Music in schools [Video transcript]
Thompson, G. Music in schools [Video transcript]. The University of Melbourne.
Presenter: Dr Grace Thompson, The University of Melbourne.
Chapter 1: public opinion of music education
I have a question for you: Would you be happy to pay for music lessons for your child? Or, to put it another way, would
you be happy for your taxes to go towards funding music education in schools? The school curriculum is a crowded place,
and politically there is often a push to focus on core academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. Some commentators
have even suggested that these are the only things schools should be concerned with. So in a time-limited school day,
what should students be learning? And does music have a place?
Well, if you said “yes” to funding music education in schools, you are not alone. A report by the Music Trust [1] in Australia
states that 87% of Australians aged 12 or more agree that music education should be mandatory. And 91% consider
music to be important to a well-rounded education.
As a musician myself, these public opinions please me, but as a music therapy researcher, what interests me is why
people believe that music education is important, and what outcomes we might expect from engaging formally with music
learning given that only small numbers of people go on to have full-time careers as musicians[2]. Well traditionally,
arguments for the benefits of including music education in schools fall into two categories: 1) intrinsic benefits, which are
more directly related to the music skills you gain, such as learning to play an instrument, creativity, imagination and
exposure to arts culture and history; and 2) extrinsic benefits, which are considered to be non-musical outcomes such as
improved learning and academic achievement, as well as psychosocial benefits such as improved well-being and
connectedness.
Most of the research in music psychology has focussed on the second category; the extrinsic benefits. I’m going to explore
these with you in some more detail, starting with academic achievement and cognitive development.
Chapter 2: Extrinsic benefits to academic achievement and cognitive
development
The fascination with music education being generally good for our learning has been around since the time of Plato, with
this famous quote attributed to him: “I would teach children music, physics and philosophy. But music most of all, for in
the patterns of music are the keys to all learning.” Fast forwarding to modern times, the development of Functional
Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI, in the 1990s gave researchers an opportunity to see if Plato’s romantic vision of
music education was actually true. The first wave of research examined whether there were any differences between the
brains of adult instrumental musicians compared to matched non-musician controls. And indeed, Gottfried Schlaug and
his team in 2005[3] found that there were structural and functional differences in the musicians’ brains, but they could not
say for sure whether these differences were the result of nature (their brains were different to start with, and that’s what
lead them to learn music) or nurture (their experiences with music lead to the differences in their brains). Many of the
studies in the late 1990’s and early 2000s had similar difficulty sorting out causation from correlation.
An influential researcher in this field, Glen Schellenberg, conducted what many people consider to be the first and most
well-controlled study that attempted to determine whether music education led to cognitive advantages in primary school
aged children. He randomly assigned 144 6-year-old, children to either music lessons, drama lessons, or no arts lessons.
He found that the children who participated in the music lessons had a small but significant increase in their IQ score
compared to their peers who received drama lessons or no arts lessons[4].
Schellenberg’s study, while exciting, measured only a general improvement in IQ. And so, follow up research around the
world has attempted to learn more about which specific domains of cognition might be impacted the most by music
education. These research areas have included long and short-term memory, verbal memory, language development,
visuo-spatial skills, and executive functioning skills such as planning, strategising, setting goals, and paying attention to
detail. However, designing ethical and rigorous research in this field is challenging. So you will find a variety of studies
with small to moderate numbers of participants, with some showing positive results, and others showing inconclusive or
no results. Anita Collins[5] conducted a synthesis (or meta analysis) of the most rigorous research and concludes that we
can expect positive changes in brain structure in people who have had high quality, weekly one-to-one instrumental
lessons for more than 2 years and who commenced learning as early as is appropriate for their instrument.
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Chapter 3: classroom-based music education
These meta analyses studies highlight the benefits of intensive, individual music lessons. Prof Susan Hallam’s research
reveals that there are general learning benefits that come from the prolonged effort involved in practicing an instrument
to mastery level[6]. However, in countries like Australia, one-to-one music lessons are typically provided outside of class
time and are an extra-curricular expense that not everyone can afford. So this now becomes an equity issue, because we
know that Independent schools with more resources are much more likely to offer a high-quality music curriculum
compared to government schools[1].
Given the expense involved in providing private music lessons to every child, another important question is whether there
are any benefits to classroom music? By classroom music, I mean group-based, mandatory classes, such as the whole
class learning to play an instrument like the recorder/keyboard/guitar, or sing in a choir. Researchers from the
Netherlands[7] investigated the impact of classroom music on students’ executive functioning skills since these abilities
play an important role in academic achievement. An improvement in executive functioning is what we call a far-transfer
effect, because music classes are about learning to play music, not about learning attention skills. With 147 children
participating for 2.5 years, this is a good-sized intensive study. The results showed that children receiving classroom
music scored significantly better in the domains of inhibition, planning and verbal intelligence. Therefore, this study makes
a powerful argument for including mandatory and intensive classroom-based music education within the school
curriculum.
Chapter 4: Extrinsic benefits to students’ psychosocial wellbeing
Let’s move on now to the other aspect of extrinsic benefits for music education; improvements to student’s psychosocial
wellbeing. This is an important topic, because we know that students who are more engaged in school and connected to
their peers are more likely to continue their education. There are many reasons why students might be at-risk of
disengaging from school, such as environmental issues, learning difficulties, and mental health problems. Therefore, the
research has focused on finding ways to mitigate the risks of young people’s disengagement in school. We know that
structured school activities can facilitate students’ sense of belonging through providing opportunities for teamwork and
cooperation. Having a sense of belonging seems to be most important, and some students have described that their main
reason for staying in school was due to their involvement in arts programs[8]. A case study from a school in Spain describes
how the senior students were highly motivated to attend the music class despite being disinterested in their other academic
classes. These students worked diligently to be included in the school’s highly valued musical culture, and this became
their main drive to finish their schooling [9].
Schools with a positive music education culture are also likely to support student to develop pro-social behaviours, such
as acting in a way that shows a concern for the rights, feelings, and welfare of other people. One study investigated a
classroom ukulele program where the teacher emphasised listening to others and problem solving together. By the end
of 12 months, there was a significant improvement in sympathy, helping, sharing and cooperating behaviours in those
children who had poor pro-social skills at the start of the program[10]. It’s interesting to think about why this would be the
case in a music class compared to any other school lesson where students might be encouraged to help each other. The
researchers propose that music lessons taught in groups also offer a social context for the development of synchrony; the
temporal coordination of biological events, social behaviours, or emotional states that are essential for social bonding.
Music is an ideal medium for promoting synchrony because it provides an external rhythmic framework that facilitates
coordination among individuals. This is a fascinating research area, and there is still so much more to explore.
Looking across the research, there is now good evidence to show that children who study instrumental music have
changes in their brain structure, particularly in motor and auditory areas. They are also likely to have benefits to their IQ,
verbal memory, planning skills and prosocial behaviour. Alongside this, I’d also like you to consider the intrinsic benefits
of music, and I agree with Glen Schellenberg[11] who reminds us that we can and should advocate for music in schools on
its own terms, rather than only because music is likely to benefit other areas of learning. Just like we don’t justify studying
mathematics because it will improve your IQ, we should also value arts education because music and the arts are a
fundamental part of what makes us human.
References
1. Music Trust Australia report: http://musictrust.com.au/music-education/research/some-interesting-musiceducation-research-outcomes/#_ftn4
2. Australian Bureau of statistics (2014). 4172.0 - Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview.
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4172.0main+features262014
3. Schlaug,G., Norton, A., Overy, K., & Winner, E. (2005). Effects of Music Training on the Child’s Brain and
Cognitive Development. Annals New York Academy of Sciences, 1060, 219-230. doi: 10.1196/annals.1360.015
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4. Schellenberg, G. (2004). Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychological Science, 15(8), 511-514. doi:
10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00711.x online: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/15/8/511
5. Collins, A. (2014). Music education and the brain: What does it take to make a change?. Update: Applications of
Research in Music Education, 32(2), 4-10.
6. Hallam, S. (2020). Podcast accompanying this module (see LMS).
7. Jaschke, A. C., Honing, H., & Scherder, E. J. (2018). Longitudinal analysis of music education on executive
functions in primary school children. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12, 1-11.
8. Catterall, J. S., Chapleau, R., & Iwanaga, J. (1999). Involvement in the arts and human development: General
involvement and intensive involvement in music and theater arts. Champions of change: The impact of the arts
on learning, 1, 1-18. Retrieved from
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0b82/1f9743f8e321f283147b5a20ba8dbe0a2f7f.pdf
9. Rusinek, G. (2008). Disaffected learners and school musical culture: an opportunity for inclusion. Research
Studies in Music Education, 30(1), 9-23.
10. Schellenberg, E. G., Corrigall, K. A., Dys, S. P., & Malti, T. (2015) Group music training and children's prosocial
skills. PLoS ONE 10(10): e0141449. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0141449
11. Schellenberg, G. (2013). Podcast: http://upclose.unimelb.edu.au/episode/277-music-and-mind-can-mozartreally-sharpen-your-neural-connections
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Music and cognitive rehabilitation [Video
transcript]
Bower, Janeen. Music and cognitive rehabilitation [Video t ra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne.
Music in cognitive rehabilitation
The fields of music psychology and music neurosciences have rapidly expanded in recent decades, and the research agenda has
centred on understanding how music is processed in the brain. The focus of this talk is the ways this knowledge is applied in practice
with people who have challenges in cognition.
One simple way to understand what cognition is, is the process of thinking. Underpinning this thinking process is a range of functions;
from primitive arousal and awareness, to attention, memory and language, and higher cognitive processes including reasoning and
decision-making. People who have experienced damage to their brain tissue can have interrupted cognitive functioning. Music can
play a unique role in the process of rehabilitation after brain injury, helping to maximise neural plasticity to support recovery and
functioning.
From research into healthy brain models, we know that when listening to music sound enters the ear, passes through the cochlear,
into the thalamus and is then projected to the auditory cortex. Following this, it is processed throughout a complex bilateral network
of cortical and sub-cortical brain regions. As part of this global brain activation, music engages almost all of our cognitive functions.
One group of neuroscientist based in Finland have proposed there are three mechanisms by which music is a successful tool for
cognitive rehabilitation.
The first is that music increases neural activation, stimulates cerebral blood flow and is known to stimulate neural plasticity
The second is that music, particularly preferred music, stimulates the mesolimbic reward centres of the brain
The third is that music is likely to stimulate spared neural networks following damage or loss of brain tissues. That is, because music
is processed globally throughout the brain, some ability to meaningfully process music is likely to remain intact even following brain
injury or illness (Sihvonen et al., 2017).
It is this knowledge about how music works that informs how music can be applied in the rehabilitation of cognitive functions.
Consciousness and attention are two of the many cognitive functions that I have focussed on in my work with people with brain
injuries. So I will discuss these now and finish the talk with a relatively new theory that musical expertise is neuro-protective in brain
health.
Music in the rehabilitation of consciousness
A period of unconsciousness is common following an extremely severe brain injury, or in the later stages of a neurodegenerative
disease. Consciousness is the foundation for all cognition. In neurorehabilitation, consciousness is understood to include arousal,
which is being awake, and awareness, which is the ability to feel, think and perceive sensory information. A person with profound
cognitive damage may not be aware of their surroundings or they may even be in a coma. While the exact neural substrates of
consciousness aren’t currently known, we do know that consciousness is not localised to one brain structure, rather it requires
complex connectivity between cortical and subcortical networks. Also, language function is typically impaired in peopled with
severely disordered consciousness, but the auditory system often remains sensitive. So, music may just be the ideal medium to
stimulate consciousness, because:
-
It is processed globally throughout the brain (as I have already discussed above) which means music may activate the
foundational subcortical structures that project upwards and increase awareness
Music bypasses the need for intact language capabilities
And, patient preferred music that is emotionally salient and has autobiographical relevance is more likely to activate
functional neural responses than unfamiliar music or speech.
While there is only a small amount research supporting the use of music to increase consciousness, the results of these studies are
quite compelling.
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One study conducted at the Royal Hospital for Neuro Disability in London compared the presentation of musical improvisation
entrained to respiration, the live presentation of preferred song, recorded disliked music, white noise and silence. The researchers
found an increase in EEG amplitude in particular bands of brainwaves (alpha and theta) in many of the study participants in response
to the familiar song condition. An increase in EEG amplitude means that there are more neurons firing together causing a greater
electrical response, which means there was a greater cortical response to the familiar song, but not to the other auditory stimuli
(Magee & O'Kelly, 2015; O'Kelly et al., 2013)
Another study undertaken by a research group in France found that after listening to one minute of preferred music compared to
listening to one minute of a control sound condition, participants who had profoundly reduced consciousness were better able to
discriminate their own name. Increased cortical activation was again measured by EEG and this also corresponded with increased
observed behavioural responses (Castro et al., 2015).
Increasing cortical activity is essential in increasing awareness, and in these two studies, preferred music was successful in
stimulating this.
Music in the rehabilitation of attention
Moving on to explore music in the rehabilitation of attention. Attention is the ability to selectively concentrate on a specific target
of incoming sensory information, while ignoring other stimulation present in the environment. It is also the ability to shift this
concentration when required. Attention is a vital cognitive function and without it we wouldn’t be able to think, learn, remember,
or even communicate. Rehabilitation of attention is difficult to target with traditional spoken therapies but music is again an ideal
tool because music has a unique ability to quickly gain and hold attention.
In a study exploring the effect of music on cognition and mood in adult stroke survivors, it was found that those who listened to
preferred music for 1-2 hours a day showed greater improvement in focussed attention, than those who listened to audio books or
who did not have a listening task (Särkämö et al., 2008). The exact neural mechanisms for this improvement aren’t known, however,
the authors hypothesised that it may be because listening to music is an enjoyable activity and induced a positive mood that
increased alertness and ultimately resulted in the improved performance on cognitive tasks. Because the study participants listened
to their favourite music, the music may have stimulated the dopamine pathways in their brain, and increased dopamine directly
increases alertness, processing speed and attention. Interestingly, a follow up MRI-based study found that these stroke survivors
who listened to their favourite music on a daily basis, had neuroplastic changes in their brain in a network of fronto-limbic areas,
areas that are known to be involved in cognitive functions. These are some pretty powerful outcomes, for the very simple act of
listening to music for an hour a day.
Is musical expertise neuro-protective?
In my discussion about music for cognitive rehabilitation thus far, it is important to note that pre-existing musical expertise was not
required for the reported outcomes. But, this raises the questions of what happens when a musician sustains a brain injury? Is their
recovery different? One emerging theory would suggest yes. Playing a musical instrument may be one of the most neurologically
demanding tasks a person can do. And we know that musical training when commenced in early childhood results in neuroplastic
changes. Recently these changes have been found to have far transfer effects, this means there are functional changes observed in
the areas beyond those immediately involved in playing the instrument. These brain changes create a greater chance of spared or
intact function following brain damage. Also, the musical brain is well practiced in recruiting a widespread network of functions to
play an instrument, and this may mean that following brain damage, it is better able to recruit alternative functional pathways to
support recovery and rehabilitation. In this way, musical expertise may be neuro-protective from brain damage or brain
deterioration (Omigie & Samson, 2014). It is never too late to start playing a musical instrument!
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References
Castro, M., Tillmann, B., Luauté, J., Corneyllie, A., Dailler, F., André-Obadia, N., & Perrin, F. (2015). Boosting cognition with music in
patients with disorders of consciousness. Neurorehabilitation & Neural Repair, 29(8), 734-742.
doi:10.1177/1545968314565464
Magee, W., & O'Kelly, J. (2015). Music therapy with disorders of consciousness: current evidence and emergent evidence-based
practice. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1337, 256-262. doi:https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12633
O'Kelly, J., James, L., Palaniappan, R., Fachner, J., Taborin, J., & Magee, W. L. (2013). Neurophysiological and Behavioral Responses
to Music Therapy in Vegetative and Minimally Conscious States. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7(884).
doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00884
Omigie, D., & Samson, S. (2014). A protective effect of musical expertise on cognitive outcome following brain damage?
Neuropsychology Review, 24(4), 445-460. doi:10.1007/s11065-014-9274-5
Särkämö, T., Tervaniemi, M., Laitinen, S., Forsblom, A., Soinila, S., Mikkonen, M., . . . Hietanen, M. (2008). Music listening enhances
cognitive recovery and mood after middle cerebral artery stroke. Brain: A Journal Of Neurology, 131(Pt 3), 866-876.
doi:10.1093/brain/awn013
Sihvonen, A. J., Särkämö, T., Leo, V., Tervaniemi, M., Altenmüller, E., & Soinila, S. (2017). Music-based interventions in neurological
rehabilitation. The Lancet Neurology, 16(8), 648-660. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(17)30168-0
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Performance anxiety
Gill, Anneliese. Performance anxiety [Video t ra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne.
Introduction
Music performance is often described as an uplifting and joyous experience. For the listener, it inspires, gives pleasure,
enhances well-being, and provides an ‘escape’ from the realities of everyday life. For the performer however, the physical
and psychological demands of playing for an audience can induce a range of emotional extremes. Whilst producing one’s
best on stage can be exhilarating, the intense pressure to achieve is often accompanied by debilitating anxiety. This can
impair performance and negatively impact a musician’s health, well-being and career.
MPA: What is it and why does it occur?
Anxiety is a normal response to any perception of threat or danger, whether real or imagined.
Although it feels
uncomfortable it does serve a functional role, acting as a defense mechanism, that protects us, helping us to respond to
danger more effectively, seek safety and take fewer risks. This is clearly useful when we are in physical danger but in
music performance the threat is more of a psychological nature, involving the performer’s self-esteem or ego.
Diana Kenny, a psychology and music professor, and expert in this area, defines music performance anxiety as the
experience of marked and persistent anxious apprehension related to musical performance. It affects musicians of all
ages and may be unrelated to levels of expertise or music accomplishments.
Although estimates vary, some studies have indicated that up to 70% of professional orchestral musicians experience
anxiety levels severe enough to impair musical performance and well-being. Pressure from self, excessive physiological
arousal and inadequate preparation are self-reported as the most common triggers.
This anxiety occurs as a result of complex interactions between characteristics of the performer, music, and performance
setting. High performance-anxious individuals tend to have higher levels of trait (or general) anxiety, introversion,
perfectionism, and lower self-esteem than those who are not so anxious on stage. They are also more self-critical and
think differently about performance situations focusing on the likelihood and consequences of negative evaluation and
outcomes. A recent study of Australian musicians conducted by Kenny, Driscoll and Ackerman concluded that age and
gender are high-risk factors with women and musicians under the age of 30 more likely to develop mental health issues
as a result of debilitating performance anxiety.
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Repertoire that is demanding or technically challenging, under-rehearsed or performed from memory can increase anxious
responding. Anxiety is usually more severe in solo performances, and in situations involving high ego and evaluative
threat such as an audition. Other situational factors that may influence anxiety include audience size, proximity and status.
While a certain degree of performance anxiety is normal, it can qualify as a mental disorder if it becomes significantly
debilitating. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, lists performance anxiety as a subtype of social
anxiety disorder. In social anxiety there is an exaggerated fear of being watched or judged. Although there are
correlations between music performance anxiety and certain aspects of social anxiety, there are some significant
differences between these two conditions.
For instance, musicians are more likely to continue performing, despite their anxiety. In contrast, individuals with social
anxiety tend to avoid the feared social events or interactions. With social anxiety the feared task is not usually cognitively
or physically demanding and does not require hours of practice to master and perform. Instrumental mastery, on the other
hand is one of the most complex of all human accomplishments requiring intricate sensorimotor skills that have been
honed over more than 10,000 hours of practice.
In parts of a Liszt Paganini Etude, for example, a concert pianist is required to bimanually coordinate 1800 notes per
minute, that’s the equivalent of 30 notes per second!
Anxious musicians are therefore more likely to be concerned about their ability to perform the task, rather than others’
perceptions of their performance.
MPA Symptoms
Music performance anxiety manifests through a combination of cognitive, somatic, and behavioural symptoms. If you
have ever had to give a presentation, sat for an exam, or played competitive sport then you can probably relate to many
of these symptoms.
Cognitive symptoms include negative self-statements, worrying, and perceptions of threat and danger whilst behavioural
manifestations include both physical reactions such as trembling and pacing and avoidance of practicing and performing.
The somatic component involves the performer’s interpretation of their physiological response. Increases in heart rate,
muscle tension and altered breathing are non-specific. Thus, they can be associated with challenging tasks, anger,
excitement, pleasurable events or anxiety depending upon how the performer perceives these symptoms. The fine motor
skills involved in musical execution can make musicians more susceptible to a state of hyper-vigilance or heightened
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sensitivity to these physiological changes, resulting in unpleasant and distracting sensations that can adversely affect
instrumental performance.
Nevertheless, it is the cognitive component that exerts the greatest influence as it diverts attention away from the task at
hand, or, paradoxically focuses the wrong kind of attention. High cognitive anxiety can result in a preoccupation with taskirrelevant stimuli such as negative self-talk or the audience reactions, distracting the performer and depleting attentional
resources. Self-focus or explicit monitoring occurs when performers try to consciously control and monitor well practised
skills that would otherwise be automatic. Both distraction and self-focus can lead to the dreaded performance choke in
high pressure situations.
MPA Treatment and Music Performance
The most effective treatment for music performance anxiety involves a combination of cognitive and behavioural
techniques.
Traditionally therapeutic efforts have focussed on reducing anxiety but performers do need a certain amount of arousal
or anxiety to optimise their performance. Anxiety has an adaptive function activating mental and physical resources that
can help musicians be extra alert and perform their best, and is actually necessary for experienced performers to achieve
peak performance.
Low levels of arousal are associated with sub-optimal mental and physical activation potentially resulting in sub-par
performances.
The relationship between anxiety and performance, however, is complex as optimum levels will differ for each performer
and will be moderated by a number of factors. Thus, interventions aimed solely at reducing anxiety will not necessarily
improve performance outcomes.
Recently therapeutic efforts have adopted a performance-enhancement approach, where the goal is to help performers
reach their potential and optimise performance rather than alleviate distress. This is modelled on performance psychology
techniques drawn from the sports domain and may or may not involve a reduction in anxiety as there are a number of
psychological factors that contribute to high-level performances.
Dr Margaret Osborne, a performance psychologist at Melbourne University actually conducted one of the first music
studies investigating this approach demonstrating significant improvements in key psychological performance skills in
students from the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.
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Preliminary investigations using acceptance and commitment therapy by David Juncos, a clinical psychologist, also
appear to be promising. This approach promotes mindfulness and acceptance of one’s emotional distress rather than
mastery or control of symptoms. The aim is to increase psychological flexibility by encouraging individuals to stay present
with their anxiety and to become increasingly comfortable with their experience of discomfort whilst performing. Although
a reduction in MPA is not an explicit goal, this approach can lead to symptom reduction.
Music performance anxiety is clearly a complex phenomenon. Whilst great strides have been made in understanding this
condition and developing effective management methods it still remains one of the most significant problems faced by
musicians. Ironically, due to performance anxiety, the last people to receive benefit from the therapeutic value of music
may actually be musicians themselves.
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Musical Beginnings: Music in the prenatal and
postnatal phases [Video transcript]
McLean, Elizabeth. Musical Beginnings: Music in the prenatal and postnatal phases [Video transcript].
Chapter 1: Babies as musical beings
We know that babies are responsive to and interested in music. Most of you will have come across countless cute baby
videos on the web, or perhaps experienced first-hand, a very young baby’s behavioural and physiological response of
rhythmic bobbing or smiling or crying when listening to a song or musical track. So, you might be interested to know how
and what happens in this critical period of early fetal development that supports emerging early musicality in the infant?
Chapter 2: Auditory development and processing before birth
So, when I refer to the prenatal period, that refers to the baby’s life beginning from conception and continuing all the way
through a pregnancy across the three trimesters until the birth of the baby. The postnatal period falls after birth.
Many researchers have been able to characterise the very early development of a fetus’s auditory system across the
prenatal period and the many variables that influence this vital perception of the fetus. The anatomical or structural parts
of the auditory system develop early, with the structural parts of the cochlea in the middle ear well formed by 15 weeks
gestational age. By 25 weeks’ gestation, the auditory system has started to function (Graven & Browne, 2008). Research
shows us that the fetus can now respond with a blink and startle response to sounds, which becomes consistent from 28
weeks’ gestation. And a little later, around 30 weeks, a reliably consistent heart rate response to external sounds can be
detected. Barbara Kisilevsky and colleagues (2009) conducted research that relied on behavioural responses and found
evidence of fetal attention, memory and learning of the mother’s voice as well as their own native language preferences
in utero. This suggests that language and speech abilities have their origins before birth.
So, what does a fetus hear in utero? They are exposed to a cacophony of sounds that come from inside the body and
from the outside world, many of which can be considered ‘musical’ in nature. Some internally generated sounds include
the continuous rhythm of the maternal heartbeat; the whooshing sound of the amniotic fluid and the most prominent
uterine sound for fetus, the maternal voice (Lasky & Williams, 2005). These are all low frequency sounds. Sounds from
the environment outside the womb include music (particularly lower pitched sounds within a piece of music) and loud
noises from the environment, for example, a lawn mower or loud truck.
Research suggests that rhythmic, tonal, and pitch characteristics of maternal speech can be heard by the fetus in utero
(Spence & DeCasper, 1987; Moon, Lagercrantz, & Kuhl, 2013) and that this assists in a newborn’s ability to discriminate
between the sound of their mother’s voice compared to other voices. A study in 2011 found that fetuses exposed to a
consistent melody during the last trimester of pregnancy, showed significant increases in their heart rate response when
presented with the same melodic segment at 6 weeks of age- post birth which indicated a memory of this melody (GranierDeferre, Bassereau, Ribeiro, Jacquet, DeCasper, 2011). So musical perception and emerging musical learning is
happening prior to birth and we can see that it affects behaviours post birth!
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Chapter 3: Musical behaviour in infancy
Over the last 25 or so years, a large amount of infant research has documented how a baby processes complex sounds
and musical elements, highlighting a baby’s ability to musically reciprocate and respond musically to their social partners.
There have been two lines of inquiry here. Firsty, focused on the infant as an individual. So, in laboratory-based
experiments, researchers have looked at what a baby can perceive and distinguish when musical stimuli are presented
in a controlled manner. These studies have mostly been with infants 3 months and older to ensure they can behaviorally
respond to the stimuli presented and then orienting preference responses are tracked. For example, infants can recognize
a melody when its pitch level is shifted upwards and downwards (Trehub, 2001), infants prefer consonant intervals over
dissonant intervals (Trainor, Tsang, & Cheung, 2002) and can also detect changes to rhythmic meter within musical
segments presented (Bergeson & Trehub, 2002).
The other line of research is focused on the infant interacting with a social partner, in most cases their Mum or Dad. This
research has examined the intimate social interactions that lead an infant and caregiver to express themselves musically
together through natural parent- infant play from birth onwards. Studies have found that infants attempt to syncronise or
match their expressions to another person through their body movements, vocalizations, facial expressions and emotional
state (Trevarthen & Malloch, 2002).
Building on this evidence, Stephen Malloch & Colwyn Trevarthen’s (2010) ‘communicative musicality’ theory has paved a
way forward in understanding that early musicality is something that an infant shares with a musical companion.
When engaging in musical play with a baby, we know that adults use a very musical, sing- song way of using their voice.
This is referred to as ‘infant directed ‘speech or singing and involves exaggerated pitch contours, rhythmicity and
repetitiveness that gives it a musical flavour so to speak. [Infant-directed, sing song voice] If I was to speak to you ALL
now in an infant directed WAY, adult to adult, I would sound rather strange!
Babies prefer this musical way of communicating over normal adult speech and prefer infant-directed singing over infantdirected speech. We also know that singing acts as a universal way of regulating infant state by a caregiver (Trehub,
2015), such as the cross- cultural tradition of lullabies to settle a baby to sleep. An interesting study by Fernald (1989)
many years ago now, highlighted the obvious audible change in a parent’s voice to communicate with their baby through
the intentional use of intonation or the ‘rise and fall’ of their speech compared to adult directed speech. This was
specifically through the parent’s use of melody, phrasing and the timbre of their speech.
Chapter 4: Applications of music for compromised infants in hospital
I’m a Registered Music Therapist, with clinical and research experience working with hospitalised, high-risk and premature
infants and their families in a neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU. Hospitalised infants are faced with multiple stressors
and challenges to their early neurodevelopment and overall wellbeing, with an obvious disruption to their exposure to an
optimal auditory environment. Amir Lahav and Erika Skoe (2014) have described an “acoustic gap between the NICU and
womb”, illuminating the deprivation of many hospitalised infants to the critical role of parental speech and linguistic stimuli,
and highlighting their over-exposure to aversive high frequency sounds, associated with negative effects on a baby’s
respiratory, cardiovascular and behavioral systems. Longer term effects of aversive noise exposure for a preterm infants’
later language, speech and learning development is well documented also (Wachman & Lahav, 2011). A recent systematic
review by Livio Provenzi and colleagues (2018) of the effects of maternal voice exposure on preterm infants suggests
maternal voice exposure can support infant feeding and cognitive and neurobehavioral development.
My PhD explored the role of music therapy on parents’ emerging parental identity and specifically, their early musical
engagement with their preterm baby in the NICU (McLean, 2018). My research and practice highlight the importance of
empowering parents in their ‘musical’ role as caregiver by offering support and education about the pivotal role of using
parents’ own voice to connect, engage, stimulate and soothe their baby. As a music therapist in this unique setting, I am
also collaborating with families to support them to interpret and respond to their baby’s sounds during musical moments
together, fostering shared musical intimacy between parents and their baby to support the critical parent-infant relationship
(Haslbeck, 2014; McLean, Skewes McFerran & Thompson, 2019).
