. Alexandra Lamont (Keele, Psychology)
Approaches to Music, Emotion and Wellbeing from Psychology: Theory, Method, and
Evidence
This presentation will outline the key approaches to understanding wellbeing from a
psychological perspective, including theories of music and emotion, positive psychology,
community psychology and health psychology. I will begin by outlining Juslin’s BRECVEMA
theoretical approach to identifying the various mechanisms by which music evokes emotion,
from brain stem to expectancy of harmony. I relate this to the positive psychology approach of
Seligman, identifying points of overlap between the pleasant, engaging and meaningful aspects of
life and the emotional mechanisms that music capitalises on. Drawing on my own data from
music festivals and from choirs with older people I illustrate how this framework can help
explain the important roles that musical engagement can play in fostering wellbeing, and I relate
this to approaches in community and health psychology.
Dr. Cheryl Metcalf (Southampton, Health Sciences)
Musical Expertise and the Spectrum of Skill
Our physical interaction with the world can be interpreted in a number of ways: as an expression
of emotion, as a gesture or determined as a series of cognitive, neurophysical and biomechanical
processes. Our intention drives our interaction and this intention can also be determined by
numerous factors. Skilled interaction is a form of physical interaction that requires either practice
or intuition. Measurement of skill and skill acquisition can further our understanding of the
neurophysiological mechanisms that underpin expertise and this information can be applied in
contexts such as learning and development, recovery from injury and broader philosophical
questions, such as what is a virtuoso performance?
Our work focuses on complex hand dexterity and the application of a novel and comprehensive
measurement technique (HAWK) to accurately measure all the movements of the wrist, hand,
fingers and thumbs during performance. Our study on piano performance identifies and
measures key characteristics associated with playing and we will present results from preliminary
work in this area; descriptively comparing these characteristics from novice, mid-career and
expert pianists.
Prof. Dr. Susanne Metzner (Magdeburg, Music Therapy)
Pain and Sound
Abstract: The presentation addresses the music therapeutic treatment of pain, with consideration
of the involved functional and representational brain functions. A two-fold description of the
therapeutic process is presented whereby a transmodal process linking affective–sensory pain
with audio music experience and an assignment of musical symbols to pain lead to a modification
of the pain experience. Some results of aneurophysiological experimental study and of qualitative
research on amateurs’ musical skills serve as a platform for interdisciplinary discussion.
Dr. Marcus Pearce (Queen Mary, Electronic Engineering and Computer Science)
Expectation and Emotion in Musical Experience
Abstract: In the mid-19th Century, Eduard Hanslick pointed towards the importance of
unconscious expectations in the aesthetic experience of music. Unexpected musical events can
introduce a sense of tension and suspense while expected events generate pleasurable feelings of
resolution. Some 100 years later, Leonard B. Meyer established that this formalist account of
musical aesthetics is not necessarily incompatible with an expressionist view of music, that
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‘Music, Emotions and Well-being: historical and scientific perspectives’
Robin Brook Centre, Queen Mary University of London
20th of June 2014
emphasises emotional experience. Meyer also suggested the possibility that expectations are built
upon learned cognitive representations of musical styles instantiated as probability systems in the
minds of composers, performers and listeners. Until recently, there has been surprisingly little
scientific work to corroborate these hypotheses. I will present a dynamic information-theoretic
model of auditory expectation that learns through musical experience and, for each piece of
music it is exposed to, generates probabilistic predictions about forthcoming events (e.g, the
pitch or onset time of the next note), given the current context. In empirical experiments with
listeners, ratings of unexpectedness and uncertainty, and electrophysiological responses to
expected and unexpected notes, show a close correspondence with the predictions of the model
(measured in terms of information content and entropy). Furthermore, behavioural and
physiological emotional responses to live musical performances have been shown to vary
systematically with the probabilistic expectations of the model. These results corroborate the
theories proposed by Hanslick and Meyer.
Dr. Jacomien Prins (Warwick, Philosophy, Music)
Girolamo Cardano on Music as a Remedy ‘for the Troubles that Result from the Misery
of Human Misfortune’
For Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), famous as a medical practitioner, music theorist,
mathematician, encyclopaedist, astrologer and autobiographer, music was an important
component in many of his speculative interests. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct Cardano’s
reception of the Platonic idea that music has the power to shape and condition the human soul,
and even the human body. In his De proportionibus and his De musica Cardano develops a
physiological theory of the human passions as local movements of the corporeal part of the soul.
In his De tranquillitate, moreover, he lists the experience of listening to music as a remedy ‘for the
troubles that result from the misery of human misfortune’, while in his De subtilitate, he claims
that the passions are movements and variations of natural heat. In Cardano’s view, music can
either edify or deprave a human being: the immediate power that musical sounds exercise over
the passions may either cause the sought-after peace of mind or increasing levels of agitation.
By studying the connections between music, emotions and well-being from a historical
perspective, this papers aims to illuminate specific historical dimensions of a broader and more
complex setting of the topic, which were pushed into the background when emotions came into
being in music psychology and therapy as a distinct psychological category during the nineteenth
century. In doing so, I hope to create an awareness of the extent to which our contemporary
debate on the topic is still determined by the – now almost imperceptible – contours of
Cardano’s universe of discourse.
Prof. Roger Scruton (St Andrews, Philosophy)
Can There Be a Science of Musical Understanding?
The cognitive science of music cannot proceed on the same model as the cognitive science of
language use, on account of the manifest asymmetries between comprehension and performance,
and the lack of a clear semantic dimension. Moreover it is not clear that cognitive science of any
kind can answer the really important questions about musical understanding, which concern the
place of music in a culture imbued with moral and spiritual values of the participants. I examine
one or two attempts to think otherwise and say a few things about the geometrical models of
tonal organisation produced by Longuet-Higgins and Tymoczko.
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‘Music, Emotions and Well-being: historical and scientific perspectives’
Robin Brook Centre, Queen Mary University of London
20th of June 2014
Dr. Wiebke Thormählen (Royal College of Music)
Making Music, Making Good: An Investigation of the Ppower of Perception in the
Assessment of Music's Emotional Benefits
In late eighteenth-century London, the presence and fame of Italian opera was a much debated
cultural phenomenon and one that attracted attention from those with a nationalist agenda.
Expounded in aesthetic treatises on music, this agenda was thinly disguised by a veil of moral and
medical rhetoric that considered Italian-style coloratura singing as dangerous in its proposition
and display of excess. The un-tempered nature of its high pitches and its rapidly executed lines
drew attention to a body in the process of unhealthy physical exertion.
This paper examines how these modes of thinking about the process of making music are
transferred into the individual perception of music's benefits as a tool for both physical and
emotional health of the individual and as tools for building a healthy society at the same time.
Interestingly, the physical act of making music is simultaneously the element of music that is
essential to music's capacity to maintain physical and emotional health through balance, while
also being perceived as the element of music that can potentially throw the body and the mind
off-kilter.
Paying particular attention to the physicality of making music, more than the act of listening to
music, as central to a historical perception of the health benefits of music I highlight the power
of belief systems in the perception of music as beneficial to emotional and physical health.
Dr. Renee Timmers (Sheffield, Music)
On the Multimodal Experience of Music and its Implications for Future Research
Abstract: Music is something that is experienced in a bodily, sensorial, and imaginary fashion. It
is also something that flexibly allows for connections with a multitude of physical and sensorial
phenomena. It is here proposed that to further our understanding of the emotional power of
music we need to pay more attention to the multimodal characteristics of music. Take for
example associations with high and low pitch. These not just differ along the dimension of pitch
height. A rise in pitch is also associated with an increase in visual brightness, an increase in
physical activity, a smaller and thinner object, and a more upright posture. Associations with
happiness and positive valence are closely related. While music properties may activate such
associations, recent findings demonstrate that they also interact with and support the listening
process. They are more intrinsic to musical experience than previously believed. Building on
these recent findings, it will be clear that the multimodality of music is crucial for the transfer of
musical learning beyond music.
Dr. Maria Witek (Aarhus, Neuroscience)
In and Out of Musical Brains: Integrating Neuropsychology with Conceptual Theories of
Music Experience
With the advent of state-of-the-art neuroimaging methods, such as functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging and Magnetoencephalography, music researchers have joined cognitive
scientists in studying the brain. What can we learn from the neuropsychology of music? How is
music understood in such approaches? And what are their limitations? Using examples from the
literature, I will discuss the aims of scientific approaches to music and point to some challenges
in integrating perceptual and cognitive research with more conceptual approaches to musical
experience.
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‘Music, Emotions and Well-being: historical and scientific perspectives’
Robin Brook Centre, Queen Mary University of London
20th of June 2014