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References
Bergeson, T. R., & Trehub, S. E. (2002). Absolute Pitch and Tempo in Mothers’ Songs to Infants. Psychological
Science, 13(1), 72–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00413
DeCasper, A. J., & Fifer, W. P. (1980). Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers' voices. Science, 208(4448),
1174–1176. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7375928
Fernald, A. (1989). Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers' Speech to Infants: Is the Melody the Message? Child
Development, 60(6), 1497-1510. doi:10.2307/1130938
Granier-Deferre, C., Bassereau, S., Ribeiro, A., Jacquet, A.Y., DeCasper, A.J. (2011) A Melodic Contour Repeatedly
Experienced by Human Near-Term Fetuses Elicits a Profound Cardiac Reaction One Month after Birth. PLOS ONE
6(2): e17304. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0017304
Graven, S. N, & Browne, J. V. (2008). Auditory Development in the Fetus and Infant. Newborn and Infant Nursing Reviews,
8 (4), 187-193. https://doi.org/10.1053/j.nainr.2008.10.010
Haslbeck, F. B. (2014). The interactive potential of creative music therapy with premature infants and their parents: A
qualitative analysis. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 23 (1), 36-70. doi:10.1080/08098131.2013.790918
Kisilevsky, B. S., Hains, S. M. J., Brown, C. A., Lee, C. T., Cowperthwaite, B., Stutzman, S. S., …, Wang, Z. (2009). Fetal
sensitivity to properties of maternal speech and language. Infant Behavior and Development, 32, 59–71.
Lasky, R.E, & Williams, A.L. (2005). The Development of the Auditory System from Conception to Term. NeoReviews,
6 (3), 141-152. https://doi.org/10.1542/neo.6-3-e141
Lahav, A. & Skoe, E. (2014) An acoustic gap between the NICU and womb: A potential risk for compromised
neuroplasticity of the auditory system in preterm infants. Front. Neurosci., 8, p.381
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2014.00381
Malloch, S., & Trevarthen, C. (2010). Communicative musicality: exploring the basis of human companionship. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, Inc.
McLean, E. (2018). An emergent exploration into the musical beginnings of parental identity across the neonatal journey
(Doctoral thesis). Retrieved from Minerva Access (http://hdl.handle.net/11343/214438).
McLean, E., Skewes McFerran, K., & Thompson, G. (2019). Parents’ musical engagement with their baby in the
neonatal unit to support emerging parental identity: A grounded theory study. Journal of Neonatal Nursing, 25 (2), 7885. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnn.2018.09.005
Moon, C., Lagercrantz, H., & Kuhl, P. K. (2013). Language Experienced in Utero Affects Vowel Perception after Birth: A
Two-Country Study. Acta Paediatrica, 102, 156-160.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/apa.12098
Provenzi, L., Broso,S., & Montirosso, R. (2018) Do mothers sound good? A systematic review of the effects of maternal
voice exposure on preterm infants' development, 88. 42-50. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.03.009
Trainor, L. J., Tsang, C. D., & Cheung, V. H. W. (2002). Preference for sensory consonance in 2- and 4-month-old
infants. Music Perception, 20(2), 187–194. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2002.20.2.187
Trehub, S. E. (2001). Musical predispositions in infancy. Annals Of The New York Academy Of Sciences, 930, 1-16.
Trehub, S. E, Ghazban, N., Corbeil, M. (2015) Musical affect regulation in infancy. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences.1337, 186-92. http://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12622
Trevarthen, C., & Malloch, S. (2002). Musicality and music before three: human vitality and invention shared with pride.
Zero to Three, 23(1), 10-18.
Wachman, E. M & Lahav, A. (2011). The effects of noise on preterm infants in the NICU. Archives of Disease in Childhood
-Fetal and Neonatal Edition, 96, 305-309.
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Music and adolescents [Video transcript]
McFerran, Katrina. Music and adolescents [Video transcript]. University of Melbourne.
Chapter 1: Music consumption
The relationship between young people and their music is powerful. At no time in life are people more committed to music
than during their teenage years. This was established in the field of Music Psychology many decades ago, with authors
collecting data that confirmed teenagers listened to music 2.5 hours per day even in the year 2000 (1), before anybody
had a phone with all their music on it. At that time, there was a maximum of 60 minutes of listening that you could do on
any mode. So duration was much shorter and portability was always an issue that impacted how many hours a day you
could actually access your music. The development of technologies that allow us all to access music on portable devices
has been a revolution to music listeners and by 2010, researchers were beginning to document more like seven hours a
day spent listening to music, but included multi-tasking with other media, such as gaming (2). Statistics continue to suggest
that young people listen to about 25 hours a week as a reasonable estimate. This quantity of consumption reflects my
initial statement, that music is important in young people’s lives, but what is even more interesting to consider is why.
Chapter 2: Adolescence and music
I just want to clarify now, what my focus is on this particular age group. The term ‘adolescence’ has a reasonably short
history as an independent stage of development, and it was only in the 1960s that a teenage market for popular music
was distinguished from other young adults, those over the age of 18. In fact, the very construct of a youth market for
popular music that was different to other adults only began in the post-WW2 era, where music was a primary agent in
creating a new economic and social demographic group, working in tandem with the movies. It’s also important to realise
that late adolescence / early adulthood is the critical period for music preferences to become fixed – not strictly for music
that is popular during these years of your life, but whatever music you become aware of during this time is likely to continue
to be important to you for decades to come (3).
Chapter 3: Types of music
One of the fascinations of adults investigating young people’s music has been the type or style or genre of music that
youth enjoy. This is partly because the teenage market has been designed to distinguish itself from the tastes of older
adults, starting with Elvis Presley’s provocatively gyrating hips in the 1950s right through to Hip Hop culture in our times.
The ways that people have classified the potential categories of music has varied over time, and whenever you are
considering music psychology studies that group music into types, it is worth remembering that. Because ‘musical
categories can be understood as both a marketing strategy devised by the recording industry as well as a more or less
accurate reflection of consumer taste’ (4). What music psychologists tends to do is categorise people based on the types
of music that they describe having an affinity with. This can be fairly stereotypical, such as Metal Heads and Pop Fans,
or it can be more creative, such as the study conducted by Julian Tanner and colleagues based on the responses of 3,393
students in Toronto, Canada – which is one of the largest and most multicultural cities in the world (5). They created a
list of music fans than included Club Kids, Black Stylists, Hard Rockers, New Traditionalists, Ethnic Culturalists, and
importantly, abstainers – a category for those who had minimal interest in music (believe it or not!), as well as Musical
Omnivores. Tanner describes how the idea of musical omnivores was created initially by Richard Peterson to identify
those who declare their cultural superiority by the breadth, rather than the narrowness, of their musical interests. In
Tanner’s study, this group of young people like all musical genres – pop, classical and Rap music – with the solitary
exception (and only just) of country music. As with most music psychology studies, the purpose of the investigation wasn’t
just to work out what music people like, but also, what other characteristics are associated with people who like that type
of music. For example, Tanner’s Musical Omnivores could be characterised as participating in a reasonably high number
of peer leisure activities (although tellingly, nothing seriously illegal); they were often at the older end of the age spectrum;
were neither particularly good students, nor especially ambitious ones, including a high number of young people from
Asian backgrounds. In the main, they were considered to be more Bohemians than scholars, who were usually in
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possession of good amount of cultural capital but did not feel under any significant pressure to do anything with it. This
grouping contrasts with the Club Kids who liked preferred techno and dance, mainstream pop, and hip-hop and rap, and
who were more likely to skip school, unlikely to be ‘A’ students, spent more time involved in peer leisure activities that
were particularly hedonistic, and were usually younger teens, with mainly white backgrounds.
As you can hear, most of the music psychology literature about adolescents focuses on music listening rather than music
making. In fact, there is quite a lot of music psychology literature that focuses on the correlations between listening to
certainly types of music and negative mental health outcomes, a topic we explore a lot more in our partner subject, Music
and Health. For example, some researchers have targeted specific genres, such as metal music, and then designed
studies to see what scores metal fans get on a range of other measures. Sometimes these studies are extremely biased
– for example, Steven Stack who used heavy metal magazine subscriptions as one variable that he compared to data
contained on the annual Mortality Detail Files in one state of American, and then interpreted the results to conclude that
‘The greater the strength of heavy metal subculture, the greater the youth suicide rate’ (6)! Although I find that kind of
research biased, he has been cited more than 8,000 times for his research in this area.
Chapter 4: Music and adolescent wellbeing
Correlations are a very loose way to draw conclusions about people, and it is not good science to leap from a correlation
to suggesting a causation – but it is quite easy to do when you read the literature in this space. My own research has
been much more focused on how young people use music as a resource in their lives. Even so, there has been a tendency
for young people to describe how they rely on music to make them feel better during difficult times, even when it does
appear to be making them feel, at least temporarily, worse (7). What I have discovered is that many factors influence how
young people use music in helpful and unhelpful ways, and that it is difficult, but not impossible to generalise. No matter
how you look at it, music listening has not been proven to have a causative influence on adolescents’ wellbeing. It tends
to reflect more about the young person, than making them become something that they weren’t already. But that
relationship between teenagers and music is very powerful, and never more powerful again, in the rest of our lives. So if
that’s you, enjoy your time with music, and make sure that it’s working for you.
References
1.
North AC, Hargreaves, D.J. & O'Neill, S.A. The importance of music to adolescents. British Journal of Educational
Psychology. 2000;70(Pt 2):255-72.
2.
Rideout VJ, Foehr UG, Roberts DF. Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds. Henry J. Kaiser
Family Foundation; 2010.
3.
North AC, Hargreaves DJ. The social and applied psychology of music. New York: Oxford University Press; 2008.
4.
Frith S. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Contemporary Sociology.
1999;28(5):579.
5.
Tanner, J., Asbridge, M., & Wortley, S. (2008). Our favourite melodies: musical consumption and teenage
lifestyles. British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 117–144.
6.
Stack, S., Gundlach, J., & Reeves, J. L. (1994). The heavy metal subculture and suicide. Suicide and LifeThreatening Behavior, 24(1), 15–23.
7.
McFerran KS, Saarikallio S. Depending on music to make me feel better: Who is responsible for the ways young
people appropriate music for health benefits. The Arts in Psychotherapy. 2013;41(1):89-97.
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Music and adolescents interview podcast [Audio
transcript]
McFerran, Kat and S a a ri k a l l i o, Suvi (2 019). Music and a do l e s ce n t s [Au d i o t ra n s c ri p t]. University of
Jyvaskyla / University of M e l b o u rn e .
Interviewer:
Hi Suvi Saarikallio, welcome. It's really exciting to have you here and especially talking about the
topic today, which is really focused on music and adolescents.
Interviewee:
Thank you Kat. It's such a pleasure to be here and it's my favorite topic of course. Brilliant [cross
talk 00:18].
Interviewer:
It is your favorite topic and it's worth noting that your article that came out of your PhD where you
really systematically investigated the literature about music in adolescents is one of the most
highly cited articles in this space. I thought we might just start with going right back to whatever
year that was. When did you do your PhD?
Interviewee:
I graduated in 2007, so that article actually is dated on the same year and yeah, it was a very
novel topic at the time to combine music, adolescents from a psychology perspective. These
mood regulation uses of music hadn't been very systematically studied.
We had acknowledged that yes, music is used for mood regulation, but how in particular? That
hadn't been elaborated at that point. I guess that's why it became so cited because it was kind of
pioneering during that time.
Interviewer:
Yeah. It was pioneering. Sometimes I think the greatest discoveries in research look quite simple.
I think that that there was a beautiful diagram as a part of that article where you just said, "Hey,
there's a lot of different ways that teenagers use music in their lives. It's around mood and it's
around identity and it's around connectedness." How did you come up with that, given that there
wasn't a lot of writing at that time? Why did you choose those ideas?
Interviewee:
Well, I am actually trained as a music teacher by my background, and I was always fascinated
about the understanding that why do we want to teach the subject to these young people, and it
seems that it's important to them? I want to understand why is it important to them then, so I
would somehow be better able to relate to what it means in their lives. That's where it all started
my interest to try to understand the adolescent's own perspective of why might it be?
Interviewer:
That's such a good point, because you and I have gone on to talk about the way that teenagers
use music, but actually that's right. It was about the functions of music at that time, and it was
why is it important? Either fast forwarding to now, or reflecting on what you learned from your
PhD then, why is music important to teenagers? Where have you come to with that?
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Interviewee:
I think it's a twofold thing that music is so easily available, and so acceptable tool in a way – such
easily everywhere, and yet it touches upon very fundamentally important functions. It affords a
lot of issues that really relate to very, very fundamental aspects of adolescent development, of
identity, emotions, peer group development or all that. It provides a possibility for very
fundamental things, but in a very easily approachable way.
Interviewer:
Yeah, it is. It's the access, which has changed incredibly since you first did your research. What
I remember really striking me from those initial moments is that, you spoke to and you
interviewed, I think it was eight Finnish adolescents, and you ask them like, "Really tell me about
what's important." They started to describe the ways that they used it, but they used it without
thinking.
Interviewee:
Yes, very much so. It seemed that they had like a, a strong feeling that this is the kind of music
that I need now. They never went into contemplating of why would I need it? They were just—
they got that gut feeling that I need this music now, and it seemed to work for them.
Actually, now coming back to what we're studying right now, it seems that it still is the case that
when we compare adolescents and then young adults, the young adults are much more already
aware of the kind of strategies that they are using music for. Their reasons for music listening
actually are much more correlated with the effective outcomes in their daily life.
If they say that I use music for energy boosting, actually when we measure their daily
experiences, their mood rises. Whereas for adolescents it's not that straightforwardly linked. They
still seem to—there's no difference. In both age groups music improves mood equally much in a
way, but for adolescents they still seem to do it in a more intuitive way. They're not specifying the
actual strategy so much.
Interviewer:
That's so interesting, and indeed we've done a number of studies that show that they're not only
unaware, but sometimes what they think music is doing is different to what it's doing. Do you think
that might be, because for teenagers their emerging identity is such a dominant part of their lives?
If they're lucky enough to be able to just focus on natural developmental processes that, that
relationship between music and identity might be even more outstanding rather than the kind of,
how am I gonna use music to manage my mood, to regulate myself, to get through this boring
public transport moment. Although we all do that, but I don't know about identity maybe.
Interviewee:
Yeah, I think you've got something there, 'cause for a young person, I think music is more like,
it's my music, it's my music and it's not my tool of regulating myself into a certain mode. It's not
that very systematic—
Interviewer:
Functional, yeah.
Interviewee:
- function. Separate functional entity that I use to make myself something, but now it's more like,
me and my music. You want to fill your life with those kinds of music that resonate with whatever
you were going through and who you are. It's much more holistic thing in a way that… that very
mechanistic tool to use it for something.
Interviewer:
Well, when I think about the studies that have been done, there's kind of two different ways, and
you might say that its music psychology looks one way and music sociology looks another way,
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but maybe that's too simple. There is that sense that people are performing their identity with
their music on the one hand.
Then in music psychology, there's that tendency to look at, well, if I'm this kind of person, I like
this kind of music. What does that correlate with? If I like metal music, what does it go with? I
don't know. Do you feel like in music psychology that's a particular interest that people have?
Interviewee:
I think there's a lot of always in psychology—there is a lot of interest in understanding individual
differences on any behavior. There's research into how personality for instance impacts our music
engagement patterns, or how we are impacted by music. We know for instance that if you are an
extrovert then you hear in the music—whatever the music is, you hear more positive shades,
than if you're not an extrovert.
Or if you're an empathic person, you tend to be more emotionally influenced by
of the music that
you listen to. There are these differences that we can identify in a very general scale, but then
again, those are of course, huge generalizations always. Of course, it's much more in individual
in the end, but at least there are some of these findings about how certain personality tendencies
might be visible in the way we are impacted by music.
Interviewer:
Yeah. I think this is the perfect time to talk about that. I'm often critical of universal statements
about people, but music psychology has contributed some really interesting findings. I remember
back in the early days it used to be about, that the instrument that you chose to play actually
could be correlated with particular personality types, and that seems kind of relevant too in terms
of emerging adolescent identities. I don’t know. What do you think of that research?
Interviewee:
Yeah, I think it's interesting to observe these general patterns of how we behave, and how well
tendencies might guide us to certain types of behaviors. There's always this—you have to look it
through a lens of, a little bit critical lens, that these are always generalizations and they are—the
effect sizes are usually relatively small. So it's not like that if you are a bit more extroverted than
I, then you definitely will like pop music more than I do, and I would like more of a metal. It's not
that straightforward that it would direct your behavior, but there are these patterns, and it's
interesting to understand the big picture that – what are all the potential individual variables that
might explain why we choose to behave in a certain way.
Interviewer:
Yeah. I'm really conscious that at the moment you are a leader in our field who is really trying to
pull apart, to tease apart all of the various influences that might be at play. I really appreciate that
you're not simplifying that, despite the fact that it's so fun when you read those studies. It's like,
"Oh wow, so there's a relationship between extroversion and pop music. That's amazing." Then
you meet somebody the next day, and they're an extrovert and they don't like pop music at all,
and it's that kind of conflict, isn't it?
Interviewee:
Yeah.
Interviewer:
Let's play with another massive generalization. We were talking earlier about the difference
between perhaps Finnish adolescents and Australian adolescents, and we won’t go into a big
debate about what is an Australian adolescent, which is a much-contested notion. But for now,
what do you notice internationally? Is there differences, in your opinion?
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Interviewee:
I'm sure there are some differences, but there is very, very little systematic comparative research
comparing cross-culturally, the music engagement patterns, or musical experiences. We ran a
study with an Indian colleague of mine Vinoo Alluri, and we are now looking at the data and
seeing that yes, for both young people in Finland and in India, music important for quite the same
reasons. It's a mood management tool. It provides connectedness. Some self-reflection, but there
are some differences too. For the Indians it was more important. They emphasize more, they
state music keeps you in a good mood, and helps you to manage your mood.
Whereas for Finns, they also appreciate it, sometimes feeling a bit low if it provided sort of selfreflective insight onto their difficult experiences, and how they then found empowerment through
getting through those difficult times. They wanted to reflect more and dwell a bit and then get
some insight and empowerment through that.
There was a little bit of a difference in what people emphasized in their important music
experiences. I think there definitely are some, but then again, huge generalizations again. I think
it would be something we should look a bit more in the future just to be grounded in contexts that
we apply our findings to. Because if I do a study with Finns, I would like to be a bit more
knowledgeable about how it is in the other parts of the world so that I don't just go, and say that
this is an adolescent in every part of the world who is gonna behave like this.
Interviewer:
Yeah. It's such a huge piece that I started thinking immediately about Freud and the
generalizations that Freud made out of a particular Austrian culture at a moment in time. The way
that even though there were truths in what he discovered, it was making them so universal that
probably may have been his undoing, but that is probably a little bit of a sidetrack.
Getting back to music and adolescents in our world right now, I wonder about—not just individual
identity and the ways that people say, "Hey, this is what I'm listening to," but also then that
connection to their peers, and whether or not music does play an important role in the way that
people connect to one another.
Interviewee:
Yeah, I think it's crucial. Especially in that time of your life when your most important relationships
go through a transition. You are no longer just the child of some family, but you are a peer in your
peer group. Music of course, symbolizes that kind of peer relation so fundamentally, and now
with the new technology, it's so easy to just share your favorite playlists, and it's a new form of
connecting through the new technology. It's really a very, very good tool [unintelligible 14:13]
when I use that word for also connecting with the peer groups.
Interviewer:
Yeah. Which makes me remember in the book that we just had edited, the Handbook of Music,
Adolescence, and Wellbeing, we did have a whole set of chapters which are about online
communities as well as face to face communities and the ways that so many more possibilities
exist. Now to feel connected to people beyond the people that you happen to meet at university,
or at school, and how music can be such a meaningful point of connection.
Interviewee:
Yeah. In this modern world, you can feel connected to people all over the globe just, because
you like the same band, or something. It's very—in a way, a nice global connectedness tool as
well.
Interviewer:
Yeah, and that takes me back to the qualitative analysis that you and I did of the 50 young
Australians talking about the ways that they were using music in their life. How feeling connected
was quite complex in a way, because if you feel connected to people online, but not connected
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in your everyday life, how that can sometimes lead to a sense of being actually unconnected, but
being virtually connected.
Interviewee:
Yeah. It's something that my generation is only trying to sort of understand. It's a new way of
connectedness and how that works. It's also a challenge for us to research, because we've been
grown up in different connectedness in our youth.
Interviewer:
I remember right back to when Simon Frith, is it? Who talks about the badge of identity, how
music is like a badge of identity? When he was constructing that idea that was absolutely about,
you're going to gigs with people, and you are turning up, and you wore the same kind of clothes.
Like, I've got my '80s reference on now, and it's, because that was how you identified you going
to that kind of gig. You're wearing these kinds of clothes, whereas when it's online, there's so
much more anonymity, and yet music transcends all of those problematics that we might have
about the difference. Because when people connect through their music, it does feel real, doesn't
it?
Interviewee:
Yes. That's the beauty of the music that it feels real, and it can allow you to so close to very, very
deep personal experiences, but yet at the same time, it is a—there's always a way out and you
can keep your cool and just say “Ahh it was just a song”. You can easily regulate that, and you
know that from music therapy very much, but it's the same thing with the kids. They can really
put all their heart into the music, or they pour their heart into the music, and then they can still
just save their face and yeah.
Interviewer:
Yeah. I always thought like the worst thing that could possibly happen is if somebody takes your
phone, and then actually looks through what's your most frequently played, which might be quite
different from what you might describe as your most favorite music right now. This is like a
modern-day phenomena.
Interviewee:
Yeah, it's definitely a very, very gentle dynamics there between your private identity, and the one
that you post around.
Interviewer:
Okay. Well thank you so much, Suvi. It's really fantastic just to hear where you're at currently.
Also, just to reflect on the fact that so much great research starts with a PhD and a reasonably
small-scale study. A little systematic literature review, a study of eight Finnish adolescents, and
actually that contributed to an explosion in the music psychology literature around music and
adolescence. I think it's a really amazing honor to be here with you today, and to hear about just
where you're sitting with things at the moment.
Interviewee:
Thank you. I'm so happy. I think that the more you study something, the more, of course you will
realize that there's so much more that I want to understand. I'm so happy that this field is growing
and blooming, and there are so many young researchers who are into this now. It's so wonderful
to see that.
Interviewer:
Thank you so much.
[End of Audio]
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Music and cognition [Audio transcript]
Thompson, Bill and McFerran, Kat. Music and cognition [Podcast t ra n s c ri p t]. Macquarie University / University of
M e l b o u rn e .
Interviewer:
Well, I’m very excited to be here today will Bill Thompson, who is an international expert in music
psychology, with a book soon to be released actually, Bill, on that broad topic. Today, we’re
gonna talk about music in cognition, but it was exciting to be involved in the book that you’ve just
created for secondary school students. Can you just tell us briefly about that to situate you and
your expertise?
Interviewee:
Yeah. Sure. I mean I’ve been very interested in making sure that scientific questions are
understandable to the general public because you find that a lot of science and a lot of research
scholarship and the humanities as well just ends up being understood by very few people, other
scholars, other academics. It’s really important that people understand and are excited by what’s
going on. I wrote a textbook. I edited an encyclopedia of music and the social sciences.
Most recently, this book is called: The Science and Psychology of Music from Beethoven in the
office to Beyoncé in the gym. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually heard Beyoncé in the gym, but
that was the publisher’s suggestion. We went with it. Actually, it used to be from Mozart in the
office to Metallica in the gym, and I thought I really wanted—that seemed a little bit, I don’t know,
white male’ish to me. We decided we wanted something a little bit different, so we suggested this
other title [laughter].
Anyway, this book really goes through a lot of topics. There are 60 topics, but they’re all on things
like music and the self or music and wellbeing, music and the brain, music and beliefs, any topic
that you can think of and there are these short, very understandable chapters by a lot of the
leaders throughout the field internationally, so that’s what that’s about.
Interviewer:
Oh, thank you. In your explanation of that, I really resonate with a number of points that you’re
making about the importance of moving the field away from the focus on these ancient,
conservative traditions and into contemporary discourse. I know that your work with metal music
and other genres of music has been really exciting for me.
Today, what we wanna talk about, which may overlap with that indeed—what we really wanna
focus on is music in cognition. This topic is really interesting for many of us who think about not
just learning, but beyond the brain, the ways that we actually apply knowledge, in a sense, about
how music operates in the brain, but not just structurally the way we understand it. What’s your
understanding of music in cognition? I mean we could very much be coming from the same or
different perspectives when we use that kind of language.
Interviewee:
Yeah. I mean cognition really just means the mind. If we’re just talking about what is it about
music and how it affects us mentally, that’s important. Why do we find it important? What’s
interesting about it? You can answer that on a couple of levels. For me, I was interested in how
music affects us really just for personal reasons, because it’s just something that’s important to
you personally, is something that’s generally important either scientifically or scholarly.
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Our health is important to us and that’s why medicine is an important field and our wellbeing is
important, and that’s why all of the experiences that contribute to our wellbeing are important
areas to study. Music is one of those things. I guess when I think of some of the most memorable
experiences I’ve had in my life, music’s often there. Sometimes it’s in the background, but it’s
often there.
The second reason I think it’s important is because there’s a real mystery about music. It affects
all of us pretty deeply. I mean there are some exceptions, but most of it affects quite profoundly
and it’s a bit puzzling in having such a powerful affect because it’s not like it’s food that we need
to survive. It’s not like it’s air that we absolutely must have to breathe or else we won’t survive.
We don’t really use it to communicate information, so we don’t use music to say, "Can you pass
the butter or pass the tomato sauce?" Some people use these metaphors because they see it as
really important. They say music is food for the soul. It’s as fundamental as the air that we breathe.
It communicates to us in some metaphor, and that’s really strange 'cause it’s just a sequence of
sounds.
I think the great mystery of music makes it a really important field, something that we wanna
study and on a personal level as well because it’s important to us personally.
Interviewer:
Okay, so that really makes sense and I’m sure loads of our students will also agree that these
moments of significance in our life are often accompanied by musical backgrounds or
foregrounds. How have you gone about taking that mystery and that magic and investigating it?
What has been the way that you’ve chosen to approach research in the field?
Interviewee:
Yeah. I mean I’ve gone through a number of phases of research and when I initially started, I
mean I was trained in perception. I started out in visual perception, so I was in a hardnosed area
of research and at the same time was doing performance in the music department and playing
casually a couple of different instruments. I thought I would apply what I knew about perception
to my interest in music, my personal interest in music. I started by, well, basically looking at
melodies and how they affect us and then what happens to our experience when two or more
musical textures or lines are combined to form a harmonic sequence.
It’s a bit like cooking, so if something magical happens, it’s like a chemistry when you mix
ingredients. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. You combine these melodic textures
and you get something different that’s fundamentally changed. I was looking at what happens in
the mind when we combine these textures. Yeah, I mean it brings to mind my early experiences
cooking where, as a little child, you’re curious about your parents cooking and so you’ll—I don’t
know if you had this experience, but I remember going to the fridge and actually mixing things
like tomato ketchup with orange juice and frozen peas and just thinking, "Well, this is what cooking
is."
Music’s a little bit like that. I mean there’s infinite number of ways you can combine things, but
some of them really work beautifully, and I was really interested in that, but anyway, that’s where
I started.
Interviewer:
What kind of questions do you ask when music perception is the lens that you begin with, but
obviously your understanding of music is very rich and subjective and experience-linked, so what
kind of questions can you ask from a scientific perspective or even specifically from a perception
perspective?
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Interviewee:
Yeah. My initial investigations were about trying to describe the nature of mental representations
of music, so how we make sense of music. We make sense of music by, for example,
understanding music as we hear it in terms of frameworks, like a scale or a key or expectations
of what we think might come next based on our particular experiences. That’s one question, how
we—how the mind actually makes sense of an incoming stream of music, but we can also ask
questions of why does it have an emotional effect on us? Why do we feel emotional when we are
listening to this sequence of sounds that are not—it’s not language, why do we feel deeply
emotional about it?
We can think about unusual cases like why do we feel—why do many people feel incredibly
positive and empowered and energized when they’re listening to music that, on the surface,
seems to be either very sad, sort of sad, mournful music or even aggressive and in some cases,
with violent lyrics, people are getting these interesting—they’re extracting these really positive
experiences and often psychologically beneficial. It’s almost paradoxical how that happens.
Then finally, we can ask—it goes logically from that observation to the idea that music can help
people, and it can help even people who have quite serious problems, like people with
neurological disorders like dementia or Parkinson’s disease or people who have suffered a stroke
and cannot speak. And then somehow music is a vehicle through which they relearn how to speak
after a stroke. These are some of the questions, just like any question that is a great mystery and
it also has some application, I think, is really important.
Interviewer:
Yeah. It really is the way that—more than the way it travels through the brain, but as you said,
the way that we make sense of music as it travels through the brain, which is really, I think, what
brings many of us to the field. When you’re asking questions to try and understand how people
are making sense of these stimuli going through the ear and into the brain—I know you have had
this passion for exploring metal music, for example. Do you tend to gather data from brain scans?
Do you tend to use interviews? What has been your preference for approaching those kinds of
questions?
Interviewee:
Yeah. That’s a really good question about methodology. I think people have to realize that the
method you use really depends on the question. I actually use everything that I can, so I’ve done
neuroscience imaging, a brain stimulation. I’ve done questionnaires, surveys, self-reports, other
kind of visual tasks and so forth, but it always depends on the question that you ask and if the
question calls for brain imaging, then I try to figure out how to use these methods and then use
them.
Just to give an example, my work with music that has violent themes, aggressive music, so we
were looking at death metal and a particular version of death metal that features violent lyrics.
We were initially interested in just what are the experiences, so for that we didn’t really need
neuroscientific methods. We just used survey and we determined that people’s most salient
emotional response was empowerment. From that, we were able to actually work out quite a bit
about what people were doing with this music and how they were converting what is on the
surface, an aggressive, kind of almost violent feel into something that is more about a positive
experience and empowering and not fueling violence 'cause that was the worry of a lot, I don’t
know, political and parent and religious groups and so forth. They were worried that this kind of
music might fuel.
We were just interested in that, so we did just use this kind of survey approach, but more recently,
we’re interested in what happens in the brain when people who are fans, who love this music,
what’s actually happening? Are memory parts of the brain being stimulated? Are motor parts of
the brain? And one of the—our pilot study has shown that non-fans really get very little stimulation
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in the brain. Basically, it’s all motor cortex because they’ve got a fight or flight response to the
music that they don’t really understand and don’t like at all. Whereas people who really enjoy and
appreciate and understand it are getting much more pervasive activation of different parts of the
brain. In that case, we actually are gonna be using brain imaging techniques.
Interviewer:
Isn’t that amazing that the same stimuli going in is really impacting different parts of the brain
depending on those music preferences, which is the most complicated aspect of music
psychology, both people’s preferences for and associations with music. Otherwise, it could be so
neat or deeply rich and subjective, but instead, it sits between these two worlds, doesn’t it?
Interviewee:
I think it’s one of the reasons why there’s a lot of misunderstanding, so that you have these nonfans, people who don’t really know the metal subculture. I was one of them, because I have only
really gotten to understand extreme metal more recently, but how they—really what they’re
hearing and what they’re experiencing is so totally different from what fans are experiencing. In
fact, even what’s happening in the brain is so totally different that it’s not surprising that they are
worried that the extreme tension, fear and agitation that a non-fan may be experiencing just isn’t
representative of what’s happening with fans who are somehow able to extract this much more
complicated nuanced set of experiences that, in fact, is largely positive.
Interviewer:
Which makes me think really about the classical Western canon and the way that trained classical
musicians hear music being so different to the way that non-trained musicians hear music, really
in much the same way as you’re describing it. It’s almost like any music with which you’re familiar
has such a different experience, not just personally from what you’re saying, but in the brain.
Interviewee:
Yeah. Certainly and yes, music is a kind of reflection of culture and of society and of—we’ve got
to confront the fact that there’s a lot of tension, cultural tension in—we live in multicultural
societies. We’ve got migrants, an influx, and we need to have greater understanding. Music is
one reflection of those differences and it also—gives us an opportunity to try to have some cultural
understanding through cultural practices such as music.
Interviewer:
Yeah. Thank you. In your estimation, who would you rate as having made significant contributions
to this understanding? I guess I’m particularly intrigued by your capacity to hold both the scientific
brain stimulation components, as well as the rich subjective aspects of music psychology, which
people sometimes fall one way or the other. You’re clearly interested across those dynamics.
Who are the other researchers that you have noticed and are also thinking so richly, so diversely
about music?
Interviewee:
Right. Yeah. That’s an interesting question. It’s one that I feel a little uncomfortable with [laughter]
and it’s just because—but I will name a couple of people who I have followed closely throughout
their career. Before I say that, I guess I just wanna say that I don’t really endorse the idea of
thinking of individuals as the—this field is so deeply team based and interactive, and an
individual’s accomplishments—so, for example, my accomplishments are really about all of the
people I have worked with and all of the undergraduate students, the postgraduate, the master’s
students, the PhD students, the post-ops, and it’s my lab and so I run it almost like a bit of a
company. My name is there, but it’s just so deeply interactive that I would hesitate to take
responsibility for the accomplishment of our lab.
You have the early, kind of pioneers, Diana Deutsch. She was one of the early ones; Carol
Krumhansl; Alf Gabrielsson, amazing, from Sweden; Ernst Terhardt, German scholar. They all
had labs too, and then somewhat more recently you’ve got people like Patrik Juslin, who did so
much on music and emotion. Again, he’s got a huge lab and I’ve collaborated with Patrik as well.
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He’s an amazing thinker, amazing guy, but he’s part of a team. The same can be said of other
people like David Hearon, who brought music theory into music cognition in a really interesting
and unique way, and then, of course, Isabel Perez doing her work on the neurosciences of music,
but again, she’s part of a—they’re all part of these massive interconnections and teams and so
that’s why I’m hesitant.
Interviewer:
That is the best reason to be hesitant [laughter]. Thank you for just really pointing out to all of our
undergraduate students something they may or may not know, which is that we all do work in
these webs of knowledge generation. It’s really beautiful to hear you say that.
Interviewee:
Yeah.
Interviewer:
In closing then, I wonder what’s exciting you about the future in terms of music cognition.
Neuroscience has obviously been incredibly popular, and people have become aware of this
discourse on music psychology through people such as Daniel Levitin and people who have really
brought it out to the masses, something that you’re obviously committed to doing as well and
have been doing. Where do you think you might go next if those who support us in these activities
choose to support you and your lab in doing so?
Interviewee:
Yeah. I mean I guess I think that what—we’re reaching a point where the field is—the different
issues are being integrated much more, so we’ve got the experimental cognition style research
that looks really at mental representations in a detached way. Then we’ve got how it affects
people, the experiential aspects of music and then we’ve got the applied health benefits, how
music can assist with neurological impairment.
Then we’ve got more broadly intercultural understanding and how music might help whole
societies and I’m quite interested in why music can have these cascading effects. I’ve always
been interested in the link between music and beliefs. It’s a funny, quirky area that I’ve written a
little bit about [laughter], but just the idea that when we hear music and we hear somebody
passionately singing, something happens and we really feel that it’s a compelling—something
compelling about what they’re saying that would not be as compelling if it were said outside of
the context of music, and then also how music has been involved in political campaigns
successfully, the peace movement of the 60s, how a lot of music is centered around religious
rituals, so a strong associate with beliefs.
There’s something about music and the way it interacts with our emotions and our attitudes that’s
strongly connected with what we believe. I think once we uncover that link, we’re gonna
understand a lot about both how music has already affected society, but also how we can possibly
have social prescriptions of music to impact upon society in the future.
Interviewer:
Wow. That would be an extraordinary contribution to knowledge and hopefully to the evolution of
the world to becoming a better place, and surely music would be a part of that. Thank you so
much for your time today, Bill. It’s been a real honor and a very special experience to talk with
you.
Interviewee:
Thank you.
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Music and emotion [Podcast transcript]
Rickard, Nikki. Music and emotion [p o d c a s t tra n s c ri p t]. Monash / University of Melbourne
Hi. My name’s Nikki Rickard and one of the favorite areas of research for me is in music and emotion. I think this is such
an important area for investigation because so much of the power of music comes from its emotional impact on us. Many
of us are plugged into music every day, using it to entertain others, or to relax us, or to connect with others. Some of us
use music actually to help manage challenges in our lives, or to support healing in therapeutic ways. Regardless of how
we use it, music is having an impact on us often through the emotions it creates.
There’s a really interesting study done by Lonsdale and North in 2011 in which a group of undergrad students were
surveyed about their reasons for listening to music. There was a bit of a top 10 list produced from that. Number five was
to learn about others or to learn about the world, things people didn’t know about others, which is a really interesting way
to use music. Number four related to personal identity, to express something about ourselves or to build up an image of
who we are through music. Number three was to help connect with others.
Number one and two related to mood management. Number two is to manage negative moods, for instance coping with
stress, relieving boredom, escaping reality, while number one was all to do with positive mood management, to be
entertained or to set the right mood. Like any powerful agent though, we should have some understanding of how it’s
working. Would you consume handfuls of pills without knowing what they’re doing to you without any advice about
appropriate dose or the potential side effects it might have on you? I think it’s the same for music and emotion.
It’s really important for us to understand why music affects us emotionally and how it does that to us. It can then inform
us on how we could best use that for our mental health and well-being. Like many of you probably, I spent my childhood
around music. It shared worlds with me that I no idea about. Similar to one of those top 10 that Lonsdale and North found
to understand more about the world or about others.
When I was about seven, I saw Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar. John English’s
portrayal of Judas affected me deeply. It was probably my introduction to experiencing strong emotions in music, not to
mention it taught me most of what I knew about Christianity at the time. When I was a teenager, concept albums like The
Who’s “Tommy”, and Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” introduced to me worlds of mental pain that I didn’t know people went
through. It probably inspired my pathway to becoming a psychologist too.
When I studied music later, I was exposed to classical music and I became much more adept at using music to change
my mood. It was such a vast library of different emotions and powerful emotions that I could then pick from and choose
at will. The most fascinating thing though for me was when listening to my favorite pieces of music with my big ugly
headphones turned up really loud and in a dark room. Then I almost felt like I was transcending to a different world. It felt
like nothing else. It was very profound for me and among the most intense experiences I’d ever had.
It’s probably these quite spiritual experiences with music that made me later, when I was researching in behavioral neural
science, wanna know more about how on earth music was doing this to people and particularly me. I guess it was in the
early 2000s that I came across two major influences that really shifted what I thought was quite a personal relationship
with music into a more academic realm and started my research adventure in that area. First, I found a book by Patrik
Juslin and John Sloboda called “Music and Emotion” which made me realize lots of other people were trying to understand
this question as well. It looked at music from a range of different perspectives as well, psychological perspectives,
philosophical, biological, developmental.
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This is all really exciting ‘cause I was fascinated in all these different aspects being a psychology researcher. It even had
a whole chapter on strong experiences with music, which focused my interest a lot. The second major influence was being
invited by Professor Jeff Pressing to attend the music psychology seminar series which he just set up at the University of
Melbourne. Jeff was one of the most inspiring and intelligent academics I’ve ever met. These fabulous sessions confirmed
for me that this was an area I wanted to spend the rest of my life researching.
Some of the first research I did on music psychology was actually with young chickens. My previous research had been
on memory. My PhD student at the time, Semia Tucksadi and I plotted out transition to music psych by exploring how
rhythmic auditory stimuli increased physiological arousal levels in animals and thereby enhanced their memory. We also
found that to enhance memory, the stimulus had to be a little bit interesting, not just a regular or an isochronous beat this
is called. That didn’t seem to excite chicks at all and definitely didn’t improve their memory, too unpredictable, and again,
no impact on memory, but a sequence that was rhythmic with a bit of variation worked well, which is kind of interesting
because researchers in music have also found that people like music that’s not too simple but not too complex.
While this chick music wasn’t really music at all, it did make me think about how music might impact us through one of
the most basic dimensions of emotion, that of physiological arousal. This finding influenced my later research in humans
heavily. It wasn’t too long before we made the transition into human research, but I continued to follow this theme of
exploring how music as a very complex auditory stimulus might be causing strong emotions by activating physiological
arousal or increasing levels in people. In one study published in 2004, I measured sympathetic nervous system indices
like heart rates, skin conductance and chills while people listened to music they regarded as emotionally powerful.
Regardless of whether the music they chose was happy or sad, slow or fast, classical or pop, their emotionally powerful
music was physiologically arousing. I thought if music can manipulate our body this way, does that also explain why music
can be so calming as well sometimes? In another study with my honor student at the time, Wendy Knight, we explored
this too. We were quite mean really. We told a group of volunteers who happened to be psychology students that they
had to prepare a quick talk on statistics which would be filmed, viewed, and rated by a few lecturers and researchers.
Hm, quite stressful. One group did this in silence and showed the classic stress responses while they were preparing their
talk, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, and they reported feeling pretty stressed. However, another group
who had calming music playing in the background as they prepared their talk, it was Pachelbel’s Canon, showed no such
stress response. It seemed that this relaxing music was actually reducing their physiological arousal levels and yielding a
response that subjectively was much less stressed. We weren’t actually that mean. We ended up telling them that they
didn’t have to do the talk after all, which was quite relaxing.
Since that early research, I’ve been interested in how we can use music to benefit us in a range of ways psychologically.
This has included improving memory with emotional music but also using music in ways that enhance mental health and
well-being and social connection. My more recent research has shifted from the lab into everyday settings and continues
to explore the conditions under which personalized music, for example through smartphone plays, might be beneficial but
also when it might not be as well as how we use music, either consciously or not, to modify or regulate our emotions. One
way we researched this was by developing some new questionnaires to measure music engagement.
With my colleague, TC Chin, we developed several questionnaires to survey individual differences and factors that might
influence how much people engage with music. The first questionnaire we developed, the muse, showed us that people
used music for emotional regulation which was no surprise given that others like North and Hargreaves and Suvi
Saarikallio had confirmed this was probably the key reason people used music. We also found they used it for social
connection and physical exercise and dance. We also wanted to be able to dig a bit deeper and understand what other
factors influenced how people engage or respond to music. So with Eduardo Contino and Klaus Scherer, we then
developed a muse back.
We crossed several studies. We sampled thousands of people of all ages and backgrounds. The resulting survey
assessed a range of factors, which will vary with how engaged people are with music including emotional sensitivity to
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music, listening sophistication, music imagery capacity, and personal commitment to music. We also found that in addition
to emotion regulation, social connection, and personal identity, that musical identity and expression was a key reason for
music use. Saying that I’m a hippie-type of person says something about my personal identity, but musical identity is
expressed through how I use music to reflect that identity. I might express this through grass roots folk music and that’s
an important way to engage with music for me or an important reason.
Finally, one of the most explanatory uses of music we found related to transcendence, using music to give us a different
perspective or take us above the ordinary, everyday world. This was kind of satisfying for me as you might recall my use
of music for these more spiritual-type experiences was one of the key motivations for me working in this field. Here it was.
This was something many people sought out with music in their lives. One of the most surprising things I learned when
we were researching how people use music is that some people actually don’t use music.
One of the factors that emerged in our muse back questionnaire, describe people who felt bored with they were listening
to music or said they felt indifferent in the presence of music. Around the same time as we were doing this research, there
was some really fascinating research coming out of Spain and Robert Zatorre’s lab which found that some people didn’t
actually like music. It didn’t have that pleasure response when they listened to music that so many other people described.
They called these people music anehedonics. That is, they didn’t find music pleasurable at all even though they still found
other things highly pleasurable.
I remembered that Oliver Sacks, the great neurologist, had described a musician who had lost his love of music following
brain damage, but had never thought about this in a nonclinical population. This research from Robert Zatorre’s team,
however, led by Ernest Mas-Herrero and Noala Martínez-Molina describes how a certain proportion of the normal
population and they estimate it’s around three to five percent, so not many but enough, just don’t enjoy music. What they
did in their research was also to measure their brains while they listened to music that most people find pleasurable and
they found that unlike most other people’s brains, there was little release of pleasure neurotransmitter called dopamine in
response to this music.
They’ve also shown more recently that there seems to be less connectivity or connection between the auditory centers of
the brain, which are registering hearing the music and listening to the music, and activation of brain reward centers which
are registering the pleasure of listening to music, just a fascinating concept that we don’t often think of in music psychology.
Another surprising thing I learned about this topic was that sometimes the most powerful emotions induced by music
actually happen when there’s silence, that is when there’s no music playing at all. There’s a lovely video that Dan Levitin
shows in a lecture on “This is Your Brain on Music.” You can probably find the video on YouTube.
It shows real time images of the brain while people are listening to Boyce’s Symphony Number One in B flat major. The
greatest changes in brain activity show up in red as the music plays. These correlate with the emotional impact of the
music reported by the listener. Surprisingly, the most intense and widespread activation occurs in the break between
movements. How can this be? How on Earth can the strongest emotional impact of the music be when there’s no music?
The key is that music can be pretty damn tricky. We make sense of sounds we hear in music in the same way that we
make sense of the rest of the complex world. From birth, we start to sense patterns in the many stimuli our brain receives
and it’s simplifies things a lot for our brain to be able to see these patterns. These are known as cognitive schemas. We
group things that are similar.
We join lines together that are continuous but have something blocking part of them. We still know it’s the same thing. We
expect some sort of regularity and the rules of the world to be adhered to. We recognize rain drops when they’re regular
tapping on our roof and we expect them to fall down, not up. It’s the same with music. We learn the rules of our culture’s
musical system and become used to what goes together and what doesn’t.
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We become familiar with certain rhythms and we like music within certain tempos and loudnesses. What does this all
have to do with silence causing strong emotional responses? Music plays with our expectations. It knows we expect a
certain rhythm. If it varies, it gives a bit of a surprise. If it follows a certain melody a few times and then shifts that melody
to a different key, our brain notices.
Sometimes our body responds to sensing something unexpected or novel, and therefore might even shift into preparation
or danger mode. It alerts us to a possible danger that we need to get ready to run away from or prepare in some way.
This leads to an increase in arousal levels physiologically in our body. It also results in a state of anticipation. A great book
to read on this topic is by David Huron and it’s called, “Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation.”
Our brain expects certain patterns or schemas and that can build quite a bit of excitement anticipating that. Our body
becomes physiologically alert and this actually intensifies any emotion we might be feeling. Physiological arousal or how
alert we are is one dimension of emotion. The other major dimension is valence, happiness, sadness for instance or
positive, negative. I think good music can do its trick.
It can violate those expectations as well. For example, it could delay what we thought was going to happen or it can do
something different. Finally, it gives us what we’re after and we feel a great satisfaction or consummation at that closure.
A lovely study showing this physiologically was published in 2013 by Valorie Salimpoor and Robert Zatorre and
colleagues. As their participants were listening to an emotionally powerful piece of music, they measured the amount of
dopamine, which is often called a pleasure chemical, released in reward centers of the brain.
During the lead up to the peak of the music, they found that release of dopamine increased in the dorsal stratum, which
has been associated with the expectation of pleasure and wanting in other studies, for example, in drug studies and
addiction studies. Then when the music peak was reached, dopamine was released in the more ventral striatum, which
is associated with the experience of pleasure. Both faces were pleasurable, but in different ways. Still, why silence?
In between movements we’ve just experienced that consummation of expectation at the end of one movement, the
experience of pleasure, that now we’re flipped into anticipation again. We’re waiting, anticipating what will happen next.
We get this double whammy of satisfaction. The brain experiencing pleasure and then wanting or waiting for what’s gonna
happen next, which produces a really intense emotional response. If you’re a composer or a musician, don’t be afraid to
use the pauses.
This topic of music and emotion is fascinating in itself. Philosophers love it and research in this field is constantly impacting
on theories about why music is so universal, why it exists in every culture we know, and why it’s been around for so long,
at least 40,000 years which is when we found the earliest known instrument, a bone flute. It’s likely that it’s been around
much longer than that. Understanding the emotional impact of music has helped unpack whether there might be an
evolutionary benefit to music. Does the way it helps nonverbal emotional communication between people, for instance,
between baby and mother or tribes dancing together, make it a survival advantage?
Understanding emotion and music is, however, also important for more applied research or applications, for instance,
therapeutic uses of music. Music therapists don’t just choose a piece of happy music to play to an individual. They need
to understand how a certain type of music will make a particular individual feel on a particular day, in a particular place for
instance, and whether that emotion will be mild or intense and how that will then be linked to other psychological events
like memories for that person and whether that music could have unintended side effects causing perhaps mixed emotions
or increasing their heart rate rapidly if it’s too exciting. A better understanding of emotions in music has also helped
applications in medicine.
For example, in selecting most effective music to use to reduce the need for anesthetics and pain control or in dementia
research to better understand how, for example, nostalgic music might impact on individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.
Will a piece of music that stimulates strong emotions and memories about the war era be beneficial or depressing for
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someone experiencing Alzheimer’s’ dementia? Research on emotion and music has a long history. It crosses discipline
boundaries as we’ve seen philosophy, music, psychology, neuroscience.
There are so many great thinkers who have pioneered in this field. Just a few you might be interested in following up
include John Sloboda, often called the father of music psychology. He’s provided some of the key initial theoretical
contributions to this field. For example, considering where the music emotions fitted with broader theories of emotion.
He's also explored which structural features of music, for example, new harmonies or the delay of a final chord or cadence
or sudden dynamic changes, were associated with physiological responses to music like tears and shivers, some really
great work.
Alf Gabrielsson, he studied the phenomenology of strong experiences with music. His lovely book called “Strong
Experiences with Music” describes the personal experiences of nearly 1000 people as they report on their highly emotional
responses and highly personal to music. Robert Zatorre and Isabelle Peretz, their team, people like Anne Blood, Valorie
Salimpoor have done some fascinating work on the neuroscience of emotional responses to music and how our brain
processes pleasurable experiences in a similar way as other pleasurable and rewarding stimuli like drugs and money.
Emery Schubert, he’s provided some of the great theoretical contributions to this field including, for instance, why we
might be able to enjoy negative emotions in music when usually we would try to avoid sad or frightening things. Sandra
Garrido who’s also worked with Emory, has done some great research on how listening to sad music impacts on people
including those who might already be depressed. This has helped clarify that music can sometimes be used quite
maladaptively in a way that actually worsens rather than improves mood.
Suvi Saarikallio, I’ve mentioned before. Her model on how we use music to regulate mood. Her questionnaire on
impacts of the use of music for less frequent uses than just entertainment including achieving intense sensations for
mental work or contemplation, seeking solace and for discharging or diverting negative or unwanted emotions. There’s a
number of people who’ve worked on understanding the mechanisms underlying music-induced emotions and I really
love this work. Daniel Västfjäll, Patrik Juslin, Klaus Scherer, Marcel Zentner, just a few.
Their works contributed to one of the most influential models on how music induces emotion, the BRECVEM model. I love
this model because it covers so many other research findings across the music and emotion field of research. For
example, it includes very low level evolutionary, old mechanisms that are hardwired into our brains such as the
physiological survival response we have to novel stimuli as well as more complex mechanisms like emotional contagion
and episodium memories. There are many others working in this field and you’ll probably hear about some of them in
other topics in this series, for example, in exploring the importance of music for adolescence or for older people.
If it’s a topic that interests you, it might also be helpful to become mindful of how music’s influence in your own emotions
and try to investigate how effective you are in selecting music to modify your moods. You might, for instance, like to try
some of the music mood apps that recommend music based on a certain mood. It seems quite simple. You might choose
happy or calm as your target emotion and it will deliver music into your playlist.
It might work for you, but it might also show you how emotional responses to music are much more complex than a single
mood that a piece of music can be described as expressing. For example, if you select happy in a music mood app, it
might make sense that Pharrell Williams, “Happy” comes up in your playlist; however, whether this music will make you
feel happy or not will depend on so many things, how you’re feeling before you play it, your current mood, who you’re
with, your personality and capacity for empathy, your arousal levels, your musical background, training. At the moment,
the apps out there, or any research, is not yet able to give us this level of insight or prediction.
Eventually though, as we understand more about how music works on our emotions, we might get better at this. To me,
this is a really exciting goal to one day know enough about how music produces complex or intense emotions in us and
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why it can soothe us and feel like a best friend. We will then, perhaps, be able to use it more effectively to self-manage
our own emotional well-being and mental health. My name’s Nikki Rickard. Thanks for listening.
[End of Audio]
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Music and emotions [Video transcript]
Chin, Tan-Chyuan. Music and emotions [Video t ra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne.
Research in cognition, psychology and neuroscience have found that pleasure and emotions are key motivations for why
individuals engage with music, through activities such as listening or singing. Through various studies, music has been
shown to activate “pleasure centres” in the brain (Blood and Zatorre 2001), and music also has the capacity to
communicate and induce a range of powerful emotions (Juslin and Sloboda 2001).
In this video, I will provide a brief overview of the link between music and emotion, by focusing on 4 key areas:
-
Firstly, emotions as a concept within affect, and the differentiation between induced and perceived emotion.
Secondly, measurement of responses to music.
Thirdly, the underlying mechanisms through which music might induce emotions.
And finally, factors that may influence your experience of music.
Apart from emotions, there are several terms which are often used in the research of music and emotion. Affect is a broad
umbrella term that covers all evaluative, or valenced states. For instance, positive emotions or positive mood states, and
negative emotions or negative mood states. Emotion is conceptualized as a combination of affect, conceptual knowledge
and sensory input from the environment. It is a brief but intense affective reaction, which focuses on specific objects, and
typically lasts for minutes to a few hours. You may also come across the term mood being used fairly often. This affective
state is longer lasting than an emotion, often occurring at a lower intensity, focusing on nothing specific, and typically lasts
several hours to days. Another common term in the music literature is preference. This refers to an affective evaluation
with low intensity. It is typically long-lasting and involves the evaluation of objects or persons.
When we talk or think about emotional responses to music, it is important to differentiate between induced and perceived
emotion. Induced emotions are the actual emotions experienced in response to music. For instance, when I listen to a
piece of music, and the music causes me to feel sad, then that is described as an induced emotion. Perceived emotion
refers to the recognition of emotions in music, without feeling it. For example, when I listen to a piece of sad music, and
I recognize that the intention of the music is to convey sadness, but I do not personally feel sad when I am listening to the
sad music – that is described as a perceived emotion. It is very much like knowing that a piece of music is expressing
sadness, but not actually feeling the sadness. Induced and perceived emotions should not be viewed or treated as
opposite extremes on a continuum. Emotional responses of an individual can occur somewhere along the continuum
from an emotion-free perception to intense emotional reactions. Apart from subjective feeling, a key differentiating factor
between induced and perceived emotions is the association with physiological change, such as blood pressure, heart
rate, and skin conductance.
This brings us to the topic of measurement. Self-report measurements are the most widely used method to assess affect
induced by music as this method is relatively easier and cheaper to administer and interpret. Types of self-report
instruments include Likert-scale survey items, visual analogue scales, continuous response of emotion concepts using a
computer interface, diary study consisting of daily reports of emotional episodes, experience sampling method which uses
random or time-based signal prompts to get participants to report their activity, affect, social and environmental contexts,
as well as the free report or narratives, which is the written description of the personal experience. However, self-reports
can be limited by biases and the individual’s knowledge about the internal processes that are going on within. Therefore
researchers are increasingly pairing self-reports with one or more of these other methods listed here.
Examples of indirect measures are affect regulation, information processing, memory, perceptual and psycho-motor tasks.
Some examples of psychophysiological measurements include heart rate, skin conductance, blood pressure, biochemical
responses (such as saliva sampling), respiration, blood-oxygen saturation, muscular tension, facial expressions, chills,
and startle reflex. Individuals’ perception of emotional expression in music can be measured using recordings of actual
real music or synthesized tone stimuli. The most widely used functional neuroimaging techniques are functional magnetic
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resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET). These methods allow music researchers to visualize
neural activity in the brain in relation to a specific emotion. Because music can evoke stronger and more diverse emotions
than many other types of stimuli, functional neuroimaging studies with music can improve our understanding of the neural
correlates of emotion. Qualitative interviews and focus groups are also a great way to understand the individual
experiences of emotional responses to music. There are a lot more research studies that I have not been able to cram
into this space. However, I encourage you to start with the authors listed here.
Two psychology professors, Patrik Juslin and Daniel Västfjäll (2008) proposed that music is capable of inducing emotion
through expectancies, by directly stimulating the brain stem (which is a part of the brain that controls arousal and other
basic functions), or by association with other emotional stimuli. The latter process of inducing emotion can be further
broken down into associations with emotions themselves, and associations with events or stimuli which themselves have
emotional connotations, including past events (episodic memory), visual imagery, and the human voice. The BRECVEM
model features 7 psychological mechanisms: Brain stem reflex; Rhythmic entrainment; Evaluative conditioning;
Contagion; Visual imagery; Episodic memory; and Musical expectancy.
These mechanisms are based on a number of distinct brain functions, described as information processors at various
levels of the brain, which use distinct types of information about the environment to guide future behaviour. These brain
functions have developed gradually and in a specific order during evolution. Because the mechanisms depend on
functions of different evolutionary origins, each mechanism will bear unique characteristics that influence its functioning.
Some mechanisms operate at lower ‘subcortical’ levels: their processing is largely subconscious, automatic, and
independent of other psychological processes (this is so-called ‘modularity’). Other mechanisms operate at higher cortical
levels: their processing is more available to consciousness, can be influenced by will to some extent, and can be easily
‘distracted’ by competing stimuli or processing. The mechanisms may also interact to some extent, which may lead to
conflicting outputs under certain circumstances. This then provides an explanation for the occurrence of ‘mixed emotions’
in response to music.
Finally, I would like to draw your attention to the experience of music. We know that the same piece of music may be
experienced very differently by different individuals, and differently in different situations or contexts. Whilst the
characteristics or features of music (such as tempo, harmonic progressions, movements, the timbre of an instrument or
voice, intonation) may influence one’s experience of music, that is not the whole picture. The individual in this music
experience or event is influenced by a whole range of factors (such as):
-
mental, emotional, physical state
perception, attitude, values and expectations about the music
earlier experience or knowledge about the same/similar types of music
life experiences or significant life events, personality
cultural, religious, political attitudes
There is also the situation or context in which this experience occurs. Experience varies according to who you are with,
where you are at, or what you are doing. Any experience of music depends on the interaction between these three factors.
The impact of each factor varies from time to time, but none of them can really ever by excluded. I encourage you to use
this as a backdrop for thinking about music experiences and the rest of your discovery journey with music and emotion.
References
Blood, A. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions
implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(20), 11818-11823.
Juslin, P. N., & Västfjäll, D. (2008). Emotional responses to music: The need to consider underlying
mechanisms. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31(5), 559-575.
Juslin, P. N., Sloboda, J. (Eds.). (2001). Music and emotion: Theory and research. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
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Music and infancy interview podcast [Audio
transcript]
Skewes McFerran, K. and Trehub, S. Music and in fa n cy [Au d i o t ra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne
.
Interviewer: Professor Katrina Skewes McFerran, The University of Melbourne
Interviewee: Professor Emeritus Sandra Trehub, The University of Toronto
Interviewer:
It's wonderful to be sitting here and speaking with Emeritus Professor Sandra Trehub. Of course,
your expertise is in the field of music and infants, or at least that's how I would describe it. I
wonder if you could start by describing how you can see this field within music psychology in
which you are a world-leading expert.
Interviewee:
I guess, I see music and infants, its importance goes beyond simply music and beyond the
infants. Okay. Musical stimuli or auditory stimuli. We can learn a lot about infants’ listening skills
by looking at how they respond to music, but when we think about our own music perception
skills, we know what they are now, but it's difficult for us to figure out how they got to be that way.
We had a lot of incidental exposure to music. We may have had some training, so we could learn
a lot by studying infants who've had very limited exposure to music and obviously no training. In
e l bwell,
o u rnwhat
e do these natural musical skills seem like? That's sort
some sense we could get toMsee,
of a starting point for learning about, where did we begin?
Then later, how are we influenced by the exposure that we had, the training that we had and so
on. Studying music and infants, bares on that. As I mentioned, we can learn about music, its
developmental origins, we can learn about hearing – audition. Music involves complex auditory
patterns. It also tells us a lot about infants' perception, about complex auditory patterns.
Speech is one form of complex auditory pattern, music is another, and there are other complex
auditory patterns in the world. Music can really inform those other endeavors as well. In addition,
music has social and emotional implications for us, and it does for listeners of all ages, and we
have shown that it does for infants as well.
It goes into other endeavors beyond perception and cognition. It tells us things about emotional
and social development, mother infant interaction, or caregiver infant interaction. Memory, so it
turns out that our memory for music is a lot better than our memory for other auditory patterns,
including speech. What does infant's memory for music look like?
There are many avenues that are relevant to the study of music in infants. It's important not only
for people who are interested in music, and not only for people who are interested in infants, but
all kinds of psychological realms can be informed by studying infants’ perception of auditory
patterns, or of musical patterns, their reactions to that, and how it influences them in many
different ways.
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Interviewer:
There's so many questions I'd love to ask out of that, but the one that comes to me first is, when
you describe this field in terms of stimuli and the interest that it holds. Because the conditions are
quite pure at this moment, and has implications for the rest of our lifespan, where experience has
occurred.
Therefore, we don't quite know how music's affecting the brain, because maybe it's related to an
association, or maybe it's a pure response. That makes a lot of sense to me within a science
approach, and like laboratory conditions and it sounds very beautiful and clean and pure. Is that
something to do with your background that you've come to the study of music and infants with a
particular orientation? A preference for this beautiful clean slate, which occurs in music and
infancy?
Interviewee:
Well, interestingly, I didn't start out as many people in this field do with an interest in music. My
doctoral research really was on infant speech perception. Really, I began graduate studies with
an interest in language development. Like how does an infant acquire the language of his, or her
culture? Okay. I thought, well, let me first look about—look at how infants perceive the sounds of
speech, or how infants perceive sound in general.
I was expecting to find this huge, illuminating literature. I was shocked when it wasn't there.
Essentially, there were some people who were looking at infant's ability to detect sounds. In other
words, to differentiate a sound, or from silence, those interested in the hearing. There were some
people interested in discrimination, but it was only thought that the best infants could do, was to
differentiate one single sound from another single sound.
There wasn't a field of infant speech perception, so when I begin, that was just starting, and the
best we thought infants could do was to differentiate one speech sound from another like BA from
PA, one syllable, and the general understanding of the time, certainly the prevailing belief is that
if you gave infants a sequence of sounds, say speech sounds, or any sounds, they would only
hear the first little bit.
Okay. That's what the field was all about. That's where I began, and I was only brave enough
after graduate school to actually challenge that, because I couldn't figure out, how could you get
from that to acquiring language, let alone perceiving music. But single sounds, you know, I
thought that couldn't get you very far. It seemed like really a bridge too far to cross. Infants would
have to learn too much. It seemed to me it would take them more than a lifetime to get there.
Even though I was really interested in getting back to language, I thought, well, if I use musical
stimuli, I'd have much more flexibility, so I could put the sounds together in any way that I wanted
to.
If you did that with speech, many things would be considered non legitimate, because speech
sounds were ordered in particular ways, and you weren't supposed to violate those and so on. I
thought, well, I'm not a musician, so if I wanted to order sounds in particular ways I don't have to
be worried about violating the rules of music. I really set about to learn about infants’ perception
of auditory patterns. Okay. That's what it all was about. I guess, what I found surprised me as
much as it surprised anybody else.
Interviewer:
I'm aware of the enormous contribution that you have made actually, because I agree that the
field was really very empty, and that you have persisted with this topic for a number of decades.
I've got a big question for you then, given that as the context. Which is: what do you think was
the most interesting discovery that you made early? And then perhaps also thinking through to
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what became the most interesting over time, or what people picked up, and maybe what they
didn't find is interesting.
Interviewee:
Okay. If you think about certain concepts, and certain concepts that are central to music in
particular and important one is say, transposition. The fact that a melody is equivalent to another
melody, even if all of the notes are different, so long as the relations between the tones, or notes
remain the same.
That to me was an early test of the possibility that infants were perceiving patterns. According to
the prevailing view with the time infants, if you gave them a pattern, they would only perceive the
initial note. I thought if we did that, we'd never be able to get to the perception of melodies if we
had to do it.
Like how would you get from one note to a melody? To me that was a bridge too far. In an initial
study, I looked at that question of transposition. First, familiarized infants with patterns that were
decidedly not musical. They just drew from all the tones that span two octaves, so generated
melodies in that way. Then in one condition they were transposed either up, or down. And in
another condition, they were scrambled. In other words, they had the same notes. But since
people might be concerned, or thought that at time, they only paid attention to the first note, well,
I had the first and last note remain the same and I just scrambled the internal notes. If infants
were really responding on the basis of the initial note, they wouldn't be able to discriminate
between that and an altered melody.
If it was the pattern that made a difference, then the transposition should be the pattern that
sounded more similar as it does to us. Indeed, what I found with a graduate student at the time,
very talented graduate student, was that if you familiarize infants with a melody, presented it
several times, and then transposed it either up or down, infants responded as if it was the same
melody.
If you simply reorder the internal tones, so what sounds to us like a different melody, infants in
fact treated that as a different melody. We were at the time because in a very challenging
procedure, it was challenging in the sense that we were measuring heart rate. In the days before
it was all fully automated, so that we had these sort of reams and reams of polygraph tracings,
and so what we found though was that infants treated the transposition as equivalent to the
melody.
Once they had, you might say, once they had habituated to hearing that melody over and over
again, their response wasn't reinstated if you simply transpose the melody. We would hear it as
the same melody, although not identical in its component notes, but when we reordered the
internal notes, well, then they heard that as really different and that reinstated their response, so
lo and behold, they behaved as we did.
The amazing thing at the time, was that we seem to face insurmountable odds in the sense that
after presenting an auditory pattern like that to infants that had six tones, it took them about 15
seconds to recover, or return to baseline. We had to separate the patterns, say your original
pattern and the change by 15 seconds, so they would have to remember it over that time period.
Remarkably, they responded when we ordered the notes, but they didn't respond when we
transpose it up, or down. Their pattern was really much like ours, even though they couldn't talk
about it. These were five months old infants. It surprised us and we went on from there, and we
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also found that if we looked with that same procedure at tempo grouping. If we had a melody that
was grouped such that you had two tones, a longer pause and four tones, grouped in that way,
and we changed that to say a four, two grouping, infants would also treat that as a new pattern,
just as we did. Okay. They responded to novel tempo groupings, and they treated transpositions
as equivalent to the original melody like we did. We were shocked, but in some sense eventually
got used to the fact that they do many things as we do. You didn't have to learn to treat
transpositions as equivalent as people thought at the time. Well, first of all, they thought that they
would have only responded on the basis of the initial tone, which was identical, but in fact, they
perceived the patterns as a whole, and they perceived them largely as we did.
Okay. These were patterns, as I said, they were drawn from two octaves, they weren't very
musical sounding, but that was done deliberately so that we would put adults and infants really
in the same position. Only later did we start using, say, musical patterns that might be meaningful
to adults, but transposition then was something that was as an ordinary for infants as it was for
adults, and so was rhythmic grouping.
These were natural things, but at the time even in writing these articles, I couldn't even describe
those as musical patterns. They were simply auditory patterns, and because even in terms of the
field of music perception at the time, people considered it ludicrous that you would study infants,
because music wasn't meaningful to them.
The focus at the time, even in terms of adult music perception, was adults with musical training.
Infants were too naive to be considered musical subjects. We just talk about auditory pattern
processing. It was really some years until we could really describe it as music, and then we
started doing studies that were more properly situated within music, things that needed musical
sense.
As I say, at the time it seemed unlikely that people would take it seriously as music if we were
using infants as the subjects of our studies, but they turn out to be great pattern receivers, and
they look a lot more like us when they perceive patterns than when they perceive individual
sounds, though their hearing isn't as good as ours is. If you want to look at them in terms of
hearing, they looked efficient.
The quietest sound that they didn't hear is a lot less quiet than the sounds that we can hear.
When you give them patterns, they look a lot like we do, except that obviously, they have some
neutrality with respect to the specific music of any particular culture. They were similar in terms
of things that were common across culture, and we saw the differences more clearly when we
looked at things that are specific to particular cultures.
Interviewer:
Yeah, I was thinking about that as you spoke, because it is such a breakthrough to completely
change the understanding of what infants are capable of. I can feel the implications of that moving
into many fields, including fields like my own, such as psychotherapy where they really have
looked at the fact that the carer-infant relationship is potentially mutual from the moment it begins.
Whereas previously the idea was the parent, or the carer was the person in charge of that
relationship and completely leading that relationship.
I really understand that, but to go back to those beautiful pure conditions that you have, almost
pre-cultural influence, to whatever degree that that is a rational statement. I remember reading
once that then there was some theoretical idea that the infants then lost the capacity to a certain
degree, and then grew it back up within their cultural framework, but listening to you speak up,
I'm hearing much more that might not be the case. That it might be that it…
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Interviewee:
Right. People have talked about that and my doctoral work was on infant speech perception. With
respect to speech perception, there is the notion that infants can perceive a wide range of speech
sounds including those that don't occur within their language. They perceive those, what we
would consider foreign speech sounds, 'cause they were foreign to our native language.
They perceive those as readily as they do those that are a part of what will be their native
language, but they don't have a native language at that point! Okay. They start out with the
potential to perceive all kinds of sounds, the speech sounds in musical sounds. But because our
cultures only make use of a limited set, eventually they get better at the things that are used
regularly within their culture. Some things fall away when they're not reinforced within the things
that they're exposed to regularly.
With respect to even the speech sounds when they're young enough, they perform as well with
sounds that are extremely difficult for us, but eventually there is some kind of narrowing. We get
better at things that are an important part of our culture and that we hear regularly. We started
having more difficulty with things that we don't hear regularly. That may be the case also for
music. We have seen that to some extent with music. Much, much later we found that if you look
at certain musical distinctions that are present in other cultures, but not in Western music, if you
tested six-month olds, you found that they were equally good with distinctions that were foreign,
or part of the native musical system. If you look at 12-month olds, especially with respect to say
foreign rhythms, then you saw that the 12-month olds were performing better on the rhythms that
were used in their native culture, their native musical culture, even though they've had limited
musical exposure.
The six-month-old was capable of anything, so it seemed the 12-month-old was starting to show
some narrowing and you see the narrowing with respect to speech sounds, and you see the
narrowing, at least we saw it with respect to rhythms. You don't see it with respect to pitch patterns
until considerably later.
Even a four-year-old isn't really doing better with pitch patterns that are part of the native system
than foreign pitch patterns. Learning the, what is relevant in terms of the pitch patterns of your
language, seems to happen later. What's happening in terms of the rhythm patterns in your
language seems to happen earlier, so maybe more primal.
Interviewer:
Wow. It's so interesting, isn't it? I mean that has fundamental implications for how we understand
our world, and at a time where the cultural differences are really being examined again and again.
I think that's totally exciting, but I'm sure that you've spent your life being excited by that.
Just in concluding then, I guess it would be fascinating for myself and for the students, just to
hear about where do you say that research in the field of music and infancy might go next from
your perspective? I'm sure that you're constantly encouraging PhDs in particular directions, and
I'm hoping that people will focus on specific areas. I wonder what it is that you think would be that
topic that we could pick up next and really put energy into.
Interviewee:
Okay, so a lot of my research for many years focused on perceptual aspects. Those that seem
to be present from the beginning, and those that were acquired slowly. And getting a sense of
the pitch relations in music, those things seem to take longer. They eventually fall into place, but
there are more slowly developing. The things with respect to timing seem to be happening earlier.
Then we have say, as you know, infants are not only exposed to, or they're not typically exposed
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to the kinds of sounds that we were using in our experiments, like sequences of pure tones, or
sequences of any kinds of tones. In fact, in their environment, people sing to them. Okay. That's
the kind of exposure that they get that is typically multimodal. Whether you are in our culture and
parents do a lot of singing face to face that involves facial expression, movement, a rhythmic
movement that accompanies the singing, so a multimodal stimulus for the infant.
The timing is reinforced by some of the things that you see in the movement, and so it unfolds in
that way. It's really much more than an auditory stimulus. What we also see is that parents have
like—individual parents have unique ways of singing to their infants. Even if they sing the same
song, so lots of people sing twinkle, twinkle little star, for example, but every parent seems to put
a unique spin on it.
Surprisingly, their performances for infants, these are multimodal performances become highly
stereotyped. If you record them on different occasions, it sort of amazing. It sounds like the same
performance. It's often at the same pitch level and the same tempo. It's almost like a frozen
performance. Each parent seems to have a unique way of doing it, so that infants not only become
familiar with the song, the particular songs that the parents sing, but the particular spin that the
parents give on those songs.
It's like a parental signature, so they're capable of recognizing the song when somebody else
sings it, but it doesn't generate the kinds of emotions that it generates when the parents sings it,
because the parent is singing it in a very particular way. It's like a very frozen performance, and
it's really unclear that parents even realize it, and it took me a while to realize it. Because when I
had parents singing to infants on different occasions… [*interruption*]
Okay. When I had them sing on different occasions, separated by a week or more, it was
astounding to me that their performances were so similar in so many respects, and would have
been very surprising to them as well. 'Cause as far as they're concerned, most of them without
musical training, they're just playing with her infants, but that performance had a very frozen
quality to it.
Okay. Even though infants were capable of recognizing those songs when sung by others, their
reaction to the parent's song was very different, because its features had so many features in
capsulated in that performance. The same pitch level and the same tempo. And I remember the
first time I had a new vision; listen and watch… listened to those recordings, he said, where did
you find all these mothers who have perfect pitch? Well they don't have perfect pitch!
Most of them don't have musical training, but there is something about that situation that
generated these, what you might call frozen performances. They were delivered in nearly
identical fashion from one occasion to the next, and that made them especially meaningful for
infants. It was shocking to me. Initially I kept thinking I was pulling up the wrong recording. No,
that's the one I just heard, but in fact, there was something remarkably similar.
Initially, I was disappointed when I watched infant's response, because I expected them to be
doing all kinds of things, even though they were six, or seven, or eight months of age, but they
were totally mesmerized by their parents' performance. They did virtually nothing. They just
stared at them so the parents could maintain their unwavering attention.
By the time infants are about six months of age, if mothers talked to them, well, they look, but
they also look around a lot. Parents tend to talk about what parents are looking at, but when
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parents sing to their infants at that age at six, or seven, or eight months of age, the infants just
stare at them, and they look sort of frozen.
I expected the smiling and all kinds of other things, great signs of joy, but for a long time they just
remain totally stuck frozen and looking like that at their infants. Parents can really command their
attention by simply singing to their infant and singing the things that they usually sing. They don't
necessarily realize that until you show them a video of the infant. And then they're astounded at
the fact that the infant is just glued on them during their performance.
Interviewer:
Wow. Again, it's just fantastic to hear what discovery sounds like. In the field of music psychology.
I really appreciate that. That's two gems that really distinguish what we can learn through careful
and rigorous experiment.
In bringing this all to a close, I feel like we could learn from you for many decades. You mentioned
multimodal as though as a way forward, so more multimodal research or… Is what you're
suggesting that there's still work that we need to do with these pure conditions of young infants?
Because that really has the potential to tell us a lot about what it is to be human, and it's quite
cool. Then on the other hand, there's also the relational implications, so the multimodality which
occurs when two people interact more specifically in a more natural musical context, but not high
music, not high culture, elite music.
Interviewee:
Sure.
Interviewer:
Really natural. They're two distinct areas perhaps that still need further development and, and
research to understand better. Is there anything else before we finished that you think you really
take out of this?
Interviewee:
Right. Yeah, so what I've talked to you about really has a bit of a Western spin to it, so caregiving
differs in different cultures. We do a lot of playful interactions with our infants. Singing to infants
tends to be a face to face endeavor. Okay. We sing a lot of playful songs. We do a lot of arousing
things to infants to engage them, but in many other cultures, particularly cultures in which mothers
have their infants attached to them throughout the day on their back, in a sling and so on, and
they go about their work in that way.
They also do a lot of singing to infants, but their singing tends to be soothing rather than playful.
It's typically not face to face, and it tends to be rather different in style. So rather than the Western
style, or urban style of singing play songs to the infants, these rousing songs. Instead, you get
soothing songs like lullabies. And depending on the culture, the ideal state, in our case, maybe a
smiling, or laughing infant, or a contented infant, as you can see on the infant’s face. Or in some
other culture, it's a sleeping infant. Okay. The styles of interaction and the kinds of musical
exposure. The musical exposure happens everywhere, but it differs depending on the goals.
Western mothers, or mothers in industrialized cultures really want to know that their infant care
is about them and what they're doing, and that face to face contact is critical.
Like elsewhere, this sleeping baby is a sign of contentment, and that's viewed as the way to have
babies grow and thrive and so on. They don't need the face to face visual contact. They get it at
other times, but to them they're looking at contentment and their body—they have the baby
against their body. The baby is getting the song, the warmth of the body, and that quiet
movement.
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For a baby to be soothed for them, this contented soothed sleeping baby is the ideal state. If they
would see what we do with our infants, they would probably see that as over-stimulation, and
disturbing the baby. They would see that as being really—not letting infants be what they are, but
really trying to make something else with them, or getting a rise out of them and doing whatever
we can to do so. There are big cultural differences in the care and what is viewed as appropriate.
There's no one best thing, and what happens, it depends a lot on the cultural context in which it
takes place.
Interviewer:
Wow. Thank you. I knew coming into this conversation that it would be difficult to contain in a
sense after a lifetime of work in a particular area. I could just hear that there are so many different
directions that we could go. I want to stop myself from asking any more questions, and I would
just take the opportunity to say thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, and just a couple of
the learnings that you've made and your contribution to music psychology. Thank you so much
for your time.
Interviewee:
You're very welcome.
[End of Audio]
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Music and memory [Video transcript]
Thompson, Z. Music and memory [Video tra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne.
Many of us may have strong personal connections to music that reflect important moments in our lives – music is often
linked with significant life events such as weddings or funerals, it may have cultural or religious significance to us…or
maybe we simply have a song that reminds us of a certain time in our lives, and when we hear it, we’re immediately taken
right back into that moment.
Researchers have been trying to understand this phenomenon for a number of years, and have even given it a name –
in 2007, researchers Janata, Tomic and Rakowski (1) coined the term ‘music evoked autobiographical memory’, (or MEAM
for short) to describe this idea of vivid memories being triggered by a familiar song.
While ‘MEAMs’ can often be a nice nostalgic experience for us, for some people who are living with conditions that cause
memory loss, they can also be a way to access memories, connect with parts of themselves, and with their loved ones,
that they may not otherwise be able to.
You may have seen media showing people who are living with advanced stages of dementia ‘coming alive’ and talking
about their memories when listening to their favourite music, and while it’s great that this potential is being recognised,
it’s important for us to understand why and how this might happen, why it’s even important to trigger memories for people
with dementia, and how we can harness this to support people in an appropriate manner.
When you hear the word ‘dementia’, you probably think of ‘memory loss’, which is a common symptom. However, the
term ‘dementia’ is an umbrella term for a syndrome, or cluster of symptoms relating to progressive cognitive decline across
more than one area of cognition, so not just memory on its own. There are many different forms of dementia, such as
Alzheimer’s disease, Vascular Dementia, Dementia with Lewy Bodies, and Fronto-temporal dementia (FTD), to name a
few, and each affects the brain in different ways.
For example, Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia, affects the hippocampus – the memory centre of
the brain – first, as well as other areas as it progresses. This is why memory is the most commonly talked about symptom.
However, people with FTD experience atrophy (or damage) to the frontal/temporal parts of the brain first, which tends to
impact things like behaviour or personality, as well as speech and language more prominently in early stages. With this
in mind, we can see how music and memory may be impacted differently for people with different diagnoses.
To make matters even more complex, when we talk about music and memory, there are a number of different types of
memory that we could be referring to. Some (brief) examples of this include:
•
•
•
Implicit memory – unconscious and procedural - such as the ability to play an instrument or sing a song
Explicit memory – conscious – which include ‘episodic memory’ (your memory of an event); or ‘semantic memory’
(which is related to general knowledge – such as who sung a particular song, or what key a piece was in)
Music perception (e.g. being able to perceive differences in pitch and rhythm etc.) – short term/working memory
So when we’re talking about music and memory, we need to consider which type of memory we are referring to.
There are a number of studies that have described people with different types of dementia, including FTD and AD, as
having relatively unaffected ‘implicit memory’, such as being able to sing familiar songs fluently, or even being able to
continue to play an instrument that they’d learnt in the past, despite having significant memory loss in other areas of their
lives (2-4).
A 2009 study by Samson and colleagues (5)really demonstrates this maintenance of implicit memory - they found that
people with AD were able to learn to sing a new song over 8 weekly sessions, despite not being able to remember
attending the sessions themselves. Therefore, their explicit memory of attending the sessions was impacted, but their
implicit memory of the song itself was maintained.
Episodic memory is typically expected to deteriorate for people with AD, although research indicates that autobiographical
memories from earlier in people’s lives are more likely to be preserved, to some degree, than more recent memories (6).
There are a number of studies that suggest music can help to enhance recall of autobiographical memories for people
with AD (7, 8). Although the research is still developing in this area, some theories have been put forward to explain why
this might happen.
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Cognitive Neuroscientist Dr Petr Janata (9) investigated what happens in the brain when music evokes an
autobiographical memory, and found that the medial pre-frontal cortex – an area relatively spared during AD progression,
is involved. Other researchers have also identified increased cognitive arousal, reduction in anxiety, and also the
emotional connection tied to the music itself as potential mechanisms for stimulating MEAMs (1, 10, 11).
To illustrate how this might work, El Haj et al (12) compared how people with AD retrieve autobiographical memories
when listening to their preferred music, compared to in silence. They found that listening to music helped people with AD
to retrieve their memories faster, with more specific detail, and that the memories held more emotional content than those
retrieved during the silent condition. They also found that the memories evoked in the music condition were more
‘involuntary’ or took less executive function to recall than those in the silent condition.
Cuddy and colleagues (7) compared MEAMs for people with AD to neurotypical older adults of the same age. They found
that participants with AD were able to experience MEAMs, regardless of the stage of progression that they were in, and
they also found that the way that they perceived MEAMs (positive and vivid) was comparable with the neurotypical older
adults.
However, a 2018 study by Australian neuropsychologist Dr Amee Baird and colleagues (8) found that the ability to
experience MEAMs may be impacted by the type of dementia a person has – specifically, that MEAMs may be less
accessible for people with FTD. Dr Baird is this week’s podcast guest, so you’ll be able to hear more about her research
directly from her. It’s worth acknowledging here that because AD is the most common form of dementia, it tends to be the
one most studied, and as a result, there is a lack of research investigating how music impacts people with other types of
dementia.
One classic example of how FTD might affect someone differently comes from Matthews and colleagues from 2009 (13)
who described a case study of a participant with FTD who reported having difficulty identifying different sounds (suggesting
impairment in auditory perception). The researchers found the participant had challenges with his explicit memory, both
semantic (i.e. being unable to recognise whether the emotional characteristics of a piece as happy or sad), and episodic
(as they were unable to correctly identify if a piece of music was familiar or unfamiliar). Interestingly, however, the
participant reported that he was still experiencing positive emotions from listening to preferred music, which indicates that
explicit memory is not necessarily central to experiencing benefits to mood and emotions while listening to music.
However, it is important to note that this is a very small-scale study, and further research is required in this area.
So now we know some of the different ways that music, memory and diagnosis might interact, we need to ask – why is it
important anyway? A diagnosis of dementia presents a number of challenges – the obvious being changes to cognition,
which can impact how a person can communicate their wants and needs and their independence. However, there are a
number of social challenges that can further impact a person with dementia, including stigma – many people think that
because someone has memory challenges, that means they can’t remember anything, and that therefore there’s no point
in connecting with them because they won’t remember it anyway.
We know from ways that people are able to recognise familiar music, learn new music, and express themselves through
music that this presumption based on stigma is not true. And while this area of research is still developing, we know that
music provides a means for us to connect with people who are going through these cognitive changes. For example,
being able to listen to a familiar song and recall events can provide opportunities for people with dementia to connect with
family or friends with whom they shared a memory of the song.
But even if they are not able to recall the autobiographical details of the song, we know that many people with dementia
are still able to participate in singing along or playing instruments, which can be a way for them to connect with other
people. For example, Australian music therapy researchers Drs Imogen Clark and Jeanette Tamplin (14) researched the
experiences of people living with dementia and their loved ones who were singing in a choir together. They found that this
gave people a chance to participate in something positive together, as equals rather than carers and care-recipients, and
that this had a positive impact on their mood and quality of life.
While there are some fantastic benefits of using music to support people living with dementia, it’s important to consider
whether there might be situations that are not suitable. After all, a part of the power of the connection between music and
memories is the strong links with emotions, and not all emotional experiences are positive. For example, music may trigger
a memory or emotion that is difficult for someone to process because it relates to loss or trauma. This is the reason that
music therapists advocate for musical experiences to be shared in a supportive relationship context– so that there is
someone present to help a person process these emotions if they come up.
Additionally, people who have dementia may have difficulty communicating in a traditional sense, as well as potentially
having limited movement due to cognitive challenges. Therefore, it’s important to consider whether the person listening
has the ability to change the song, adjust the volume or even turn it off if they feel they need to.
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There’s still so much to learn about music and memory, and how it can be used to support people living with memory
challenges. But it’s clear that it can be a powerful way of connecting people with differing levels of cognitive abilities, so it
makes sense to consider ways that we can use music together with people who have dementia, rather than in isolation.
References
1.
Janata P, Tomic S, Rakowski S. Characterisation of music-evoked autobiographical memories. 2007:845.
2.
Deason RG, Strong JV, Tat MJ, Simmons-Stern NR, Budson AE. Explicit and implicit memory for music in healthy
older adults and patients with mild Alzheimer's disease. 2019. p. 158-69.
3.
Cevasco AM, Grant RE. Value of musical instruments used by the therapist to elicit responses from individuals in
various stages of Alzheimer's disease. Journal Of Music Therapy. 2006;43(3):226-46.
4.
Ho PA, Stern TA, Rustad JK. "Moon River": Intact Musical Appreciation and Performance in a Man With Semantic
Variant Primary Progressive Aphasia. Psychosomatics. 2019;60(1):70-4.
5.
Samson S, Baird A, Moussard A, Clement S. DOES PATHOLOGICAL AGING AFFECT MUSICAL LEARNING
AND MEMORY? 2012. p. 493-500.
6.
Graham KS, Hodges JR. Differentiating the roles of the hippocampal complex and the neocortex in long-term
memory storage: evidence from the study of semantic dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Neuropsychology.
1997;11(1):77-89.
7.
Cuddy LL, Duffin J. Music, memory, and Alzheimer's disease: is music recognition spared in dementia, and how
can it be assessed? Medical Hypotheses. 2005;64(2):229-35.
8.
Baird A, Brancatisano O, Thompson W. Preservation of music evoked autobiographical memories is dependent
on the type but not the severity of dementia. Journal of the Neurological Sciences. 2017;381(Supplement):85-.
9.
Janata P. The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories. 2009:2579.
10.
Irish M, Cunningham CJ, Walsh JB, Coakley D, Lawlor BA, Robertson IH, et al. Investigating the enhancing effect
of music on autobiographical memory in mild Alzheimer's disease. Dementia And Geriatric Cognitive Disorders.
2006;22(1):108-20.
11.
Foster NA, Valentine ER. The effect of auditory stimulation on autobiographical recall in dementia. Experimental
aging research. 2001;27(3):215-28.
12.
El Haj M, Fasotti L, Allain P. The involuntary nature of music-evoked autobiographical memories in Alzheimer’s
disease. Consciousness and Cognition. 2012;21(1):238-46.
13.
Matthews BR, Chang C-C, May Md, Engstrom J, Miller BL. Pleasurable emotional response to music: A case of
neurodegenerative generalized auditory agnosia. Neurocase. 2009;15(3):248-59.
14.
Clark IN, Tamplin J, Baker FA. Community-Dwelling People Living With Dementia and Their Family Caregivers
Experience Enhanced Relationships and Feelings of Well-Being Following Therapeutic Group Singing: A Qualitative
Thematic Analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 9 (2018). 2018.
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Transcription of Sarah Wilson, 2018 ABC FM Radio Interview
Int: Professor Sarah Wilson from The University of Melbourne, what is happening to
your brain when you hear that, why does it feel so good?
SW: That’s a wonderful question that neuroscientists have really been trying to nut out
the answer to using very modern neuroimaging techniques to investigate the brain in
action, when it listens to music. And a key finding from that work, is that when we listen
to music, either our favourite tunes or perhaps we’re singing, that large areas of the
brain are activated. And that means that many networks of the brain are involved, and
all of those networks are getting used. Music has this remarkable ability to directly
activate the reward networks of the brain, and these are the areas of the brain that give
us that dopamine hit, that really feel-good release of chemicals in the brain that are
known to have positive, feel-good effects.
Int: How does it actually help your brain to be smarter or more active?
SW: That is this concept of neuroplasticity, where the brain changes with repeated use
or engagement in certain activities. And as I said before, when we listen to music or
engage in music, we’re using all of these networks. The thinking is that by using these
networks we are strengthening or enhancing their capability and there is a large body of
research that shows there are benefits for musicians in terms of other cognitive skills.
So, musicians will do better on auditory learning or auditory memory tests. They might
do better on spatial tests. There is also evidence that it generally enhances their IQ and
this is because it is this complex, rewarding task that involves all of these networks. So,
we call this near-transfer effects – that we use one skill to enhance the functioning of
the brain more generally.
Int: That’s really interesting, because I always thought that polymaths, the genius
composers that might have also been excellent at either visual arts, or sciences and
mathematics, were actually born that way.
SW: Well, that’s another intriguing area of research that we are doing in our Lab.
Looking at how much of the musician is born or made. Is it genetics or is it
environment? And of course, it’s a complex story and it’s an interaction of both. But we
are finding in this work, looking for genes in particular for singing ability, that there is a
greater concordance between identical twins in their musical abilities, than non-genetic
twins. So, what this is telling us is that there is probably a genetic predisposition for
musical ability, but then you also need to put in the practice and the hours to train the
networks to get what we call the neuroprotective or beneficial effects.
Int: And we’re not all brilliant musicians or good enough to be professional musicians,
so what if we just love listening to that music - can that help us become smarter, or can
we become superhuman just by listening to Mozart?
SW: I’m not sure about superhuman. But certainly there are some interesting clinical
studies that show, for instance, for people who have had a stroke, that if as part of their
early rehabilitation in the hospital wards they’re played music, versus perhaps some
auditory books or white noise or silence, that those people who have had the music
actually get discharged from hospital earlier and have better recovery markers early,
post their injury.
Int: But is all music equal, Sarah? Because if that person is in hospital and they’re
recovering and they’re listening to get Beethoven, is that going to help them get better
more quickly than listening to something equally fabulous but not classical, like the
Beatles?
SW: So, this is a very debated issue, and you’ve probably heard of the Mozart Effect,
which is an old idea now, but has caused a lot of controversy in the literature. Is there a
certain type of music that you need to listen to that is going to entrain your neurones to
fire, or work together in a particular way that brings maximal benefits? The literature
suggests that in fact it’s probably got more to do with mood, and that the benefits are
greatest when you’re actually fully engaged and motivated to be listening, and/or
playing or singing the music that you like because that’s when you’re going to get the
best brain function in response.
Music and older adults [Audio transcript]
Tamplin, Jeanette & McFerran, Kat. Music and older adults [Audio t ra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne
Interviewer:
Wonderful to be here today with Dr. Jeanette Tamplin who is a music therapist—a registered
music therapist—but also, and importantly for today, Jeanette has been the recipient of an
NHMRC-ARC Dementia Research Development Fellowship, which was the signature initiative
created by the Australian government because of their recognition that we needed to be focusing
research dollars towards the area of dementia. Within that scheme, their recognition that music
was playing an important role in the lives of people with dementia.
Jeanette’s coming to us today with a background as a research fellow. Somebody who’s spent a
good deal of their time in research activity, as well as practicing as a music therapist, which
means she brings both practical and theoretical understanding following on a long time ago from
when she completed her PhD here at the University of Melbourne, and was actually rewarded a
Chancellor's Prize from memory, for the brilliance of that initial work. It’s wonderful to have you
here today, Jeanette. Thank you for making the time to talk with us about music and older adults.
Interviewee:
Mm-hmm, thanks. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
Interviewer:
Yeah, thanks. My first question is really broad. Please feel free just to share any thoughts that
first come to mind and we’ll see where to go from there. It’s really about why are you even
interested in this topic of music and older adults? Why do you even think that is an important
topic for investigation?
Interviewee:
Well, I think it’s important because I have a strong belief that music is important for people at all
ages, so that obviously includes older people. I don’t think we need to distinguish what age
someone is to know that music is beneficial for people, so I guess that’s a good place to start. In
terms of why specifically music is important for older people, I think there are lots of different
angles that I approach this with.
One of them would be to support healthy aging. I think there’s research out there at the moment
that sustain that cognitive stimulation, learning an instrument, things like that, are really good for
building cognitive reserve and maintaining cognitive function as people age, and that those
cognitive functions can be declining over time. I think that’s a really good angle from a cognitive
perspective.
Also, it can support exercise, and keeping people healthy as they age by motivating them to
exercise and things like with physical entrainment. It’s a great way to engage socially. Lots of
music activities happen in social contexts like choirs, and things like that. There have been
several research studies to show that people who are otherwise healthy but aging do really well
from being involved in things like community choirs, or community music groups.
I think all of those things support the idea that music’s good for healthy older people to support
them as they age, but also that we can use it in a therapeutic context. I guess that’s where my
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passion lies. My training and my research has been from a music therapy perspective. Not so
much from a preventative, but more in a dealing with disease or debilitation in some way. There’s
lots of different ways that we address similar things, but helping people who have got some other
underlying problem, using music in a therapeutic context.
People who might have health conditions like Parkinson’s, or dementia, or stroke, heart
conditions, things like that, so we can use music in a therapeutic context looking at similar sorts
of things. We could focus on cognitive stimulation, and improving cognitive abilities, or supporting
exercise and gait rehabilitation, or social engagement because people tend to get much more
isolated as they age, and find it hard to get out and interact with others. Loved ones start dying
off, so I think keeping people connected and socially linked up with others, music is a great way
to bring people together.
Interviewer:
I can really hear your interaction—the way that you see music is functioning in healthy lives, and
how you then translate that to support people to live as healthy lives as possible under whatever
health conditions they’re grappling with at the time. I was thinking about—you sound very oriented
towards using music for health improvements on the basis of that, so it’s actually—can you tell
us a little bit about what background you came from to have this belief that people can improve
in one way or another based on their engagement with music?
Interviewee:
Sure. Yeah, well I’ve been working in neuro rehabilitation for 20 years now, and probably a large
proportion of that population are older people. Stroke often happens—it can happen for younger
people as well, but increasing incidence for older people. I’ve worked for a long time as a clinician
working to use music to help people improve function in different areas.
Yeah, so I guess that’s come—my drive to work in neuro rehabilitation has come from a passion
and really intrigued by the way that music affects the brain, and the brain controls all of our
functions. Wanting to be able to harness that power of music to be used in a therapeutic way has
been something that’s driven me clinically and in my research career to answer questions that
I’ve been interested in in working on.
I’m also, I guess, really interested in building an evidence base because I think music can be
used in a very targeted way to improve function and well-being for older people or people of all
ages. That’s been a driver, I guess, in my research, that I really wanted to contribute to a building
of an evidence base so that music therapy is seen as an effective and—based on evidence—
that we can provide to people who are funding services, or things like that so that there’s a greater
access for people to get access to these types of programs.
Interviewer:
When you talk about evidence base, the students in this class obviously come from a range of
different disciplinary backgrounds. What kind of research helps in building an evidence base for
a profession like music therapy? What do people look for as evidence?
Interviewee:
I guess in these types of medical or, yeah, health and medical settings, people are looking for
more objectivist types of research to support decisions around funding programs sometimes we
find. Particularly, I guess, in these health funding models, so that’s why—partially it’s the way my
brain works a bit as well that I really enjoy finding answers to questions, and seeing how people
respond to particular types of the ways that we can manipulate or give them musical experiences.
I think that that also works well to developing specific music-based protocols that we can then
test and see, what is the effect? What is the effect of this particular way of interacting in a musical
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way versus not doing that? Teasing out what the differences are and using that to argue for an
effect, and then funding, I guess, as the outcome of that.
Interviewer:
Mm, so I can hear you’ve got comparison conditions, which means that some people will
participate in a music therapy intervention which you have designed specifically for people with
a particular condition—a health condition—and you’ll compare that—do you compare that to
nothing, or is there comparable conditions that you are often trying to tease out? Like, is music
therapy more effective than something else? Is there a competition in there, or how does it work
for you as a researcher?
Interviewee:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think I’ve tried a couple of different research designs out over
time, but the one that I like the best—it’s definitely about comparing because if you’re doing a
randomized trial or a controlled trial of any kind you need a comparison group. I’ve tried
weightless control groups so that—I think ethically, I guess, as a therapist I don’t like to have
someone who gets nothing—a group that gets nothing. Either they get the music intervention
later on, or they get something else.
The design that I’ve used a few times is where there’s an active control group. For my PhD study
we looked at people who were doing small therapeutic singing groups versus a receptive music
therapy method where they were listening to songs and talking about songs. Singing was the
main thing that we were looking at, so the control group didn’t sing. We’ve done similar things
with our ‘Parkinsong’ research, so wanting to compare—then there are actually—apart from the
ethical desire to not withhold something that you think’s useful for people—there are actually
research design issues that make this design useful and worthwhile because we want to control
for as many of the similar conditions as we can.
If we’re getting people together in a group with a facilitator or a therapist, then that might have an
effect. We actually wanna compare a scenario where we’re getting two groups of people together.
They’re meeting together every week for the same amount of time with a therapist or with a
facilitator, and they’re doing something active. They might be communicating and socializing. All
of those things are the same across both groups, but the only thing that’s different is the actual
music intervention that one group’s getting.
In our pilot Parkinsong study, we compared people who came together in small groups, and now
we’re doing dancing, or painting, or other things. They were socializing with other people with
Parkinson’s. There was a facilitator or a therapist there that they weren’t singing. Yeah, so trying
to compare those two things.
Interviewer:
Sorry to interrupt, but I just got quite interested in this idea of singing. That came from your PhD
research this particular fascination with singing?
Interviewee:
Mm-hmm.
Interviewer:
Is that relevant with older people particularly, or is that part of your belief about the function of
music for all people, which just happens to be focused on older people?
Interviewee:
I think it comes from my passion about singing is therapeutic for all people. I think there are some
aging-related conditions that make it even more—have an even greater potential for helping
people. Like you said, yes, I did my PhD research, and we were looking at singing for people with
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quadriplegia to build their respiratory strength and their ability to project their voice, and people
of all ages.
That’s really translated across now—and I also did some research prior to that with people who
had a stroke. Looking at singing to improve their articulation and the clarity of their speech.
Different types of ways of manipulating a singing intervention and the focus of one of the goals,
but still being very goal-focused, I guess, about the way that we’re singing. Rather than, “Let’s all
just have a happy sing-along.”, which is also great and everyone loves it, but it’s not as goaldirected or targeted.
Both of those things—those previous projects—informed what we’ve done in the Parkinsong
project where we’re really looking at singing to improve—like, with Parkinson’s, which is an age—
tends to be much more prevalent with older people age over 65, the communication is one of the
main things that gets affected alongside lots of other movement things like their gait, and their
shaking, and things like that. It also affects the muscles in their face and that controls speech in
their mouth and face.
Singing, while it’s useful for everyone, it’s particularly useful when you’re having a communication
problem that’s affecting the way that you speak, and that you can interact socially causing you to
withdraw. Not being able to—not feeling confident or feeling embarrassed about communicating,
which then has a self-perpetuating cycle of making you speak less, which makes you not want to
speak. Yeah, so it just keeps continuing.
If we can use singing, and which we’ve shown that we can do in our first study—and we’re about
to start another one—but we’re showing that singing actually improves people’s functional
speech; that they’re singing louder and better, and that that also has a flow-on effect to their
confidence. They’re less embarrassed. They’re communicating more so they’re using their
speech more. I think that’s the other kind of outcomes that I’m looking for. I guess coming back
to the first question you asked was—it is about my belief about singing, but there are certain
populations where it’s even more powerful because there’s a clinical, or a—yeah, a reason why
they would need it more than usual.
Interviewer:
I find that really interesting to—coming back to a really clear focus on functional improvements
related to people’s respiratory conditions, but also this communication skill. Acknowledging that
there’s also a range of mental health parts to that to do with confidence, and shame, and all of
those things that as a therapist you might be also focused on. Do you need to control for those
aspects of the intervention?
I know that sometimes in music therapy studies, for example, they wanna separate out the
influence of the therapist from the influence of the music. Where do you stand on that, I guess,
about whether or not it’s possible in a music therapy intervention study to separate those
influences out, or whether that’s important just to see if it’s just the music, or if they need to go
together?
Interviewee:
Well, I think there’s even a third factor which is the influence of each other, and being there
together as a group, which I think that’s also hugely therapeutic. I actually don’t think that’s it’s
possible, and nor would I want to separate those things out because I think music therapy has
that—it’s different. It’s not music medicine. It’s not prescribing a magic pill and getting people to
sing three songs a week is gonna make them improve. It might make them improve a little bit,
but it definitely won’t address a lot of those other aspects around the well-being and the
communication-related quality of life types of goals I don’t think to the same extent.
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We’ve just tried to design an intervention that is replicable and well-documented, but that
incorporates all of those aspects. It’s actually more of a transdisciplinary model—the Parkinsong
study specifically—because it’s very much informed by speech pathology and music therapy
together. The facilitator’s actually working a transdisciplinary model where they use each other’s
skill sets. Part of it is be getting them to actually practice conversation skills.
We’re weaving in practicing speaking using voice exercises, singing a song, focusing on holding
notes for longer, or doing funny sounds with our voice which normally you wouldn’t do because
you’d feel weird, but everyone—you’re in a social context where everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s
got Parkinson’s, so no one feels embarrassed about shaking, or making funny sounds with their
voices because there’s an understanding that there’s a therapeutic goal for it. It’s quite different,
I guess, for if you think about all of those things in combination from a traditional choir, or just a
community singing group which would also be lovely, but different.
Interviewer:
Yeah, and I can feel how very easily that translates into being able to measure different skill levels
pre and post. I assume that in those designs what you’re looking for is improvements in—whether
it’s articulation or respiration. Is that right? Is that what you teach to measure?
Interviewee:
Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. With with these types of designs, we usually have a primary outcome
measure and then a range of secondary outcome measures. With the Parkinsong, the main issue
that causes communication problems is this deterioration in loudness, so people—just because
of the movement disorder—they’re unable to—over time they get softer and softer. Other things
happen to their voice. They slur their words and things like that.
The Parkinsong, our primary aim was loudness. Can we get them to be louder? There are actually
other interventions that have been—speech pathology interventions that have been tested and
found effective. We wanted to do—but there’s been critique of some of those because they’re
very repetitive; they’re very drill-based exercise; highly intensive, like you have to do it every day
for four weeks. It’s very full-on, and they have quite a big drop out, and also there’s not that many
trained to do this type of specific intervention.
We wanted to find out, can we do something similar with something that’s quite motivating? That
has a social aspect that maybe helps people cope with a lot of the other symptoms of Parkinson’s
at the same time? Yeah, that’s why we designed this intervention in this way and looked at
loudness as the primary outcome measure. We’re also looking at things like respiratory strength
probably as a mechanism for getting louder. To understand if they are getting louder, how are
they doing that? Also things like intelligibility, and also a whole range of well-being outcomes like
depression, and stress, and anxiety, and relationship quality, and things like that.
Yeah, so we designed the study as a—where we measure people pre, post, or pre, mid, and
post, and look at standardized measures that we can measure how loud someone’s voice is
before they start the intervention, and then again at the end; or how much they can push air out
of their lungs before and after. We also used a whole range of standardized measures like the
Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale for example, and voice-related quality of life. We looked at
that as well.
Interviewer:
I might use that as an opportunity to then move. I know you’ve done a lot of research in dementia
as well. Obviously that’s a degenerative disorder, so the kinds of functional skill improvements
may or may not be as relevant. Do you have the same focus—‘cause I know you still focused on
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singing—or do you move into more of a well-being landscape when you’re looking in the dementia
studies?
Interviewee:
Well, I guess the work that we’ve been doing in a related kind of way I guess—which is the
community-based singing groups for people with dementia: the Remini-sing Study—I guess on
face value looks similar. Like, we’re encouraging people with a degenerative condition and their
partners, carers, spouses, to come along to these interventions.
I think you’re right. In some ways it’s not so much a functional goal mainly because there isn’t the
communication problems. They’re not trying to address something that’s very functional to
improve, but more so about supporting relationships and knowing that there is such a massive
growth in the older population as our population ages, that dementia also—the incidence is
increasing because there are more people who are getting older. Wanting to be able to contribute
to finding ways to support people to live in the community. To support them to be able to have as
a high quality of life as they can for as long as they can.
Also to support people who are caring for someone with dementia because there’s a massive
unpaid workforce out there who are having to translate from being a husband or a wife to looking
after the person that they love most and seeing them deteriorate, and all of the stress and the
isolation that happens for them. Not being able to go out because they need to look after this
person. There’s a whole lot of changing roles. I’m looking at the need, I suppose, and targeting
the interventions that we develop to the needs, and the needs in that population are different.
We’ve also got other studies that I’m looking in more focused on residential care; another big
international trial that we’re working on, so differences—it is different depending on the context.
Yeah, the Remini-sing Study’s really focusing mainly on the relationship quality, and supporting
people to have that mutually rewarding musical experience together that’s beneficial for them
both on an individual well-being level, but also in being able to connect with each other, and find
a sense of relationship that they might otherwise be losing in other contexts.
Interviewer:
Mm, and I can really hear as you’re speaking there’s a part of this which is inherent to the music
therapy discipline, which is that you can use the same musical experience, or musical encounter
that you can tailor it towards different outcomes. That can sound a little bit counterintuitive to
some people. You might think, for example, that singing together in a choir-like situation, or
singing together would be good for respiration. Whereas if you were going to be focused on wellbeing, you might think of doing something else musical together: listening to music together or
whatever.
In fact, what we know is that it’s not actually the particular act, or the particular experience of
what we’re doing musically, but it is very much about how you as the research designer in this
case—but all music therapy practitioners more generally—actually tailor what happens just
before you start singing, and what happens just after you start singing, and how you select which
songs. For respiratory goals you might choose a different song to sing as a group than you might
choose one which is based on associations and memories that will bring that mutual pleasure.
That’s really interesting. I don’t know if you can just explain the ways that you alter group singing
towards different goals very briefly. I know it’s a whole official thought system that you have.
Interviewee:
Yeah, some of what you said makes sense because definitely if we’re looking at a more functional
goal that’s around building respiratory strength to be able to get louder, or to be able to articulate
better, there’s very much a strong focus on exercises, and pulling out certain parts of songs, and
focusing on getting louder. It’s in a fun way. Not in a cracking the whip way, but getting people
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to—invoking that sense of group competition and trying to outdo each other, and so building all
of that into it.
It’s quite a different sort of experience than—I guess it’s kind of like training for a marathon and
going for a jog: they’re both running, but they’re different types of goals that you’re working on.
Keeping those goals—sometimes those goals are—it’s helpful to have them in the forefront of
the minds of the group, so bringing, “This is why we’re here. We need to get our voices louder
and stronger, and we’re gonna combat this deterioration that’s happening in Parkinson’s.” People
with Parkinson’s are super keen to fight the progression of the disease in any way. They’re super
keen for research. They’re super keen to do anything that’s gonna help this progression of this
horrible disease.
With dementia it’s a different experience because a lot of the people in the group with dementia
don’t even know they have dementia for starters, so talking in a goal-focused way isn’t as
relevant. It’s more about the in-the-moment experience and bringing them back a sense of
themselves. Getting them or their partners to choose songs that are significant, and that remind
them of things, and that bring that sense of self right back up into the front of their mind rather
than being a bit confused about what’s happening.
It really validates important and meaningful times in their lives, and anchors them to who they
are. Yeah, I guess it’s—yeah, it’s different. Very different focus with similar types of—at least for
singing, but yeah, can be quite different ways of singing and ways that it’s introduced—the
activities are introduced and the way that people engage.
Interviewer:
I always find it really interesting reading the music psychology literature the degree to which
people try to reduce music to variable status. In a way trying to say that the music is having a
direct effect on the brain which is doing a certain thing, whereas certainly in the kinds of studies
that you’re doing, which are evidence orientated, trying to see whether a particular intervention
makes a difference to people’s functional capacities. Then you can’t separate out the effect of
the music and it really—I love hearing how you alter that so carefully even though it’s still singing.
I think that’s a really useful thing for people to reflect on how differently music can be used in
these different types of experiments.
Finally, just thinking about—you’ve worked in Parkinson’s, in stroke, in neuro rehabilitation, with
people with dementia, so your research has been across a wide range of people. I wonder what’s
been most interesting to you where you’re hoping if you have the opportunity to do anything at
all next, what hypothesis you might be interested in. Testing, or whether there’s something which
has been particularly amazing in your journey as a researcher that stands out about the way that
music can work in the world, or whether it really has come back to this ability to just validate and
endorse people’s rights to access music as an intervention during difficult times of their lives.
What has it brought up for you?
Interviewee:
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think one of the things that has stood out for me over a number
of different studies—‘cause they’re all slightly different—but the thing that stands out as common
between them all as a stand-out is the motivational aspects of music. The fact that, like I said
before, there are other evidence-based interventions that you can use—speech-based
interventions that you can use to improve Parkinson’s-related communication, but they don’t have
the same—they have high drop-out, and it’s not very motivating and not very fun to do.
I guess that’s the thing that we draw on in music therapy in lots of different settings. Coming from
a newer rehab setting, lots of things that we can get people to do in rehab aren’t very fun. They
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might be painful, and annoying, and pushing all the buttons of “I can’t do this very well”, but
music’s really motivating, and we can get so much more out of people when they’re doing
something functional in a musical context.
That’s also really stood out for me in the research that we’ve done. The Parkinsong research, we
had such high attendance. People would just not miss it. They would come every single week
and they would say this is the thing that they look forward to the most in the week because they
know—I think one of our participants interviewed said, “We know on Friday’s it’s gonna be a good
day. We’re gonna sing and then we’re gonna feel good.” It’s just like a given. “Then we’ll go out
for lunch afterwards, and we’ll talk more than we usually do because everything’s all stimulated
and practiced and lubricated.”
That was an example from Parkinsong, but we had similar things with the Reminiscing Study
where people would say, “The person that we’re caring for with dementia had lost track of most
of the day-to-day things that were happening in their week, and weren’t really able to take on new
information or learn new things, but they knew that Friday’s were choir day.” That for some reason
that would stick in their heads, and that they were always really motivated to get there because—
and the same thing with the carer.
The carer was getting so much out of the peer support, and interacting with other people, and
feeling better themselves, and getting out of their headspace of, I’m at home and seeing this
person I love deteriorate, but we’re here; we’re singing together; we’re on the same page. They
were really motivated to come along once they had experienced it. I think that’s the thing that
stands out to me about—yeah, one of the most amazing things about working as a music
therapist is that we have this tool that’s so motivating and so engaging for people. It happens to
be really beneficial and therapeutic if we use it in the right way.
Interviewer:
Oh, [laughter] that’s beautiful. Thank you. Dr. Jeanette Tamplin, it’s been wonderful to take some
time just thinking about all of the variety of research that you’ve done in this area working with
older adults. Thank you for your time and for all of the work that you’ve done in the field so far.
Interviewee:
Pleasure.
[End of Audio]
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Music and older adults [Video transcript]
Clark, Imogen. Music and older adults [Video t ra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne.
Chapter 1: What relationships do older people have with music?
I would like to begin by considering what music is, or has been, through the lives of older people who may be anywhere
from 65 years of age through to 100 years plus according to the World Health Organization. It's important to note the
diversity in this age group, because it represents at least two generations.
As recognised by Andy Bennett in his book “Music, style and aging: Growing old disgracefully”, 1 older adults’ music
biographies are also likely to be extremely diverse.
For example, some people will have grown up in the Jazz era of the 40s, others during the rock and roll era in the 50s.
Later we had the Psychedelic and political music of the 60s. Punk in the 70s and maybe dance and disco in the 80s. So,
there's a fair range of different types of contemporary music in that time frame. Interestingly there are also a number of
musicians, the Rolling Stones come to mind, who have grown older with their fans and continue to draw crowds. There is
a contemporary music culture that has evolved with older people that continues to influence their thinking and lifestyle.
It's pretty funny to think that the Stones actually wrote about what a drag it is getting old because the persona they exude
really hasn’t changed over the years.
My own research2 suggests that many older people not only relate to music from their youth, but have strong connections
with music from other prominent times during their lives. For example, many have explained to me that they enjoy music
that has been introduced to them by their children and grandchildren, because this music represents special relationships.
Of course, we also need to note that not everyone is into contemporary music either, classical music is often preferred.
Older people that I have worked with are also often involved in choirs, community music groups (ukulele groups for
example are really taking off), and orchestras.
Chapter 2: How do older people perceive music in their lives?
Let’s consider how older people perceive the role of music in their lives. Is this perception merely nostalgic or does music
actually play a more powerful or meaningful role in their daily lives?
Hayes and Minichiello3 undertook a really interesting study back in 2005 involving in-depth interviews with 52 healthy
older Australians to explore what music meant to them. The study asked participants how they felt music related to selfidentity, self-expression and personal well-being. Their research suggests that music provides older people with a
symbolic avenue for defining the self and understanding personal identity following retirement. Participants in this study
explained how they had time to reconnect with music in more depth and with more passion than they had during their
working years. They spoke about joining music groups and choirs, attending more concerts and simply having more time
to listen to music.
Participants in Hayes and Minichiello’s study also explained how music is about connection with others. Being in active
music groups helped older people to feel valued, accepted and needed, and the empathic relationships built with other
group members overcome or at least help older to manage experiences of stigma and isolation.
Participants also spoke about experiences of well-being from music participation, even when they are also faced with
chronic health conditions such as dementia, cancer and heart disease. This is because involvement with music remains
accessible when other skills and interests may not be readily available anymore.
Older people in Hays and Minichiello’s study also spoke about how music helps them to experience and express
spirituality. Both listening to music and playing it evoke strong emotions and imagery, a sense of beauty and aesthetic
pleasure, and strong feelings of transcendence.
So now I also want to look at what music means to older people in terms of their health and well-being and to do this, I'm
going to briefly touch on 3 examples from my research.
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Chapter 3: How can music support physical exercise?
First, I want talk about self-selected music playlists that older people with heart disease developed for exercise and
physical activity.4 Participants were guided using a conceptual framework to consider physiological and subjective
motivators for exercise in the music they selected.5 This was an interesting process, particularly as we explored subjective
motivators, which involved hearing people’s stories about special relationships through their lives and experiences from
long ago that had strong associations to music. Physiological motivators are perhaps more straight forward, and involve
thinking about aspects in the music such as the rhythm, tempo, melody, and lyrics.
We found that listening to self-selected music helped participants to overcome feelings of anxiety and fear about doing
exercise. For example, one participant found that his music had associations with his younger, more energetic self, which
helped him to feel stronger and more confident. Participants spoke about how music lifted their mood and was energising.
Music was also a viewed as a “companion” that helped them to feel like a “friend was with” them as they “walked”.
Chapter 4: How can music enhance connectedness?
In a further study, we examined the experiences of community-dwelling people with dementia and their family caregivers,
who attended a therapeutic choir.6 Participants in this project explained how it was really important to them that they could
engage in singing together. They explained that there were lots of community activities that they could attend separately,
but very few where they felt comfortable and welcomed as a couple or family. Participants in our project further explained
how “no one [was] judging anybody else, and everyone “understood”. Participants “could sing in a manner that they
wanted without feeling restricted”.
Participants also spoke about the personal benefits they experienced from being in the choir, including a sense of pride.
One participant with dementia described the choir as “something to live for” which is pretty powerful. Another participant
with dementia explained how being in the choir helped him to feel “more confident about meeting new people.”
Carers explained how they had initially signed up for the choir because they thought it would be beneficial for their family
member with dementia, but they were really surprised to find that it benefited them as well. In particular, participants, both
those with dementia and their family caregivers, enjoyed the mental challenge of learning new skills.
Chapter 5: How can music improve mental wellbeing?
Finally, I want to talk to you about a therapeutic songwriting project with people who have dementia and their family
caregivers. This research is hot off the press and not published yet but supports findings from the choir research
suggesting that couples and families who attend weekly music therapy sessions benefit from enhanced connectedness
with each other and other group members. In qualitative interviews, participants in the songwriting group, as for the choir,
were overwhelmingly positive about the experience and noted that a being able to attend together was very beneficial.
They also spoke about how they enjoyed the mental stimulation because songwriting is quite a challenging thing to do.
One of the family caregivers said that she enjoyed seeing the way her husband “put his thinking cap on”. Another
participant with dementia noted how “the music seemed to take [her] back to happy times, and it stays with you after the
sessions”. Participants also spoke of the social stimulation and interaction that resulted collaboration as they focussed on
the “single aim of writing a song together.” One participant explained how “It’s nice to express a group, and to express
other peoples’ ideas, to listen, and to be listened to, to share”.
Participants were surprised that they could write a song and were very proud of the product. As one participant noted, this
project really “challenges perceptions about what people with dementia are capable of”.
We were excited by results from rating questionnaires, which suggested that therapeutic songwriting may lead to reduced
symptoms of depression for people with dementia and improved quality of life for family caregivers.
Chapter 6: Conclusion
In summary these research projects demonstrate the value of music as we age. Whether by simply listening to music, or
actively participating in music activities, music supports older people to reconnect with their self-identity and personal
strengths, build social connections and empathic relationships, and provides an avenue for mental stimulation, growth,
and the development of new skills.
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References
1. Bennet, A. (2013). Music, style, and aging: Growing old disgracefully? Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
2. Clark, I. N. (2016). Music to support physical activity in older adults with health conditions. (Doctor of Philospohy).
La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1959.9/559768
3. Hays, T., & Minichiello, V. (2005). The contribution of music to quality of life in older people: an Australian qualitative
study. Ageing & Society, 25, 261-278.
4. Clark, I. N., Baker, F. A., & Taylor, N., F. (2016). Older adults’ music listening preferences to support physical
activity following cardiac rehabilitation. Journal of Music Therapy, 53(4), 364-397. doi:10
5. Clark, I. N., Baker, F. A., & Taylor, N. F. (2016). The modulating effects of music listening on health-related exercise
and physical activity in adults: A systematic review and narrative synthesis. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 25(1),
76-104. doi:10.1080/08098131.2015.1008558
6. Clark, I. N., Tamplin, J. D., & Baker, F. A. (2018). Community-dwelling people living with dementia and their family
caregivers’ experiences of therapeutic group singing: A qualitative thematic analysis. Frontiers in Psychology,
9(Article 1332), 1-13. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01332
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Music and the brain [Video transcript]
Lee, C. Music and the brain [Video transcript]. University of Melbourne.
Presenter: Dr Young-Eun Claire Lee, The University of Melbourne
Music and neuroscience/auditory processing
It doesn’t matter if it’s Bach, the Beatles, or Maroon 5. Your favourite music is likely to trigger a similar type
of activity in your brain as other people’s favourite do in theirs.
Music and neuroscience explores how music impacts brain function and human behaviour.
In this lecture, I will be discussing three main topics – 1) What do we currently know about auditory and
musical processing in the brain? 2) What is the relationship between music and language processing? 3)
What is the link between music and emotions in the brain?
So, first let’s think about what happens in our brain when we hear a sound?
One striking aspect of our brain’s response to sound is that the neural response to sound is isomorphic to
the sound itself. In other words, if we look at the waveform of a piece of music, and then the waveform of
the brain’s response to that music, the two waveforms are identical.
[Slide 1] The earliest stage of neural processing of sound begins in the cochlea, which is a small snail-shaped
organ in the inner ear. In this organ, there are hair cells whose function is to transform mechanical energy
into neural signals.
[Slide 2] As in all other senses except smell, auditory information crosses over from one side to the other; so
information presented to the left ear travels to the right side of the brain and vice versa. The second slide
shows the major pathways of auditory processing. The first convergence of information from left and right
ears occurs in the superior olivary nucleus, which are a collection of nuclei in the brainstem. The main
function of this area is to determine differences in timing and intensity between the signals from each ear
for sound localisation. From here, the auditory signals are transmitted to the lateral lemniscus and then to
the inferior colliculus, still in the brainstem. Here, the auditory spatial map is generated and aligned to a
visual spatial map in another area of the brainstem, for further coding of sound localization. From there, the
auditory pathway continues to the thalamus, which regulates which sensory information reaches the cortex,
namely primary auditory cortex, which is thought to process auditory input at a very basic level.
Musical processing
Let’s now think about musical processing.
The oldest scientific method for understanding brain functions is to study the consequences of brain lesions.
For example, people who sustain severe lesion to the primary auditory cortex disturbs a person’s ability to
make sense of sound while lesions to certain auditory cortical regions result in an unusual phenomenon - a
highly selective problem with perceiving and interpreting music, termed ‘Amusia’.
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People who have been diagnosed with amusia have no problems with speaking or understanding speech or
making sense of everyday sounds, but they have particular difficulty with processing music such as
recognising familiar melody. However, we are no longer relying on patients with acquired brain lesions to
study musical processing in the brain.
There have been over 100 neuroimaging studies that have examined the brain systems involved in listening
to, responding to, and performing music.
[Slide 3] What these studies have found is that there is no single centre for music. Rather, music is a whole
nervous system activity. When music is played, imagined or listened to, almost every part of your brain gets
activated concurrently, including auditory cortex, motor cortex and limbic system (emotion). It is presumed
that multiple brain systems are synchronised by the structure and temporal flow of music. Even when we are
listening to music in the most passive way, your brain is intensely active in processing and responding to
music.
This is different to say, the language centre, where there is a specific region of the brain dedicated to
language processing. So when this area gets knocked out from a stroke for example, a person loses their
ability to understand or express language and become aphasic. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to
lose music in the face of brain insult or neurological disorders.
Music and language processing – overlapping and discrete processes
Given the obvious similarities between music and language, it is not surprising that there has been a running
debate for more than two hundred years as to whether they evolved in tandem or independently – and if
the latter, which came first. We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one.
Neurobehavioural evidence suggest that musical processing involves multiple components that can be
selectively impaired without apparent effect on language. There have been cases with amusia who show
selective deficits in receptive/expressive musical functions with no issues with language production or
comprehension, as well as cases of musicians with aphasia but spared musical abilities.
[Slide 4] An increasing number of neuroimaging studies have shown significant and large overlap in the
response to vocal and musical stimuli, taken as evidence of sharing of musical and speech processing. The
key question is to what extent parts of the musicality network can be shared both functionally and
neurologically with language. The green boxes in the slide indicate music specificity and italics indicate
possible shared module between language and music. Some people have argued that music is simply an
extension of speech.
[Slide 5] From a neuroanatomical point of view, there is large overlap between neural and cognitive
mechanisms devoted to the perception and production of music and language. For example, functional MRI
research has reported shared activation patterns involving middle and superior temporal cortical regions, for
the perception of speech, and song stimuli both with and without lyrics.
[Slide 6] In a study by Brown and colleagues, amateur musicians vocally improvised melodic or linguistic
phrases in response to unfamiliar, auditorily presented melodies or phrases. These researchers found that
the areas of activation were virtually identical for linguistic and melodic generation.
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Most of the differences were seen in lateralisation tendencies with language favouring the left hemisphere.
Together, these findings have been used to support both the co-location and separate representation of
music and language functions within the brain. Currently, the idea that parts of the language and music
networks are shared is popular in the literature.
Music and emotions
How does music move us?
Music is particularly useful in studying human emotions because music elicits such a wide range of
emotional experiences and manifestations.
[Show slide 7] In one of the earlier studies, Blood and Zatorre 2001 used PET (positron emission
tomography) to look at the neural mechanisms underlying intensely pleasant emotional response to music.
10 undergraduate students who reported to experience frequent “chills” when listening to music were
recruited. Each chose 1 piece of classical music that consistently elicited “chill. “Participants were scanned
using PET while passively listening to their selected music, control music, amplitude matched noise and
silence.
As intensity of these chills increased, cerebral blood flow increases were observed in reward and pleasure
circuits in the brain, including ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and ventral
medial prefrontal cortex. These brain structures are known to be active in response to other euphoriainducing stimuli, such as drugs.
[Slide 8] More recently, Salimpoor and colleagues in 2011 have discovered that our brain releases
neurochemicals called dopamine responsible for our subjective feelings of pleasure when we listen to music
that gives us these euphoric feelings. Similar neurochemical activity occurs when you eat your favourite
food, eat cheesecake or chocolate, have sex, runners high or euphoria from cocaine.
[Slide 9 + 10] What was really interesting in this study was the timing of this “chill” response. These
researchers used fMRI to look at what was happening to the brain seconds before the subjects reported
chills and found a functional dissociation in dopamine release and activation. In other words, they found two
separate regions of the brain that respond to one of the peak experiences of listening to a favourite passage
of music and seconds leading up to that, in anticipation of that climatic moment. They found that there was
a prolonged increase of activity in the caudate before the favourite passage in music.
This reward is entirely abstract and may involve such factors as suspended expectations and a sense of
resolution. Indeed, composers and performers frequently take advantage of such phenomena, and
manipulate emotional arousal by violating expectations in certain ways or by delaying the predicted
outcome (for example, by inserting unexpected notes or slowing tempo) before the resolution to heighten
the motivation for completion.
Evidence suggests that music making draws on a range of highly developed and well- integrated sensory,
perceptual and motor skills, as well as emotions, memory and higher order cognitive and attentional
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functions. This motivation to engage in this complex state is driven by the reward system of the brain that
activates in response to both the anticipation of and the experience of pleasure.
This suggests that, probably, the reason that we find listening to our favourite music over and over again so
appealing is that emotional catharsis or release of tension that we experience.
[Slide 11] Now, there is a small proportion of people who have what we call “musical anhedonia” who show
reduced emotional arousal to music while they show normal response to other types of reward. MartinezMolina and colleagues in 2016 found that individuals with this condition show reduced activity in the nucleus
accumbens during music listening but not during gambling task. They also show normal activity in the
primary auditory cortex demonstrating that this is not a perceptual problem. As this example shows, we can
link reduction or increase in brain activity with the presence or absence of emotional response to music.
References
Alluri, V., Toviainen, P., Jaaskelainen, I. P., Glerean, E., Sams, M., & Brattico, E. (2012). Large-scale brain
networks emerge from dynamic processing of musical timbre, key and rhythm. Neuroimage, 59, 3677 –
3689.
Blood, A. J., & Zatorre, R. J., (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain
regions implicated in reward and emotion. PNAS, 98, 11818 – 11823.
Brown, S., Martinez, M. J., Parsons, L. M., (2006). Music and language side by side in the brain: a PET study of
the generation of melodies and sentences. European Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 2791 – 2803.
Martinez-Molina, N., Mas-Herreno, E., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Zatorre, R. J., & Marco-Pallares, J. (2016). Neural
correlates of specific musical anhedonia. PNAS, 113, E7337 – 7345.
Peretz, I., & Coltheart, M. (2003). Modularity of music processing. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 688 – 691.
Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine
release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14, 257 –
262.
Schön, D., Gordon, R., Campagne, A., Magne, C., Astesano, C., Anton, J. L., & Besson, M. (2010). Similar cerebral
networks in language, music and song perception. Neuroimage, 51, 450 – 461.
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Music and the brain interview podcast [Audio
transcript]
McFerran, K.S. and Collins, A. Music and the brain [Audio transcript]. University of Melbourne.
Interviewer: Professor Katrina Skewes McFerran, The University of Melbourne
Interviewee: Dr Anita Collins, The University of Melbourne
Interviewer:
Hi there, Anita. It's so great to be here and talking to you about Music and the Brain. Of course,
you are well known around Australia and around the world on this topic, not just because of your
marvelous TED Talks, but your contribution to the field generally.
I guess what I wanted to start by asking was, what made you interested in the topic of Music and
the Brain? Why do you think that's important?
Interviewee:
Well, I'm a music educator, and I often say to music educators, when I meet them, I'm a practicing
music educator. I use the word really deliberately; I'm still practicing my craft. Part of what
happened was, I was searching around for a PhD topic, and I got two pieces of advice. Someone
said, “Pick the thing that's being researched the most. It's got like so much stuff about it and all
you're doing is looking at all the research in your own lens but pick something easy and just get
it done.”
Then another piece of advice was, “You need to love the topic as much at the end as you did at
the start, and it needs to feed your soul.” Now, I could have gone either way, but I decided to try
and find something that I would be so excited about at the end. I spent nine months reading just
everything. I was waiting for that one moment, that one moment where I said, “That's it. That's
the spark. That's the thing I'm going to love.”
It happened in the strangest way. I read this article by Donald Hodges, who is a music educator
as well, but also went a long way into the field of neuroscience. He wrote this article and he had
four neuroscientists in it. He asked this question; he said, “If you got to speak to music educators,
what would you want them to know about what you're doing?”
I read it and I read it and I read, and I got to the end and I was furious. I said, “I don't need to
know that! I don't care about that, but here are all my other questions.” I thought, “Wow, maybe
that's the thing that would get me interested.” It was as simple as saying, “How can this research
help me be a better teacher?” It was that simple. What I didn't realize is that, the study of music
as using it as a tool to understand the brain and how it works, and how it learns, actually has
global impact on every single human being and every single child that I come in contact with, but
also any teacher comes in contact with.
I stumbled upon something that I think is the next wave of things that we can learn about what it
is to be human, what the human condition is. But also, the next thing we can use to understand
how children learn, especially in this world that is so noisy in so many different ways.
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Understanding sound and understanding how sound affects us, and how sound can be positive
and negative or neutral. All of those things are really important. Now, the music learning part, is
just one part of what I study. Helping schools understand why music education is not just about
the kids who are interested, or the parents who can pay for it. Or the kids that we designate as
talented. It's actually beneficial for every single child, and how can I use the research to help them
upskill and update their understanding, not change their mind? How can I just update them on
what's happening? That's how I got excited about it; because all I wanted to be was a better
teacher and it took me into a whole different world.
Interviewer:
Well, okay. I'm excited about it. When you said that the four neuroscientists sort of shared
irrelevant information in a sense and didn't answer the questions that you really had. Do you
remember what it was that you really felt was important to understand about how music is
processed or operates in the brain?
Interviewee:
Yeah, I do. I do remember a little bit about it. One was very technical. What I felt while I started
to understand what they were saying they didn't get the message across in a way that someone
who was a non-neuroscientist could understand. I thought, “At the very basis, that's a shame.”
Why do all this research and not have it understood? It's important to hear from a technical point
of view, but why not have it understood by other people who are outside your field?
First of all, it was a translational thing. How do we get this very, very technical stuff into language
and ideas and deliver it in such a way that it can be shared with the non-scientific community?
One was very technical and what they're saying was interesting, but it didn't come across.
Another one was talking about how the brain processes music, but again, wasn't connecting, how
we feel when we process music, to how the brain works with it. They weren’t connecting with this
idea that, there's a human attached to these two ears. Then, they've got all their experiences and
all the other things happening. It was just like, “No, no. It's very clinical.” I was like, “We need the
clinical, but we also need the human side of it.”
That interested me, because I was looking at my students trying to figure out from their behavior,
how they were interpreting the music. Whereas, this could give me a door into what might be
happening in their brain, which could be added onto my expertise as a teacher. It was just a lack
of connection and a lack of translatability and a lack of understanding of the field that might be
able to use it, which were music educators.
Funnily enough, I've just read an article that says exactly that. We need more translators of this
research, who understand the research and can translate it in an authentic way but have a voice
that can be understood by the general public. I think it’s honestly the general public that need to
understand these incredible things that are being discovered.
Interviewer:
That really makes sense to me and I agree with your perception of the literature. Given the
audience that we have today, which is people that come from a range of different backgrounds,
including science, also arts and all these disciplinary interests, what would you tell them? What
have you decided? I know you've done many, many public presentations, and of course,
everyone's different, but what are your favorite facts that you'd like to share about Music and the
Brain?
Interviewee:
I think the one that resonates with everybody is that—again, it's not absolutely correct with all the
details, but I’ll say music is our first language. We had it before we had the spoken language we
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currently have. Just thinking of it that way, understanding how old music is in our brain. If we had
the sounds, this prosody, this rhythm and melody of communicating before we actually had
language attached to it, then it's the very basis of what we understand.
Often, I look at it like anything from a business course, to music videos, to when Donald Trump
is doing what he does.
There's prosody and rhythm and melody and everything. We're picking up all that information,
but we get really focused on listening to their words. If we took the words out, we're going back
to our musical roots, and we're gaining more meaning from that, firstly, than we do from the words
that are spoken. I think that's the most important. That's a really important thing to think about
when we—when I'm in schools or when I see a parent and a child interacting and the child says
something in a certain tone, and then mum or dad will whip around really quickly and say, “Don’t
be so rude.” I'm thinking, “But you just spoke in a rude way to your child, trying to correct them
for being rude.” We need to model that prosody, that music in our language.
If we did, we talk a lot about being kind and a lot about being mindful. How might that change, if
we just change the melody and rhythm about our language? For me, with communicators like
teachers, it really opens the door for them to think about, “How do I speak? What message am I
sending, if I didn't use my words?” Early childhood educators understand it really well. Getting up
to high school and university it can be a little bit more difficult. Music is language, language is
music, is the first thing that I think of some of the ones I love.
Talking about our sound environments, we now live in a world that is noisier than it's ever been
before. As humans we're not built for it. Our auditory processing is getting overloaded so often
and particularly in a city like Melbourne, you get on the train and when you walk in the streets, if
you count how many people have got headphones on or headphones in, or are shielding
themselves from the auditory environment for whatever reason, I sit there and think, “Okay, what
are we missing in the wellness of our communities when it comes to sound? How does that work
in a shop? How does it work in a hospital? How does it work in a university? How does sound
affect us?” Those things have been really interesting to discover which are outside my field of
education.
Then when it comes to education, looking at the different practices about how people learn music.
Does it matter if you learn it informally? From your dad every Saturday you get the ukuleles out
and you play. What impact does that have from a cognitive and musical and emotional
perspective? Versus kids that from the age of three picking up violins in and ah, that's part of their
life. They practice every single day for long periods of time, but for what outcome?
I think it's about taking any little piece of information and connecting it to the application of it.
There's great ones in education. Brilliant research which talks about kids at the age of between
three and four, if they can keep a steady beat, that's a physical representation that they're ready
to read at the age of five. Great, because imagine if every preschool we focused on beat keeping
in order to get these kids ready and preliterate? How cool would it be as a kindergarten teacher
knowing that most of the kids coming into the class were cognitively ready for the next big task
they have to do, which is to read. To me, that's an application of the research. It's really simple
and it doesn't cost anything. All this is education. Getting everyone to hear about it, understand
it, and then use it.
Interviewer:
It does make it seem so accessible and I can hear how your capacity to translate knowledge into
action is really critical here. What was your PhD about in the end, given that that was—I'm just
kind of interested in the research that you've done on this topic to be translatable, I guess.
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Interviewee:
I did my literature review and at the time it was 2009. Really it was only the very decade and a
little bit of the research field. I was basically asking the question, “How could this help me be a
better teacher?” The conclusion I came to, which is in the PhD journey is a little bit tricky, is that
actually we didn't have enough information yet. The research wasn't far enough along. I went to
my PhD supervisor and went, “What do I do now?” She said, “No, this is great. What can you use
it for?” I was lucky at the time I was teaching in teacher education at the University of Canberra
and I taught all the generalist teachers. Anyone who teaches—it's the year three teacher and I
have to do an arts unit. They have to be able to teach the arts and teach music.
Now, these people aren't musicians, and if anything, they can't read music. They are quite
terrified. I used to get students who would sign in the first day and they would look at me and say,
“You're not going to make me sing. Are you?” I said, “We're singing in five minutes.” And a few
of them broke down. A few of them were so scared. They had such serious art scars, from that
experience of singing that they really didn't want to. But they were fine. They were fine because
if you teach in a certain way, then it's just going back to the primal thing of being a human being.
But what I had noticed is that, they did all their learning and did all their activities, they never
really got invested in it, because they just went, “Well, I'm not a musician, and it's not a very
important thing. I'll do it, but I won't learn. I won't try very hard.”
I had a control group, an experiment group and the experiment group, I infused all of the learning
with this research, but in ways that they could understand it and grapple with it and see the
importance of it and the benefit for the rest of their teaching. Then I had a control group that I just
taught normally.
Luckily, then, I did a pre and post survey on their attitudes towards their learning and some of the
actions they'd taken and it came out that they had skyrocketed through. They got better grades,
first of all, and none of this stuff had been marked by me, but they got significantly better grades.
They were more engaged in it. They were far, their efficacy was through the roof. They were like,
“This is so amazing. I'm going to continue to learn how to do this.”
Also, a lot of them, those art scars I talked about, whether they were acknowledged or hidden,
they came out in the process too. It became transformational and therapeutic for them as well to
go through this process of going, “I am a music teacher. I will call myself a music teacher because
I know I can do it. I've got more to learn, but I know how important it is now.” It was about changing
minds and attitudes and states while testing at, “How do I talk about the research in a way that
resonates with them?”
Interviewer:
I remember we've talked about this many years ago actually, but can you describe to us what it
is that you've learned? How do people need to learn about research? What techniques do you
use? I remember something about even just images of brains but I don't want to sidetrack you!
Interviewee:
I’m still always—like I said, I'm a practicing teacher. I'm a practicing translator as well. I figured it
out now. Took me a while. I'm waiting for that moment when I say something, the light goes on
behind their eyes. Something happens, and you can see it and you go, “Oh, I've got you! Right,
ok”. It now works. A principal won't be listening to me and then I'll say one thing and they'll go,
“Really? Tell me more.”. It's like, “Wow, I've got you.”
A lot of it is through storytelling. Either I tell stories of my own experience, but I can also make up
archetypal stories. Or I talk about a feeling or a talk about, “Have you ever heard this story? Have
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you ever had this experience or who's had this?” It somehow pulls them in. Then it's explaining
the research without saying, “Research states this.” It doesn't go into the technical language, it
just talks. Again, it continues to do it with narrative and story about, what is this actual thing, and
getting people to get entranced by story.
I think what I've learned is that, as an educator, you tell lots of stories anyway, and then as a
scientist, some of the best ones that I've spent lots of time with, have explained something to me
in a story. It could just be that resonates with me, but I think it has a lot of power. Again, like music
is such an old part of being human. So are stories.
By putting those two together, I'm actually accessing the oldest and the most experienced parts
of being human and that people remember things. They come up and tell me years later, “I
remember the story you told about this.” They can tell me all the parts of the research study, but
it's because it's through a story. That's been the most effective way to do it.
Interviewer:
Am I remembering correctly that you did another study where you used images of the brain to
help people understand that the research you were talking about? That was neurological and that
was more effective than not including images of the brain?
Interviewee:
Yeah. Well, I did a little bit of—well, I had images of the brain. They were coupled with the image
of the story. If I was talking about a car engine working really, really well, then the picture of a car
engine and the picture of the part of the brain or the network that you were talking about or the
kind of activity, put those two things together. It's something that you could relate to and then
something that was new. If you put them together, then that triggers the referred or remembering
part, and it triggers the new learning as well. I do that now with speech as well. There’s all sorts
of strange things that I talk about. The stranger, the better. The weirder, the better, because it
becomes memorable when you talk about strange things, and then that part really sticks in.
It's about, I dunno, I did work in my—part of my PhD was talking about how you change minds.
What came out of that sort of part of the research was about this resonance. How do you—
resonance works for me as a musician. I understand what resonance feels like, but how do you
make a new piece of information resonate with somebody through the cognitive understanding,
their emotional understanding and something else that backs it up?
A statistic will resonate with a principal and they will remember it. They'll quote it back to me
[laughs] but it's created resonance. Whereas a parent needs a story or a shared view of their
child. “I've seen Alexander do this, and I wonder what he's doing.” Then, you suddenly get mom
or dad going, “I've seen him do that at home too. I wonder.” Suddenly, it's a shared experience.
Yeah, it's finding that resonance and some people, and some professions are much harder than
others.
The more I've watched, speaking of your audience, who are so diverse, the more I've watched
people who are masters at their craft, it doesn't matter what they're doing. The more I've noticed
that moment of resonance, how they grab someone. You can watch Steve Jobs, you can watch
Elon Musk, you can watch Donald Trump. You can watch—I mentioned three men, but incredible
women. They have that and I love watching them and just going, “There is that moment. That's
where you've got them” and finding out how they've done that.
Interviewer:
Gosh. I can hear that your way of understanding Music and the Brain just leads to understanding
what it is to be human because, first of all, you started by talking about how it was. Before we
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had language, we had prosody, we had these inflections and musical sounds, which links into
how language is developed. Then it's about how do we communicate? Then it's about how do
we understand people?
I'm just conscious of the time, when you think about all of the research into Music in the Brain,
what is it that you found the most interesting? Where do you think the field's going, now that there
is so much interest in this field? Where do you think we've got to go and what is that on the basis
of?
Interviewee:
Yeah, I think there's been quite a number of—there’s quite a number of interdisciplinary institutes
around the world. I really like going to visit them because this idea that you can have all the
scientists around, there’s the psychologist and then there's a philosopher, then there’s an
educator and, and because we're studying the human brain—no, we're not we're not studying
music. We're using music as a tool to study the human brain. Then all of those different discipline
need to weigh in on that because I think it makes it richer.
The one that I think is a problem that's been identified just in a paper that was released recently,
is that educators are so busy educating, and they both don't see the value in the science, but
they also don't spend—it's not translated to them in a way that’s as effective, that they're not
connecting with it so much.
If anything, coming from the education world, we're a little anti-business and a little bit antiscience. It's like, “We know what we're doing. We're masters of all what we do.” It's true. Teachers
are experts in what they do. I think connecting educators a little bit more with the scientists in a
way that they can—not just the scientists saying, “This is what we found.” The educators need to
be able to say, “This is what we know and these are the questions we have.” How can we bring
those together so much more? I think is a very tricky thing to do, but I think it needs to be done.
Then, the application of it. What does it look like in the real world? There's a difference between
what it looks like in the real world in Southeast LA versus in Melbourne versus in Santiago. It's
all very, very different. How do we take this new knowledge, which is wonderful, but then apply it
in all the different contexts and in a way that it becomes effective? I think there's a lot of—I think
it's just expanding.
I'm really interested. I believe that the next five years are the biggest five years we'll probably
have of this research. Especially in the education space, because we've reached the point of
randomized longitudinal studies. That's what we need to be able to say, “Look, this is the gold
standard of scientific research. This is what they found in this particular context.” Also, we need
translators. We need people who can, who can talk to all sorts of people and help them
understand the research, not talk at them about the research, which I think a lot of the time, that's
what we get. We need to—No, no, no. My personal choice is, I like working with people to
understand their point of view, and understand what I can learn from them and what they can
learn from me.
Interviewer:
Yeah, I've heard you reference a couple of times now, randomized controlled trials and other
comparative conditions. Is that methodologically speaking, is that important to you? Do you think
comparing people who experience music, for example, in this context as a stimuli against people
who are experiencing something else? Or in terms of the brain and music research, what do you
think are the most important variables that need to be controlled for, that are kind of missing up
the space of this time?
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Interviewee:
Yeah. Look, the study design that I'm most fond of at the moment is—as quite a number have
moved into—instead of having the experiment control, having the music group and the non-music
group, they put in a third. The third is some other sort of extracurricular or extra activity. Music
and sport often get placed up against each other. They're the most interesting ones to me about
looking at it and finding out that, gee, actually, both of them are important! It's not a, “One is the
best”. Actually, children need all of these experiences.
In Western society, that's kind of going against some of the ways we organize curriculum, but
definitely the way that we organize timetable and the value systems that we put on top of things.
I like that system. I am really enjoying a lot of the research that's coming out just this year and
late last year, which really controlled for so many socioeconomic factors and genetic factors as
well.
I feel like they're getting quite tough, such a tricky and complex thing to study the human
development and then make decisions about what this actually means. They are doing such an
incredible job. I love the fact that there's groups of economists working on an educational and
neuroscientific problem, because they're looking at it through a completely different lens. I love
the fact that a lot of work has been done from the public health space to look across to this
research and go, “Okay, if we view it from public health, what impacts does that research have
in the implementation of music education schools, have on the largest system of public health?”
The reason I love that is, I think that's in my TED Talk where I was trying to get to is that this has
an impact on public health and economic health. It's not just about something fun to do, or
something extra to do, or something to do because you win competitions, it's actually beneficial
for the whole nation. If we can get our heads around that idea from public health and the
economics point of view, that's a whole different ball game, when it comes to how does it look in
a school and how do we fund it, how do we support it and how do we recognize the value in it?
Interviewer:
Oh, that's awesome. Okay, what I'm hearing is, from Music and the Brain is kind of the middle
and just emanating out in every way. And you're really contextually located, in that it's one thing
to look at auditory processing or language processing or where emotions are triggered in the
brain, but actually, it's only interesting when we understand it for each individual in their context,
and also what are we going to do with the information? I really do think that has been your
outstanding contribution to the field. Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else that
you wanted to pass across before we wrap up?
Interviewee:
Just that, not necessarily with music and the brain but your students are doing a wonderful study,
but remain curious, remain curious forever, because that's actually the thing that's driving this
field of research, but also why people become so passionate about it is because it's feeding our
curiosity, and curiosity is a thing that keeps us alive as humans.
I think I applaud that your students for taking this unit. It's a really important unit to do. Also, keep
on the front foot of all this research and ask big questions and ask how it relates to your
experience verses how does it relate to your brother, your sister, your best friend's experience.
Then use that knowledge to help anyone that you're coming in contact with. Doesn't matter if it's
a business team, it doesn't matter if it's you sitting with someone who you're providing therapy
for. It's important all the way through. Remain curious your life will be very exciting.
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Interviewer:
Oh, that's so beautiful. You just led into the whole rationale for our learning activities in this class.
Thank you very much, Anita Collins, wonderful to speak to you.
Interviewee:
Thank you.
[End of Audio]
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Music consumption [Audio transcript]
North, Adrian and McFerran, Kat. Music consumption [Au d i o t ra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne.
Interviewer:
It's wonderful to have Professor Adrian North here with us. Adrian has a long standing reputation
in the field of music psychology, and his work is much cited, particularly I've been really excited
by his work about music and adolescence, which he has often undertaken with his colleague,
David Hargreaves, as well. Most recently, Adrian has really moved into this new and exciting
topic around music consumption. I wonder if we could just start with that, and you could tell us,
how did you end up deciding that music consumption was an interesting area of topic of research
for you?
Interviewee:
Sure, absolutely. Thanks for having me on by the way. Certainly where all that work came from
all the work on adolescence was all around, essentially, how adolescents specifically consume
music because back in the 1990s when I started doing this stuff, ‘cause I'm old now, that was, if
you like, that's where you saw music consumption going on particularly. Of course, that's really
changed over the last 10 years or so by the gift of these devices that we use and sort to each
other today, which is the rise of the Internet and particularly the rise of the portable internet has
radically changed the relationship that we have with music. Yeah, I think looking back 30, 40, 50
years from now, I think one of the stories of our time that people remember the early part of the
20th century, early part of the 21st century for is, of course, this massive escalation in the internet
and in the context of our field of music stuff.
What that ties into is the rise of streaming services and the fact that whereas I remember when I
was a student, way back in the early 1990s, I used to go into college every day literally with a
carrier bag full of audio cassettes, so I could listen to whatever music I wanted to at the time and
I remember––I think it was for my 18th birthday, I managed to convince my parents to buy me
what was at the time a hugely expensive walkman which would play audio cassettes and had FM
radio built into it. I couldn't believe that. That was liberating, and of course, these days contrast
that with what we do now. The iPod, I'm talking to you on the phone that's in front of me as well.
Those have got access to 50 million tracks, which I can listen to, not just on demand, but crucially,
wherever I want to listen to them. This whole relationship that we have with music has radically
changed the consequence of that. It used to be the case, arguably that music listening was
something that we would, say, deliberately sit down and do, or at least was on in the background
of some other activity only while we were, say, in the home, usually where we had access to a
reasonable library of music. That has completely changed.
Now wherever we go, we've got whatever soundtrack to it that we want to have to it and
psychologically for me, that's really interesting ‘cause what that means, of course, is that music
isn't just something that's consumed as the focus of our activities. Rather, it's something that the
music has become something that aids us in the course of other activities, and it's that shift in the
use of music, that’s really, really interesting, I think, and I think when you look at how the research
has been going over the last 10 years or so, you start to see this real rise of research, looking at
how people are now actively using music, and I think Amanda Krause’s research on this is a
fantastic example of that, where Amanda's relatively recently been looking at how people use
music as they move around the world, as they, say, for example, just use social media where of
course so many of us spend so much of our leisure time these days. It's that kind of research, I
think, is really, really important in terms of capturing the broader population trend in how people
consume music.
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Interviewer:
I find that a really fascinating juxtaposition of two different disciplines. In music sociology, where
they've always had that fascination with the uses of music, and now you coming at it, and I don't
know that you're very much a social psychology scholar, but when you talk about the uses of
music and capturing these patterns, that to me really speaks to the music psychology aspect.
Can you talk to me maybe about one of the studies that you've done on music consumption,
whether it's in shopping, or dining or in service, or whichever one you'd like to focus on, but just
to talk about, when you study this from a music psychology perspective, these uses of music,
what do you actually do?
Interviewee:
Yeah, let’s go back to where this stuff came from originally or most of it came from originally,
which is again back in the mid 1990s, which is when I was doing my PhD, where you used to see
people consuming music most in public, at least, was in commercial premises, the kind of places
you mentioned in your question. What David and I were doing right about then, we did a bunch
of studies looking at how people listen to music in shops, restaurants, those kind of places,
service environments if you like, because those are the kind of places where people would be
exposed to music that was often out of their control, but nonetheless, they were hearing music in
the stream of daily life. What we got interested in there was what you can take from more general
psychology and apply specifically to music. For example, we spent a lot of time using the
[distorted audio] model of environmental psychology, which itself now is practically ancient. It was
first published in 1974. That’s only three years after I was even born for goodness sake.
That talks all about how if you like features of the environment, and of course, by implication,
what we were getting at is if you like music in that environment, how that affects your emotional
response to the environment in general, and also how it affects your behavioral responses. What
a lot of that work that David and I were doing then was all about was trying to take these
mainstream models of psychology, yeah, in this case, talk about environmental psychology but
we used quite a bunch of others, and actually just apply them to specifically music per se. Another
one of those models we spent a little time talking about was social identity theory and what that
might have to say about the stereotypes people have about music and how one musical tribe of
people might relate to another musical tribe of people, but to this day what we've still been doing,
both with David and more recently with Amanda, is trying to look at how these other theories of
psychology explain specifically music.
I remember reading something years ago now from that John Sloboda wrote. I think he did it in
his 1985 book Musical Mind where he was talking about a paradigm for music psychology being
not just that the other aspects of the discipline inform our understanding of music, but vice versa
too that our understanding of music and the research we do on music can inform those other
aspects of general psychology. I think to some extent, I've always been mindful of the need to try
to do that ‘cause there's always been much more emphasis on what you can take from
mainstream psychology and apply to music simply because there's an awful lot more material
there to choose from. Obviously if you've got the whole of psychology as your box of toys to play
with then that gives you tremendous amount of scope, but I think it applies back the other way
too to be honest.
Interviewer:
Is your most preferred method for investigating music consumption using psychological lenses,
do you like to ask people about what their experiences emotional, behavioral and otherwise, are
or do you like to observe or what’s been your approach?
Interviewee:
I think it's more the former. We've got Hargreaves to blame for this one. David always used to go
on to me during our PhD that this whole [distorted audio] practical was a good theory and I think
David's absolutely right in that respect. He always used to talk about––literally in my mind now,
I’ve got a picture of myself in his office back in the 1990s with me saying to David, “Look, we
need to understand how music works in the real world. This is the coming thing. This is what's
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important,” and David saying, “Yeah, that's all fine, but what's your theory then?” Me saying,
“Well, let's pull in all these external theories.” There's always been this emphasis. To my mind,
not so much an emphasis, a need to draw on mainstream psychology because it's there that you
get the really detailed sense of why this is happening. I think, obviously, if ever you're doing
something that isn't theoretically driven, and it doesn't have to be psychological theories. That
can be theories from any discipline, but if you're doing something that isn't theoretically driven,
then you never really understand why it's coming about. I think it's interesting.
If you look over literally just the last few years, you see all this research coming out in computer
science journals presenting these fantastically complex algorithms that analyze music from the
last 10 years and tells you all about what became a hit versus what didn't become a hit. Of course,
unless that's rooted in a theory or in this case of musical taste, musical preference, it doesn't
really tell you anything about next 10 years. Inevitably, it's only ever going to be descriptive.
Whereas, music psychology, it's a science. It'll even predict it. It will tell you about what should
be happening under a given set of circumstances. For that, you have to have theory. Obviously,
my background is all in psychology. Now. I did A level psychology in the UK, which is like the
equivalent of Australian year 12 psychology. My degree is in psychology. My PhD was in the
Department of Psychology. I've always worked in schools of psychology. Inevitably that's the
theoretical approach that I take, but I think what the crucial point is there's got to be a theoretical
background to it. Otherwise, you're not really learning anything for the future.
Interviewer:
When you say theoretical background that makes a lot of sense to me. Do you mean that you're
testing hypotheses? When you talk about prediction that you have an idea and you go out and
you ask people to see whether or not they confirm that or are you more exploring inductively?
What's your preference?
Interviewee:
Little bit of both to be honest. I think realistically, and there's several factors in that. I mean,
certainly when you look at the literature, obviously, in some cases, there's a theory that already
exists that seems to relate very well to the particular problem that you're looking at. Whereas in
other cases, there simply isn't a theory out there and you end up thinking, “Well, there ought to
be by now.” Under those circumstances, you inevitably have to be more exploratory. Whereas in
other cases, you really can test hypotheses. I mean, certainly, in terms of the stuff I've been doing
very recently as in literally the word processing document that was on my screen prior to us
talking to one another. I've been looking at stuff around the relationship between musical taste
and culture. From a psychological perspective, the only theories that are out there on this concern
these models of culture which attempt to produce quantitative dimensions along which it’s
claimed at least you can capture the culture things like individualism or power distance, and so
on and looking at how they relate to musical taste.
To some extent, you can pretend that you're doing hypothesis driven research in that respect so
that you might say, for example, if you're in––this is literally what I've just been writing about. You
can say that, okay, if you're in an individualistic culture, then it's more important to you to have
access to precisely the music that you want. Whereas if you're in a more collectivist culture, it's
more important to you to have access to music that brings groups of people together in social
gatherings. Yeah, to say that’s a proper hypothesis in the Thomas Kuhn sense, that's probably
stretching it a bit. I’ve seen people that would probably say, “Nah that’s not a hypothesis, Adrian.
Come off it.”
It's at least trying to take that approach as best you can, but the technology is changing very
quickly and the way in which people use music is changing very quickly. I think given that to some
extent, to keep up with that, you almost have to take a bit of a flyer in terms of saying, “This isn't
necessarily a perfect theoretical prediction, but at least it's telling you where to look.” I guess to
try to answer your question, I think that's probably the approach I've tended to take, which is use
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theory wherever you can, and at the very least use theory to guide where you should be looking,
but sometimes you can't necessarily say A should produce a higher score than B because there
isn't enough research out there to really support that kind of hypothesis yet in those cases.
Interviewer:
It sounds to me as though you're really taking into account a huge range of whether you call them
conditions or factors or from culture. I don't know if you explore gender at all and then age group
as well as the context in which music consumption occurs. That must be very complex in terms
of deciding [crosstalk 12:57]
Interviewee:
Yeah, I think it is––[crosstalk 12:58]. It's something I've been looking at a bit more in the last
couple of years, which is for years now, music psychs, we've banded about terms like culture or
gender and so on but in psychological terms, what exactly do we mean by that? To me, let's just
pick on those two examples although we could pick on others. Those two terms are horribly under
specified. For example, there's two papers I've done recently looking specifically at gender. What
do we mean by that? Are we trying to argue that this is about X and Y chromosomes? I suspect
we're not. In that context, there’s two things I got sent off to journals within just literally the last
couple of weeks, just literally in the run up to Christmas, ‘cause we're recording this just
immediately post Christmas. One of those papers looks at gender in terms of the Hofstede Model
of Culture, and certainly didn't refer to it in biological terms, but instead looked at it more in terms
of the way in which Hofstede conceptualizes a culture as being more masculine or more feminine,
which is, as he describes it, has got much more to do with basically the masculinity, femininity,
and dimension of culture.
He talks about masculine cultures being ones where you have very clearly defined sex roles. He
doesn't say what they should be or what they are if you like, but he just says you have them
whereas at the feminine end, you have much more gender neutral allocation of roles or activities
within a particular culture. I think that's one interesting way in which you can conceptualize
gender. When we say, “What do we mean by that?” maybe that's what we mean by that and you
get some results out of that. I certainly don't think for a moment though that that’s a complete
characterization or captures it perfect. One of the big lessons of psychology is that these
overarching social categories are, by definition, very complex and multifaceted and I think it's
important to try to get into that in more detail. Let me give you another example.
Another one of these papers I did relatively recently, where I looked at age, because I’m sure
you've done it yourself. You could put musical tastes and age into something like psych intro and
you’d get about eight zillion hits back but what do we mean about age that supposedly relates to
musical tastes and one thing I was doing with–– it was actually with an honor student. It's a great
project where she conceptualized age as being a concern with particular life goals because there
is research out there showing that as we move through life your life goals shift. Most obviously
when you're school aged, you’re concerned with education and friends. When you’re middle aged
like me, you're concerned with your kids and their well being and when you're older, apparently,
broadly speaking at least, you see a greater focus on concern about the state of the world and if
you like, issues to do with legacy. What this particular project did was to look at how musical
tastes and the ways in which people use music might actually relate to your concerns with life
and in particular, how those concerns themselves change at different points in your lifespan.
This is broadly what that research found. It found that there's always a concern with, if you like,
interpersonal relationships with well being and happiness. Of course, there is. Everyone wants
to be happy, and everyone is defined to some extent by the interpersonal relationships that they
have. You find other uses of music shift across the lifespan and those issues that become more
important in the ways in which you're using music at any given age, seem at least intuitively to
map onto the kind of concerns you might expect people to have at that particular point in their
life. I think, to me, it's just important to specify what we mean by these very broad terms like
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culture, gender, age. What are they? What are they particularly and what's the particularly
relevant bit of it? I mean, it's another interesting thing that I often come across in my own
research, which is the whole issue of effect sizes. You do these kind of large surveys of lots of
people and inevitably see some noise in the data from that.
One argument I've been finding myself making repeatedly in papers in the last couple of years
is, whereas in general psychology, for very, very good reasons, a strong tendency at the moment
to emphasize effect size rather than p-value. Good. That's exactly what we should be doing, but
at the same time, I think it's just as important when you're dealing with these very broad and quite
often poorly defined terms like gender, culture, age, it’s also interesting, just that you're explaining
any variants at all. I'm kind of going against the mainstream on this at the moment. I'm starting to
think that until some point in the future when we do get these terms defined more specifically, I'm
starting to think actually, no, p-values actually really are quite interesting at the moment again. I
don't know. It's one of the things that I think about while I'm driving home from work. Is it p-value
or effect size that's more important here? I'm not sure I've got a firm deal on that yet, but I think
certainly you can make the case that p-values are important when you get into very complex
systems like music, culture, gender and so on.
Interviewer:
When you talk about these large data sets where you can actually use these kinds of calculations,
that's been one of the stellar highlights of your contribution to the discourse is that you do really
enjoy looking at large data sets. Why is that? Why is it that you prefer to collect a lot of data and
to look for patterns? Is that something that's come from––
Interviewee:
Yeah, it comes back to that previous point I was making about these are relatively complex
systems. I don't think we're anything like in the position theoretically, that I'd like to be where we
can say it's this very, very, very tightly defined variable that we should be looking at. Don't get me
wrong. I absolutely think we should be there. That has to be the end goal that we're trying to get
towards, but I think at the moment we're just nowhere near having that. Instead at the moment,
the approach I'm trying to take instead is to say “Look, let’s just measure stuff and start to try to
find where things are going on.” Let me give you one very specific example of that. Another bit of
research that I think it came out last year in Psychology of Music, where we looked at relationships
between pop music lyrics and the economy, ‘cause there's a paper I've always really enjoyed,
which came out years ago in the 1980s, I think, by American researcher called Harold Zullow and
he found that optimism in pop music lyrics could predict Gross National Product in the USA.
Interviewer:
Wow.
Interviewee:
Again, if you give it a generous reading, of course, it's completely intuitive. That makes perfect
sense. I think he actually says this in the paper or something to this effect. I don't know. Maybe
I’ve superimposed this. I’m not certain, but if you do indeed have music around you a significant
amount of the time during your waking life, then of course, those messages are bombarding you
and to some extent at least, they're registering with you psychologically. Of course, if that music
is optimistic or pessimistic, it makes perfect sense that that should be in some way influencing
your degree of optimism in life. In this paper that Amanda and I put out last year, we looked at
pop music lyrics and looked at them in relation to the economy. What was interesting now is we
found only some links between the economy and the music lyrics and in particular from memory,
what we found was that as the lyrics became more concrete, or you see relationship between the
extent to which the lyrics are concrete and the amount of economic turbulence that you see.
Interviewer:
That’s interesting, isn’t it?
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Interviewee:
Yeah, one way which we defined the economy if you like, again, another one of these very
nebulous terms, was to look at turbulence on the London Stock Exchange. We just looked literally
at the standard deviation in the closing price of the FTSE100, I think it was, and we looked at
how that related to concreteness in the lyrics and we found a link, but similarly where you don't
see relationships are between a whole bunch of other lyrics variables and other economic
variables. Again, for me, one of the lessons of that paper was is a point again, I was making about
be it gender, cultural, age, or whatever, is what do you mean by the economy?
Interviewer:
Economy, yeah.
Interviewee:
Well, in this case, I think, yeah, what I think is interesting and useful is turbulence in the economy,
uncertainty, because that clearly does speak to psychological processes around doubt, worry,
anxiety and so on. You can start to see how that's gonna link through to broader psychological
processes. Whereas instead if you just look at things like Zullow did, look at things like gross
national product that arguably tells you less about psychologically what's going on in people's
minds at any point in time. This is the point I'm getting at is try to identify a range of variables,
which are the ones that seem to be particularly psychological which you might expect to leak
through to other things. That's one part of the answer. The other reason for using large databases
is to be honest. It’s very favorable terms, but to be honest, it's just bloody good luck.
As a consequence, the kind of work I do, which is all about trying to use music in everyday life,
obviously, over the years, I've built up a reasonable network of contacts with people and usually
speak and businesses in particular and generally speaking, what you find is that they're very
happy to provide access to these very large data sets, or at least help you get access to them or
to help you build them because of course, they get to learn something from it as well. To some
extent, it's largely serendipity. There was also a far more pragmatic concern, which is my day job.
I'm currently Head of the School of Psychology. Obviously, that sucks up a fair amount of time
and I'm just not able to spend time in a lab at the moment or at least I get very little opportunity.
This is the kind of work that frankly, it's just easier for me to do it in the context of the day job.
Interviewer:
I think that's so important to hear that that conflation of all of those different areas of influence
from practicality to interest to timing, so tell me in relation to music consumption, what's the most
interesting thing you've learned? What is music consumption? Why is it even interesting? Why is
it valuable?
Interviewee:
Yeah, I think for mine, and this is––I don't know if I could point to one specific piece of research
that unequivocally tells you this much more than any other, but certainly looking across the stuff
over the last few years, for me, the big lesson about music consumption is that it’s very much
goal based in the modern world. We use music for a purpose. That's not to say that people don't
sometimes just sit down for purely aesthetic reasons, and listen to music to enjoy an artistic
experience. Of course, we still do and we absolutely should. One of the great things about music
is that it does that. Yes, it’s bloody obvious, but what's become really, really clear when you look
at research that looks at how people are engaging with music in everyday life, is that music is
fulfilling this range of other goals. You could characterize those goals in a bunch of ways and
that's one of the big problems I think we've got in our particular field at the moment is what's the
model that we use to actually conceptualize the different goals of music?
Clearly, we are using music to actually achieve goals I think the issue therefore becomes, okay,
how do we conceptualize goals of music and, God, we could really use as a discipline, a really
well worked out model, if you like, that talks about what the functions of music are. The problem
is, of course, you can run that on a whole range of conceptual levels be that emotional versus
practical. You can be very specific versus very global. For example, the music you want to listen
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to while you're running versus the music you want to listen to while you're working. There are so
many different ways in which you can conceptualize it, I think it's going to take a very long time
for us a discipline, if you like, to nut out really what that model looks like. There's an awful lot of
research that you see out there at the moment that we––including my own, I hasten to add, that
would really benefit from that.
Interviewer:
Gosh, I really agree with you. Of course, I bring a particular bias to people's internal worlds as a
music therapy researcher who's interested in this space as well and thinking about not just the
goals that people have, but also the unconscious associations that people have. I always find
that’s missing from the discourses, this assumption that people are cognizant of why they're using
music or they can reflect on it, at least, retrospectively. Whereas my experience is that music is
often triggering responses and feelings that people can't even describe once they've had them
because it doesn't make sense because it comes from the past and associations that may be
repressed.
Interviewee:
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I'd actually go one step further than that. Again, you can tell I've
been doing writing, can’t you? This is another paper that I was just––in the running to the
Christmas break there where a long time ago, now again, back in the 90s, I did a bit of research
on this idea that I think we ended up calling it musical fit, the idea that music, if you like, frames
a certain set of behaviors and a certain set of attitudes. That's something I’ve come back to again
in the last couple of years and in particularly in this one paper that we've just sent off. It’s not
been accepted yet, and I don't know if it will be, so I don't know really if I should be talking about
it.
Interviewer:
Go on.
Interviewee:
I'll give it that health warning. Everything I'm about to say might be rubbish [crosstalk 26:46].
Interviewer:
Or considered to be.
Interviewee:
Yeah, I think that one of the really interesting aspects of that, to me is this idea that our knowledge
of the musical world doesn't just sit in its own hermetically sealed box wholly unrelated to our
knowledge of the rest of the world. Rather what seems surely to me to be the case is that when
you hear a piece of music, it sets off a whole bunch of other associations concerning that music.
Interviewer:
Exactly.
Interviewee:
Of course, those other associations are all almost completely idiosyncratic, which I think starts to
get real interesting when you look at in the context of this paper that we wrote about we wrote
about this in the context of advertising, is when you start to think about how that kind of stuff can
therefore be used commercially ‘cause if you're doing––irrespective of the rise of the Internet,
there is still a thing as mass media and there is still such a thing as mass media advertising that
goes on out there. It's how do you take these ideas of use and use it to prime associations, when
different people have got different associations? One of my concerns is that this is the only way
in which marketers or advertisers could use that kind of phenomena is only by going for the lowest
common denominator stuff like music, which is quite ostentatiously, from a particular culture or a
particular country would prime people to think of a particular country or culture, but how else can
you use these very broadly understood meanings of music in commercial terms versus the fact
that different people have got different understandings of almost any given piece?
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I mean, just to give you a concrete example of what I’m wittering on about. If you use, say, music
by really well known example, The Beatles, in the context of a TV advert, then to some people,
The Beatles speaks to ideas about artistic integrity and just great music. To some people it raises
notions of 1960s idealism. Whereas to other groups of people, I suspect my kids will be amongst
this group, it's really old music that only daddy listens to anymore. I think even at the level of
really well known musical examples like that, if you're struggling to get some sort of broad
population level consensus about the meaning music is how far can you take those kinds of
effects in commercial practice?
Interviewer:
I think that's really spot on because surely technology in the future will allow us to be able to take
those idiosyncratic aspects of people’s life histories into account. You could walk into a shop and
already you've got this whole program, which explains what you like and why you like it, and so
you get this certain set of music or at the dentist, in music therapy, there's all these meta analyses
of music reducing pain at the dentist, and how do you select and..
Interviewee:
I think this in particular though is one of those areas where it does start to get really, really
interesting and where you really do start to see this idea of, at least my take on music psychology,
really starting to run into much, much broader societal issues. I mean, like you say, I'm sure even
right now, it's at least theoretically possible to construct some sort of clever computer mechanism
which recognizes that Adrian has walked into the dentist. He's probably feeling nervous.
Therefore, let's interrogate Adrian's music library and play him some music that he likes and he
finds calming.
Interviewer:
Exactly.
Interviewee:
It’s entirely possible to look at your music streaming service listening history. From that, construct
a personality profile of you, and if you happen to be on the web looking at a large online retailer,
does that therefore start to influence advertising messages that should be used because they will
be maximally persuasive to you? Now, all of that, theoretically is not easy. Of course, it's not
easy, but it's undoubtedly doable even with what we know circa early 2020. It was possible to do
it five years ago, but it starts to raise all these other issues that you see much more common in
the interface of technology and society in general. I think music is there now. The more we
understand about how people use music in daily life, the more these broader issues around ethics
and privacy start to come into our own particular field because we start to come across those
boundaries where what you can do and what a given individual might find helpful and useful,
might well be regarded by someone else as really, really creepy. I think we’re there. I think music
psychology is there as a discipline.
Interviewer:
I think it really is too. So exciting and it could go in so many directions. I think it's exciting that
you've taken this notion of music consumption as a really contemporary frame for thinking about
music and emotions and behaviors and social relationships but also, that connection that you
now have with industry for actually having an impact on the real world, so not just theoretically
everyday life, but the real world itself, I think is super clever. In closing, I just wonder is there
anything that you'd really like to point out that from your three decades of research, what you
would consider to be, for this group of music psychology students who themselves may be the
majority of them around 20 years old and really excited and passionate about their music, what
would you say in terms of music consumption perhaps, would be a key closing message?
Interviewee:
Yeah. To be honest, I was having this conversation with some of my own students in the run up
to Christmas. To be honest, to my mind, there's never been a better time to be doing research in
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music psychology. We are absolutely on the cutting edge of one of the big changes in society
these days. It's like the equivalent of knocking around universities in the 1850s and being
interested in the ability of coal to transform water into steam. Here we are. We are right on it here.
I think more pragmatically, again, obviously it raises all these really interesting theoretical
questions which have only really come about in the last 10 years, which in turn means I think
anyone coming into the field, they've got a fantastic opportunity to build their own career around
almost any of these huge questions which come up. It also means that to be honest, in theory, at
least, the position has never been better in terms of opportunities to bring in funding for this kind
of research. You will be aware yourself. One of the criticisms that any research on music always
gets it is how's that gonna improve people's lives? Blah, blah, blah, why should we fund this?
Well, to be honest, right now, we have some including the most valuable company on the stock
exchange, they're interested in this stuff. There are lots of dollars floating around music at the
minute which in turn, gives anyone coming into the field a real opportunity to actually probe that
funding profile, which is the kind of thing which gains long term employment which is pretty
tedious and slightly dispiriting almost if you like, but in pragmatic terms, which is anyone coming
into it has got to think about too, there is a real opportunity here as well that's simply hasn't existed
before. Yeah, I do it here with my own students. I really encourage other students who are
interested in music psych to really embrace that and run with it because the opportunities are
immense at the moment.
Interviewer:
I so agree. Thank you for sharing your enthusiasm and your passion as well as your deep
knowledge about this topic. It's gonna be the basis for many discussions for us and I just am
really grateful for your time.
Interviewee:
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.
[End of Audio]
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Music consumption [Video transcript]
Krause, Amanda. Music consumption [Video t ran s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne / James Cook University
Introduction
Hi, I’m Dr Amanda Krause. My research is in the area of music psychology. I focus on trying to understand our everyday
interactions with music. Today we’ll be talking about the effects of music on our consumer behaviour.
Consumer behaviour is the study of how we purchase and use goods and services, and it includes considering people’s
emotional, mental, and behavioural responses involved in these activities.
Music can have a wide range of influences in consumer settings.
Music can influence the places that we go, how we perceive the atmosphere of retail spaces, the amount of time we spend
somewhere, the amount of money we spend, the products we buy, and so on.
It can also influence our memory for advertising and branding, and other beliefs about products.
Today we’re going to focus on our behaviour in retail settings, such as shops, restaurants, and bars. We’ll talk first about
attracting customers and then we’ll talk about what happens once you’re in the retail setting. I’ll also talk about the main
theories behind music’s influences.
So, let’s get started.
The first thing we need to know is that music is a part of atmospherics. Atmospherics is a term from marketing - to mean
how a space can create certain effects in buyers. It includes the intended atmosphere, or the designed space, and the
perceived atmosphere, which refers to the consumers’ perceptions of the space.
Importantly, atmospherics are apprehended through the senses – what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. As
something we hear, sound and music is both a part of any place’s intended and perceived atmosphere.
Getting customers
Step one for a retailer is getting customers. Music can influence store selection and patronage. Here we’re talking about
how music can attract or detract potential customers.
Picture this – you’re walking through a shopping mall. You can hear music playing in the shops – perhaps the latest top
40 playing from one clothing store and classic rock from another. Now, both stores are selling clothes – but they’re
signalling different audiences with their music choices. Teenagers versus adults.
Research has shown that people tend to visit a physical source of liked music, so playing music in a shop, for instance,
can encourage customers to enter the premises. A study by Adrian North and David Hargreaves published in 1996,
showed that playing liked music was better at attracting people to an advice stall than playing nothing. BUT playing disliked
music was worse than playing nothing.
So the question isn’t whether or not to play music, but what KIND of music to play that will attract the customers you want
into your shop – or eatery.
Once you’re in the retail setting
Now let’s say you’ve entered a retail setting – be it a café, clothing store, or even a bank. Different musical styles give rise
to different atmospheres – that is, people perceive a retail environment differently based on the music. Let’s take a
research example – North, Hargreaves, and McKendrick considered how the type of music influenced judgments of a
bank and bar atmosphere. They found that the more the music was perceived as fun, the more the bank was perceived
as fun, just as the more the music was perceived as invigorating, the more the bar was perceived that way.
This perception of the atmosphere has financial consequences too. North, Shilcock, and Hargreaves have shown that
people are prepared to spend more money on food items at a restaurant when classical music is playing compared to
when pop music or no music is playing.
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Research indicates that the speed of customer activity is related to the tempo and volume of background music. As
Caldwell and Hibbert state, this is one this is one of the more consistent findings from research on this topic. More arousing
music leads individuals to carry out activities more quickly or spend less time on activities.
For example, Milliman found that that slow music slows down supermarket shopping by 15%. This extends to how fast
and slow you eat and drink - how many bites per minute to take – Roballey and colleagues found that people take more
bites per minute when hearing fast music compared to slow, and McElrea and Standing found people drink quicker to fast
music as well.
BUT, that there is a trade-off between the speed of customer activity and spending. IF you’re moving through a retail
space – say a grocery store – quicker because the music is more arousing as Milliman found, you’ll spend less money on
groceries. A grocer wants you to peruse the aisles and pick up more items as you shop.
Speaking of the items you’re choosing to buy, music also has an influence on product choice as well. Let’s stay with the
grocery store for a minute and I’ll tell you about my favourite piece of research. North, Hargreaves, and McKendrick
conducted a study in a UK grocery store. At the end of an aisle, there was wine on sale – there was equivalently matched
French and German wine on sale. What the researchers did was play stereotypically French or German music on
alternating days. On the days the German music played, the German wine sales increased and on the French music days,
there were more French wine sales.
So the music style matched the wine style – so the music was influencing purchasing decisions. And that’s whether or not
you even realize it – because when they asked people about it after checking out, only a very small number of people
were aware of the music. Now, the music isn’t necessarily CAUSING you to buy wine or a certain wine. If you love French
wine, you’ll likely still buy the French wine BUT if you’re undecided, then that music might prime you towards a certain
item.
Theory
So how do we explain music’s influence on our consumer behaviour?
The first theoretical explanation concerns the effect of music on physiological arousal. This comes from Daniel Berlyne’s
work on psychobiology and arousal. The basic premise is that louder, faster, more complex music is arousing. And arousal
will make you move. So, as I said before, arousing music speeds up customer activity.
The second theoretical explanation concerns the ability of music to prime certain thoughts and associations. We know
that people build up associations to specific genres or pieces of music over their lifetime. These associations can be both
cultural and personal – for example, a song that you identify with your first relationship or your wedding dance song. That’s
a personal association – there’s nothing in the music itself, but the memories attached to that song have power. Relatedly,
music can also influence consumers through its emotional effects. Our emotional response to music can affect how we
process commercially relevant information.
On a broader scale, the match between music and situations/experiences – including products being sold—is referred to
as ‘musical fit’. It refers to people judging how well the music matches the environment. Consider for yourself the music
you might select for trying to help you sleep versus running 10 kilometers at the gym. My own research has shown that
people choose different music that better matches each situation and their goals in that situation.
With our interest in consumer behaviour, I’ll use a good research example to illustrate this idea of musical fit. Jacob and
colleagues looked at the impact of music genre on visitors to a flower shop. They monitored customers’ time in the shop
and the money spent when there was no music, pop music, or ‘romantic’ music playing in the background. People spent
more money in the store when the romantic music was playing. There was congruence between the style of music and
the products on offer.
This idea of musical fit explains how the music at the grocery store was influencing wine purchasing. Staying on wine,
Areni and Kim did a study in a wine cellar – they compared what happened when classical or top 40 music was playing.
There was no difference in the number of shelf items examined OR the number of items purchased, BUT there was a
difference in the amount of money spent. Shoppers purchased more expensive merchandise when the classical music
was playing. Across these studies, it seems that classical music creates an ‘upscale, classy’ environment. This
atmosphere then influences customer behaviour.
Of course all of this doesn’t JUST pertain to wine – Alpert and Alpert, for instance, found that congruency between music
genre and the purchasing of greeting cards.
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Wrap up
The research on the influence of music on consumer behaviour highlights a few important issues for consideration.
First, there are no proven influences – rather there are trends and trade-offs. If music can have so many different
effects, it is important to remember that there is no “one size fits all” approach. We must consider individual differences,
personal preferences, and the fact that our past experiences matter. Plus, our experiences are multi-sensory. So, music
is only one part of the atmospherics to consider.
David Hargreaves’ Reciprocal Feedback Model – which helps explain our interactions with music broadly -- nicely sums
up this idea. The model shows how there are three inter-related components that influence our response to music –
These are characteristics of the music, characteristics of the situation, and characteristics of the individual. All three of
these interact upon each other to influence our responses.
With this in mind, a particular music track will affect somebody to different degrees if it is a particular track they love,
compared to one they loathe. For retailers, then, it’s important to select music that addresses the most important
marketing goals for each individual setting.
Today we’ve talked about how music can influence the retail settings we visit, how we perceive the atmosphere of retail
spaces, the amount of time we spend there, as well as the amount of money we spend and the products we select.
Relatedly, music can also influence our memory for advertising and branding, and other beliefs about different products
–including how we perceive the taste, flavour, and feeling of food and drink. It might sound strange, but there’s a
growing body of scientific research, called gastrophysics and “sonic seasoning” that considers how music and
soundscapes can make food and drink taste better. If you’re interested, I encourage you to check out
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Music in schools [Audio transcript]
Ha l l a m, Susan and McFerran, Kat. Music in schools [Po dc a s t t ra n s c ri p t]. University College London,
University of Melbourne.
Interviewee:
I am currently Emerita Professor of Education and Music Psychology at the Institute of Education
UCL, but I didn’t start my life off intending to be an academic. I was a professional musician. I
don’t think everybody who reads my work as a researcher realizes that and so my interest in this
area starts from quite an early age, seven, when I looked to play the violin. As you will be aware,
or I assume the listeners will be aware that the systems for learning music around the world are
different, very different.
In England, at the time I was learning—this was about 1956, something of that order, just in the
post-Second World War period. There was a great pressure to try and get working-class children
to engage with making music because, prior to that, it had been absolutely the domain for those
with money. Where I lived, the person in charge of music had a vision, and the vision was that
every child in that area, which happens to be Leicester, which is a geographical area in the
Midlands, every child in Leicester should have the opportunity to learn to play a musical
instrument in school. What happened was he set up a music service, which became later the
model of music services in England and that music service employed instrumental teaching staff
whose week was spent traveling around to schools and teaching children in large groups. For
instance, I started in a group of 12. I think the actual number may have depended on our
instruments, but violin was quite an easy instrument to—quite cheap, to be honest. I started in a
group of 12. He used to turn up on Tuesdays. Our little group of 12 would go off to a room
separate from the school, have a violin lesson with him for half an hour, and that’s how it all
began.
Now, surprisingly, after that group of 12 none of whom had parents who were, in any way shape
or form, musical in the sense of having learned to play an instrument themselves or anything like
that. We were all completely naïve. Engagement with music at school, at that time, would’ve been
singing hymns in assembly and that was about it, to be honest. Their model of music was listened
to on the radio at home so a mixed bag but no musical expertise, really, from the parents at all.
Out of those 12, about half went on to join what was, then, the Leicester Schools of Music, which
was a voluntary group, which run on Saturday mornings. We had to travel to it. There were
actually three orchestras: a junior orchestra, an intermediate, and senior orchestra. About half
went on to join that so we’re already committed to going beyond just the lessons in school.
Actually, three of them went on to become professional musicians, which is quite remarkable,
really.
Anyway, when I was about 10 because we had to travel to the suppliers, to what was available
on Saturday, it meant traveling on public transport. It meant you couldn’t go terribly young, and I
was 10 when I joined the junior orchestra. By the time I was 12, I had made sufficient progress
to be in the senior orchestra. When I was 15, I led senior orchestra and I did that until I was 18.
Then, I went on to the Royal Academy of Music where I studied the violin, so you get a sense of
what was going on in my life and those of colleagues because every year about between I guess
10 and 12, people would go from this relatively rural area with no particular musical background
in their family onto the most prestigious, higher-education music academies in the world. That’s
the background and that is where I started. That led me to where I am now and established quite
a lot of my beliefs, as you can imagine. When later in my life, people said, “Oh, no, you can’t
possibly teach any other way except one-to-one,” I was able to go, “You can and I know cuz I’m
living example of it.” That was what started it.
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From that, I went to the Royal Academy of Music, as I told you. Because I’d had such a good
time in Leicester playing in the orchestra, I think there is nothing in life that can compare with
playing in a large instrumental group. For me, it was orchestra. It might have been big band. It
might’ve been something, but that kind of quality of sound and the immersion in that sound and
the vibrations is something you can’t really replicate anywhere else or I don’t think you can. What
I realized, looking back on it, was the demands it makes on you are huge. There’s cognitive
demands, reading music quickly and sight-reading; physical demands, actually gettin’ your
fingers around the notes; emotional demands of interpreting the music and playing musically;
social demands cuz you’ve got get on with the other people and all those kinds of things. It was
much more challenging, intellectually challenging than anything that I was doing at school despite
the fact that, age 10, I passed what was called Ten Plus and went on to grammar school. What
was going on in school musically and otherwise couldn’t compare. It just didn’t have that level of
challenge so that was the beginning of that.
Then, after I left the academy, I joined the BBC Midland Light Orchestra just initially as a member,
but, after I’d been there about two, three months, the principal second violin left and I was asked
to take on that role. Because of the various regulations of the musicians’ union at that time, we
were only allowed to work three and a half days a week in order to not overspend the budget and
not overspend the recording time allowed. During that time, I was also able to do a lot of freelance
work, so not only did I play in that orchestra, which had a diet of light music of one sort or another
but also chamber music with something called Orchestra da Camera where I became deputy
leader and also in theaters and backing nightclub singers. Some of the names, I don't know. The
age difference is interesting. People like Cilla Black, Gene Pitney, Lovelace Watkins—some of
these are names from the past, but, at that time, they were people at the top of their game. By
the time I’d been a professional musician for about 10 years, I had a vast musical experience:
classical, opera, theater, nightclub, recording, backing all sorts of things. Huge experience. All of
this fulfilled my learning to learn, actually, wanting to learn and do new things.
While I was at the BBC, I decided that I didn’t think that this was going to occupy me sufficiently
the rest of my life, so I took up a degree in psychology, spare time externally with London
University. I had a tutor. Basically, what happened was he said to me, “Get the past exam papers
for about the last six years and just pick a question you’d like to look up and then answer it and
send it to me. I’ll mark it and send it back to you,” and that’s how I did my degree. Apart from, I
had to compile a laboratory notebook and Birkbeck College, which was part of London University,
provided a two-week course in the holidays where you could go and get your laboratory notebook,
but, basically, that’s how I got my degree. I had no real tuition, formal undergrad tuition at all
except learning to play the violin very well but not much else at the academy and doing this
degree in psychology.
When I finished the degree with psychology, I realized that, actually, this is what I wanted to move
into combining the two things. The institutional education had a master’s course in Psychology
of Education part-time, and so I was able to carry on with my musical career. What happened
was, at that time, I cut down on my playing enormously, left the BBC. I did a teacher-training
course, a one-year, full-time teacher-training course, so I became a qualified music teacher. Also,
at the same time, as going into teaching like that, my husband did the same thing. We both left
full-time playing to become more full-time teachers with playing as an extra kind of thing. That
was really where I probably learned, during that master’s course, learned more about teaching
than anything I’d ever done because I began to understand how you learn. That’s the key to
teaching. If you don’t understand how people learn, you don’t got much hope of really teaching
them effectively, and so I learned so much about learning, in general, but not music because I
was in the psychology department. Educational psychology was the focus.
My tutor was a brilliant man but he was into learning. That was his area. He knew nothing about
music, nothing at all. Effectively, I had free rein in terms—not the core elements. For instance, I
had to do statistics and research methods, and I had to do modules on personality, learning,
motivation and those general things, but when it came to choice of research project, my
dissertation, I could do what I wanted. He told me right from the start, he wouldn’t interfere cuz
he didn’t know anything about it so that was for me. He would keep an eye that I was making
sense psychologically in terms of learning.
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I was very interested, obviously, in how children learned and what, in particular, made some
children more successful than others. I was able to use a range of measures to do that. They
were all quantitative one way or another. I was able to do some intelligence tests, some tests
with asking teachers about the children and how easily they understood instructions, what their
musical ability was. I gave them a musical ability test and also asked the teachers how musical
they thought the children were and then feed this into a model of outcomes: how well were they
actually able to play and how long have they been playing to reach the standard they reached?
Then, through the statistics, I was able to throw all this into a program, SVSS, and what came
out of that was quite surprising. In fact, at the time, very surprising, which was that most important
factor, really, was the length of time they’d been learning, and the second most important factor
was the teachers’ evaluation of how well they were able to understand instructions. Nothing to
do with musical ability. Musical ability tests didn’t have high ratings at all.
This led me to think, “Well, okay, what is going on here? What is it about these children?” Of
course, that led me on to think about practice. My tutor said, “Well, you should do a PhD,” and I
did that, also part-time, also with him so, at this time, I was also carrying on with my own teaching
and also doing some playing. I interviewed 22 professional musicians and about another 30
young musicians, age range I think was about 7 up to 18 to find out how they practiced, how long
they practiced but not just how long they practiced, but what did they actually do when they were
practicing? This, at the time, was way ahead of the field. Nobody was doing anything like that at
all and that has carried on. I mean, although I moved on to lots of other things, that underpinned
a major part of my research and, to some extent, still does.
Other people have latched onto some parts of it. Of course, obviously, there’s been a lot of work
about the expertise paradigm, which has ruffled a lot of feathers all over the place and, no doubt
will continue to do so because, basically, it’s back to the old argument that the ancient Greeks
started about are you born or do you learn? I think I’m of the view that very definitely you learn,
not completely ruling out the born bit but the born bit is really second to learning. No matter what
you’re born with, if you don’t engage with learning and those kinds of things, being born with what
people might want to call talent or ability is a waste of time cuz you don’t develop it. Of course,
you will be aware and your students will be aware of lots of readings. I’ve written endlessly. I can’t
tell you how many chapters and articles I’ve written about all of those things so it’s been an
ongoing thing throughout my career. I think that that was really the first thing.
One of the things was the most surprising thing that I learned from that was definitely that practice
and effort were really, really important because, at that time, in England, we still had the Eleven
Plus and all of the education system was very much grounded in the idea that if you were born
clever, then that was it. It didn’t matter how you were taught. It would all work out. If you were
born clever, you would succeed. End of story. Those first pieces of research completely changed
my mind about that.
Anyway, by this time, once I finished my PhD, a job came up at the Institute of Education in the
psychology department. I must say, it might sound strange given how much of my work has been
in music, but I have never, ever, ever talked or researched in a music department or a music
education department. All the while I was at the institute, I was either in psychology or either
moved on to lifelong learning and policy because policy, you, then, realize, actually becomes very
important. Excuse me. I’m just gonna have a drink of water. Is that okay?
Interviewer:
Yeah, it’s definitely okay to have a drink of water. Also, it’s so exciting, I think, for students to hear
how critical a PhD can be in the trajectory of research that, then, exists for the rest of your life. I
can really hear the fact that what you learned through the deep observation that I guess you
hardly ever get a chance to do again in research that’s so precious, a PhD, just focusing on one
idea for so many years that will, then, sustain your entire career. It’s a beautiful description of
how that operates for so many people.
Interviewee:
Yeah. I think in music, certainly, most of the people I’ve supervised and I have supervised a lot
of PhDs, they come with an idea and then it’s that idea that is driving the work, whereas, in quite
a lot of subjects, that’s not the case. They apply to do a PhD in a team of researchers and
sometimes, they’re interested but not always that interested. I’ve always said to the students,
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“This is the beginning. Even when they finish their PhD, this is the beginning of your research.
It’ll go on throughout your life,” so I think that’s quite important. It might vary and it’ll take some
twists and turns. I mean, mine did.
Around this sort of time this was going on, universities were being pressured into generating
income from research. I’m sure you have this in Australia. We had what we call the REF, the
Research Excellence Framework. I know around the world, they’ve called it different things, but
it’s basically how many publications have you had? What research income have you generated?
What impact has it had, all that kind of thing? Well, here was me in a psychology department with
high-levels of expertise in psychology and recognized as being a really good teacher of,
particularly, the stats, which most people—I remember the staff didn’t like teaching. They didn’t
understand it. If you got statisticians in, the students couldn’t make head or tail of it. Although I
was a psychologist, I had other strengths, should we say. Then, there was this music stuff and
nobody in the department doing anything on music. “What’s you gonna do with that? You better
start finding something else.”
Well, as a musician and as, perhaps, again some of your students will recognize, you do wander
around schools quite a lot looking for students who have forgotten to turn up or whatever or you
turn up in the practice room you’ve been allocated. There will be two or three children in there
sitting around quietly hiding cigarettes as you appear at the door. I thought, “Well, I don't know
very much about this but maybe I could do that,” because coincidentally, the government, at that
time, decided to collect data on the attendance both at school and within school so discarding off
lessons, both of those, across the whole of England. Never been done before. There was nobody
at the institute who knew anything about it. Why should they? There was no money.
I thought, “Well, I know as much anybody else, probably a bit more than some.” I managed to get
some funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation to do some research on it mainly asking local
authorities, so this is the areas that have responsibilities for schools. What are you doing about
collecting these data making sure you know what’s going on? What are you doing to help schools
increase their number of children who are going to school and then staying there? I got the grant,
and we did this research. Gulbenkian was so pleased with it, it was sent free to every school in
the country. This was my first piece of funded research. It’s like all these things. Once you’ve
made your start, you’ve got your foot on the ladder and all sorts of things come out of that.
From that point, I, then, was offered opportunities to bid for grants on exclusion from school, on—
sorry, my husband’s right—oh, yes. Sorry. My husband just stuck me some—the title of the book
was Here Today, Here Tomorrow. This is the attendance book. There’s a famous book Here
Today, Gone Tomorrow. No? I don't know. Anyway, it was called Here Today, Here Tomorrow.
It was a very short, a very tiny, probably about 20, 30 pages. It was aimed for teachers to look
through. It sort of said, “What you have to start off finding out is why—you have to know why
they’re in school? Why aren’t they in school?” Quite often, some children would be away from
school for three weeks and nobody would know why. Parents weren’t required to tell the school.
After three weeks, the kids, they’re always quite nice not being school. “Nobody’s doing anything
about it so maybe I’ll stay at home,” really silly things. Anyway, I’m getting diverted.
Anyway, out of that came a hold load of opportunities to research: attendance, exclusion from
school,—this is kids getting thrown out usually for poor behavior.—and behavior in school,
generally, both at secondary and primary level, and, also related to that, ability grouping. I don't
know, I mean, what the situation with this in ability grouping where you are. You don’t have it?
Interviewer:
No, we don’t do a lot of that.
Interviewee:
Okay.
Interviewer:
I’m wondering in my excitement as you start talking about that is I’m sure that you wondered
whether music played a role in keep students attached to school. Was that one of the things that
you had the opportunity to investigate?
Interviewee:
Not that, at the moment. More to come. Am I running out of time? Do you need me to speed up?
Interviewer:
Yes, maybe, although it’s wonderful to have the chat, but maybe, it would be—yeah.
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27.36 minutes:
Interviewee:
Okay. I had these strands on music, which were long going and the strand on these other things,
which was relatively new. The ability grouping is still ongoing. I am still doing research on that. It
is still a hot topic in this country. Coincidently, shortly after this, the BBC rang me up wanting me
to give them advice on—they wanted to do a live replication of the Mozart effect. Are you familiar
with the Mozart effect?
Interviewer:
Yeah.
Interviewee:
They wanted to do it. They had a program called Tomorrow’s World, whether we’re looking at
future’s topics. The research on the Mozart effect where if you listened to 10 minutes of Mozart,
it was going to raise your IQ, it’d just come out and they wanted to replicate it on TV. They rang
me up because they wanted to set this experiment up and then run it live on TV. Well, actually,
we couldn’t quite run it quite like that but we had our best go. We ran it on the radio. The children
were in three groups, and there were over 6,000 children who took part. Within each school that
took part, it was split into three groups. They all had to listen to the Mozart, which had been
listened to in the original research or they listened to, oh, a pop group whose name escapes me.
I can’t remember who it was, a pop group who were top of the chart, at the time, or they,
unfortunately, got me talking about experiments. Then, at the end of the 10 minutes, the music
stopped and they all had to fill in a questionnaire about spatial reasoning. Then, the teachers
marked the questionnaire cuz they were all right or wrong answers, and then they were couriered
over to me. I put all the data in. Then, the next day, we presented it live on television. Not
surprisingly, we weren’t able to replicate the Mozart effect.
In fact, I did a later analysis with Glen Schellenberg who, by using a slightly different statistical
technique, showed that the pop group did better. To be honest, my original analysis I was stunned
by because it said there was no difference and I don’t really think there was. If there was, it was
only because the kids were a bit more excited about the pop group. Anyway, it was in all the
newspapers. It created a huge interest. From that, I, then, got lots of offers. “Will you do this, that,
and the other? Will you do a review of research on the power of music?” That has, again, been a
huge strand of my work, which carried along with what we were just talking about. Does music
have an impact on children who were disaffected from school, and so on and so forth? I’ve written
endlessly about that. If you want me to send you a CV or something I can do that. Would that be
helpful?
Interviewer:
No, though, we’ll certainly put the students onto reading. What I’m really interested in is that
research about the power of music and the connection to school. What did you discover?
Interviewee:
Yeah. Well, I mean, this has been ongoing for a long time. First of all, it showed how powerful
music was in all sorts of ways, not just in relation to school but in relation to people’s lives, in
general. That research carried on across the whole area. In schools, it took—I mean, one of the
problems—this has always been a problem.—is that teachers don’t read research, not unless
they’re doing a master’s degree, usually, so you end up with a gap between the two. I’ve always
tried to make what I was doing accessible to teachers and easy to understand, so having brought
the thing together, we produced a side of A4 with what music can do for you in school in 10 key
points. That has evolved over time, as well.
The latest big review I did was in 2014. I, then, started to re-review it because it’s moving so fast.
I decided I would have to split it up, so I did a paper just focusing on language because that’s a
very, very strong area, which came out a couple of years ago. I’m working on one, at the moment,
on mathematics, which, again, has been a developing area. There’s been a lot of confusion in
the mathematics side. The language side is very, very strong. If children do language particularly
in the early years of school—lots of music, sorry.—their language skills will improve enormously.
That’s pretty much now been accepted. That has meant that there’s been a lot more focus on
early years music because it helps. It helps with phonics, which has been a huge pressure in
schools and that sort of thing. One of my PhD students, she’d use working with rhythm to help
older children who were struggling with reading, and that also has been successful and that’s
been published. There’s a lot of work that’s been on the language side of things.
Maths is still a little bit—we’re not so confident about it. Spatial reasoning, which is one element
of math, which is where you are able to manipulate shapes, seems to have a strong relationship,
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but math, more generally, is more difficult because maths is extremely complicated. Maths covers
a huge range of different elements, which means you can’t go, “Well, which maths do you mean?
Do you mean geometry? Do you mean algebra,” but the spatial-reasoning element is fairly strong
and so they’ve been important.
It’s been important to keep this research up mainly to try and help schools justify the role of music
in schools where funding has decreased. A lot of headteachers have looked at the evidence and
seen that it can help and taken that on board and used it with their governors or whoever to justify.
Then, there’s the social elements, which there’s been less research on in many ways, although
recently, it’s getting more and more research on the social side and how it can help children better
integrate and things like that. I think that this sort of mental health, there’s been more and more
work done with adults, which is, again, an area where I’ve moved into, which has shown how
important music can be in people’s lives, bringing them together, getting them to sing together in
all sorts of venues, prisons, people who are homeless, all those kinds of things and so, of course,
that applies to children.
I went on a visit to a lot of schools for something we have called a Wider Opportunity Scheme.
You may have heard of this. It’s where every child gets the opportunity to learn to play an
instrument. Well, that is still going on but it does mean hugely large—it means the whole class
has to buy an instrument, which is tricky for some of the teachers and some of them are better at
it than others. One of the things that came out of that, I would go in and visit a school to hear it
going on and observe what was going on there. Headteachers would—I’d hardly get in the door
and they’d be telling me how wonderful it is. I’d be able to point them in the direction of things to
read and so on. One interesting thing that came out was the number of children who had special
educational needs. The teachers would say to me, “There are two children in this class who have
quite severe special needs. If you watch this class, by the end of it, I don’t think you’ll be able to
tell which ones have got the special needs.” There were two people, two children who were
elective mutes, would not speak but they would sing. In one way, it’s a small sample, two children
out of—I mean, I must have visited several hundred anyway. The point is I think there’s still more
work to do on that area. That’s another area which is developing in all sorts of ways. I think we
will carry on doing it.
For people who are teaching music, it seems to me that the big issue is environment. The key
one is access. Everybody, absolutely everybody, should be able to access music, learn to play
an instrument or learn to—I mean, say learn to sing. I mean, most people can sing. Anyway, we
have some extra tuition in singing so everybody should have an opportunity. Then, what happens
is you get the debate about, well, what should it be? Should we have—this is where the
arguments ridiculous. Should we be looking at classical music? Is that the role of a school?
Should all this other stuff be outside school? Of course, the Musical Futures Project—have you
heard that?
Interviewer:
No.
Interviewee:
Well, we’ve done quite a lot of evaluation of that, which has shown good things and bad things.
Because we’ve not been running it, we’ve been able to evaluate it from a distance. There is
absolutely no question that for a lot of children, it has given them massive opportunities to thrive
in music lessons, which they didn’t have before. Some teachers have found it very difficult cuz
it’s based on popular music. It’s based on learning to play by ear, which they’re not familiar with
either. For the teacher, there are challenges. If you like, for the school, what is the school aiming
to do? What does the school or the area think music education should be about? There are a lot
of issues around that and also, as I said, this whole idea of opportunities for everybody, everybody
being able to learn in school an instrument usually starting in primary school. Should we be doing
that or should we be selecting or should we be just taking those who can pay? These are big
philosophical questions. Some of the research that I’ve been doing, particularly on the value of
music, has slightly helped, I think. In fact, I know it has. I can demonstrate it has, to some extent,
helped governments to keep it on the agenda, but governments are changed. You have to keep
working at it. The schools have to keep working at it. I think that that is a key issue.
For me, I think the main issues is access, the type of music, and the access has got to be ongoing.
It’s no use saying, “Okay, we’ll let you play the violin, but, after two years, you can’t do it anymore
cuz there’s no more money.” If it’s to have any long-term benefit in terms of all the things like
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language, literacy, all those things, you better keep doing it. It’s not a half-hour and then forget it.
It’s ongoing and choice of the schools. They’ve got to decide. Most of the schools where they
decide to take it on board, they heard teachers say, “We’ve never regretted it, and we would
never go back to not having music.” It’s getting them going, in the first place.
Of course, one of the biggest advocates for that are teachers who are in the school. If a teacher
goes in and works with a large group and the children enjoy it, and perform, and perform well in
concerts, then the headteachers go, “Oh, this is a good thing.” Then, it takes off and you generate
that kind of ethos of music is one of the core things we do, so that’s very, very important, as well.
Of course, once children have started a musical journey through their lives, which they do, and
that has to start in school—for most children, if it doesn’t start in school, it won’t start at all. Once
they start, many of them, then, carry on into adulthood. I mean, I had a pupil who, when I taught
her—this is going back a long time, about 60 years. She learned to play the violin. For jobs, we
moved away from the area where she lived, but we kept in touch cuz she was very interested in
music. She carried on playing but I didn’t teach her anymore. We met her a few months ago.
She’s now a medical doctor. She is a medical doctor with—
Male Voice:
Médecins Sans Frontières
Interviewee:
They go to war zones, Ebola zones, all that. Her mother said to me,—her mother came, as well.—
“She takes her violin with her everywhere she goes.”
Interviewer:
Yeah, that’s a beautiful story. It really is.
Interviewee:
Yeah. She plays it cuz otherwise, the baggage load would be astronomical. Yeah.
Interviewer:
That’s a beautiful summary of the powerful connection that you’ve been exploring all your life.
Interviewee:
Yeah.
Interviewer:
Really, so thank you for taking us on this wide-ranging journey. It was really exciting both at a
practical level for the students to hear how a research career evolves and how it comes from
areas of passion and commitment, not necessarily from strategically following the dollar signs but
from really staying with one’s expertise.
Interviewee:
You have to play the game a bit, but you can steer the game a bit, as well.
Interviewer:
Yeah, it’s really beautiful to hear.
Interviewee:
Of course, you’ve got to make contacts, and you’ve got to—I mean, this moves me on to one
other thing. I have always held the view that it is important when you present research, to present
it in a neutral way, in an unbiased, neutral, factual way.—these are the findings.—rather than
trying to tell people what to do. If you try and tell them what to do, they don’t want it, particularly,
politicians. For me, and this has worked, is you present the findings, you present what the findings
mean, and how different applying them in different ways could mean different things, but you
don’t start trying to put forward your opinion. People sometimes say to me, “Well, what’s your
opinion?” I say, “Well, I don’t really have an opinion, as such. I believe that you have to research
thoroughly, that you have to research using lots of different research methods around the same
area, and you research thoroughly and then you present those findings clearly in a way that
practitioners and people, who are not experts, can understand. Then, they have to make up their
minds whether it makes sense to them.” Usually, they do.
I think, to be honest, the fact that I spent a lot of my time as a professional musician and teacher
made a huge difference because I knew, not just from the research, I knew from doing it that this
was the case, so I could talk to a teacher or I could talk to a student about practicing and it meant
something cuz I’ve been through it myself. It wasn’t just me as flying in from some outer-space
planet telling them what to do. This is somebody who had done it herself and had reached the
highest levels of my musical profession but not only that but was also able to research it and if
you like, confirm.
Interviewer:
Yeah, that’s wonderful. Alright, I wanna say thank you so much for your time. You’ve been
extremely generous.
Interviewee:
Okay. It’s okay.
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Interviewer:
We could talk for days and weeks and, certainly, there are many publications that we’ll pass on
the students to read.
Interviewee:
I’m sure we could, actually.
Interviewer:
I just wanna say thank you, on their behalf, for the time you’ve given us.
Interviewee:
Okay.
[End of Audio]
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Music performance [Audio transcript]
Davidson, J. & McFerran, K.S. ( 2019). Music performance [Au d i o t ra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne.
Interviewer:
Hi there, everybody and welcome to this interview. Today, we are speaking with the wondrous
Professor Jane Davidson, who is currently with us at the University of Melbourne but has a long
track record in a number of fantastic universities right here in Australia and overseas, and she
brings with her this wealth of experience in the field of music psychology that goes back a number
of decades. Today, our topic is really focusing on music performances and, in particular, the
social aspects of music performances, which Jane has been exploring for a long time. Jane, I
thought we might just start off by asking a really broad question, which is why you even think that
group music performances are an important area for investigation?
Interviewee:
Well, they critically important at a number of levels, but I suppose that the most fundamental and
basic—the first kinds of music making we make is in a group with our caregivers. When we're an
infant, we sing and it's all about responding to someone else. I suppose, at that most basic level,
I would say that it's really a core part of the human condition—music, social interaction. I can
probe that a little bit more and say what I mean about that. Then in my own biography, I began
studying performance, focusing rather more on soloists, but as I did that, I realized the group
context was also something that changed the dynamics for that person with the audience and of
course then with the co-performers.
I was fortunate enough to live in Sheffield for a long time, which used to be the home of a very
famous international string quartet called the Lindsay String Quartet. They're, unfortunately,
either deceased or retired now, the members of that quartet, but they really challenged social
practice, and rather than sitting in front of the audience and simply playing to the audience, they
used to sit in the round, with the audience around them. They would change positions every
movement of a work, the classical work, and they would talk to the audience, often in between
movements, explaining to them what was happening in the music. Also, it gave you huge insight
to them as individuals and how they interacted with one another.
That was the thing that stimulated my psychological interest in the group dynamics of how these
things work. Then because they were incredibly busy professional musicians, I chose not to do a
study of them. Rather, what I did was I worked with a string quartet of students, and I looked at
the process they went through, from rehearsal to performance and what that told me about the
musical dynamics and how the musical expression and the musical story evolved and changed
through the rehearsal process. I also had the story of what happened in the performance.
That was details about the music, if you like, but I also had this rich narrative about how these
four individuals interacted with one another and how they behaved towards one another in
rehearsals and then eventually what happened in the performance. Then I had material where I
interviewed them afterwards and we watched the performance together, and I found out all kinds
of fascinating things about them, in terms of how they spoke about one another's playing, how
they supported one another or not. That was really the first piece of, if you like, empirical work I
did. That was back in 2002, that article was published, so I did that work a long time ago. I
probably did the work more than 20 years ago.
Interviewer:
Do you mind if I actually just dig into that a little bit, Jane?
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Interviewee:
Yeah.
Interviewer:
Because we talk a lot about research methodology in this subject, and the students are analyzing
different music psychology studies, so that sounds fascinating to me. The data that you collected
is performance, rehearsal, dynamics, perspectives. Can you just talk us through a little bit about
how you—what that data was and what you did with it?
Interviewee:
Yeah, so the data came in various forms. It was essentially on video, so I had video of the music
rehearsals. I had video of the interviews and video of them watching video of themselves playing
because, clearly, they couldn't talk out loud when they were in their actual performance. I spent
many, many hours doing a number of things, counting, for instance, the numbers of times they
would look at one another or they would talk to one another, who would be leading that. I would
make some quantitative assessments of what they did. I also did a transcription of what they were
saying, and I then analyzed that and looked for themes within that, so it actually generated a lot
of data.
What I was going to say was, after I did that piece of work, a number of other people started to
research in that area, and some of them drew on theories and methodologies from more social
interaction kind of perspectives and more clearly in that kind of social psychology field directly.
Then there's another field that I was particularly interested in. Although I haven't written so much,
in terms of journal articles on this, I have written about it in book chapters, which is this field of
proxemics—how close somebody is physically to somebody else and what that invites. If you're
at a large distance, you have to be more formal and distant and raise your voice and so on. The
closer and closer you are, the more intimate the exchange can be. Clearly, if you're performing
in a very tightly packed ensemble, like a choir, that has big ramifications—who you're standing
with, what that sounds like, and so on.
This particular topic touches on many potential methodologies and also many different theoretical
or frames of reference. For instance, proxemics was developed in the early 1960s by an
anthropologist, by a social anthropologist. Whereas, for instance, some of the other methods I've
used, not in that paper, but I've done other things where I've looked in great detail at the music
and what the performer does, in terms of their musical expressions. That's the changes in and
around the regularity of the music as it's written, so the regularity, the pulse or the regularity of
the loud and the soft, so those things—the timing, the dynamics. Those methods draw much
more on hard scientific measurement, or else looking at gesture and posture, if you're looking at
the body movement, which comes from another field, again. You have all these different points
of reference.
Interviewer:
It's so interesting to hear that because I know your research quite well and to know that you have
drawn on quantitative data, qualitative data. For you, is that because you've been interested in
pursuing particular questions, and you feel quite open to using different methods? 'Cause one of
the things we critique in this class is that sometimes there's dominant traditions in fields. I'm
remembering we have science student, people from humanities, where they're really discovering
quite unusual methods, compared to those that are dominant in their own field. If you could just
tell out about how you pursued different questions with different methods.
Interviewee:
In terms of different methods and my view of them, it's this—if you measure something, you can
find an objective real difference between two things or two points in time or two attitudes. If you're
looking at something that I'm fascinating by, which is how bodies interact, particularly when
they're making music, but how people come together and do things, you can very easily measure,
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to look for difference. On the basis of that, it doesn't tell you why, but it gives you a series of facts,
about which you can then draw up some hypotheses. To find out the more why something
happens, of course, again, it's hard to get at any kind of hard truth, but what you can do is you
can talk to people. You can talk to different people and find as many different perspectives and
understandings from their meanings as possible.
Working in that way, a much more qualitative way, you can come to some conclusions that are
different. They're based on the majority of people's views about something and then the variations
away from them. Because it's done in this very detailed qualitative manner, it has such a great
amount of depth to it. It catches the subtlety of both the individual and the larger number. I'm a
little less certain about using measures or tools. They're fine. You can use standardized
measures. Of course you can, but because they give you trends of behavior across a large
population, they often miss what happens for the individual.
I do use surveys as well. In an ideal world, one would combine, if you could—it depends on the
research question. I would always try and triangulate different kinds of research methods and
then triangulate the views of different individuals so I get these different perspectives all the time
in what I'm doing. It means sometimes the research is very slow. Sometimes it means that I don't
get things finished because I've gone on one route, and I haven't got the rest of the data and the
detail I would require it to be, but that's what I aspire to do anyway.
Interviewer:
Oh, that's so helpful, Jane, thank you. It's just really great to hear somebody who is equally
respectful of a range of different approaches articulate a rationale within music psychology for
that, so really appreciate it. I didn't want to distract you—but I did—from what you've learned and
what you've discovered in your career because I know that you have really taken up a couple of
key themes around the human interaction and encounter in musical performances. I don't know
if you wanna focus more on your whole career as a trajectory or if you wanna take us to where
you are most passionate now.
Interviewee:
Sorry, just to—so you're talking about just in this area of research?
Interviewer:
Yeah.
Interviewee:
What I had been thinking of saying was I could talk about—well, for instance, I did a paper about
Annie Lennox, okay, and I thought I was doing a paper about a soloist. Actually, I was doing a
paper about the whole social situation of the performance. That's how it turned out. I could talk
about that because that really was a very—I think it's been quite an important paper in the
literature. The other one I talked about hasn't been hugely cited, but it was an important-ish paper.
This one with Annie Lennox, it's been cited a lot more.
Interviewee:
It's just about something I didn't really expect it be about. I don't know if you want me to talk about
that.
Interviewer:
I'd love to hear about that, especially unexpected discoveries. I think it's really exciting to hear
about how things come up when we're doing research, that we don't expect to find.
Interviewee:
I've just told you about the string quartet research I did, and I actually went on and studied other
kinds of ensembles as well, in the classical tradition. In parallel with doing that research, I'm a
solo singer. I work in the classical tradition, but I have also sung in more jazz. I was doing some
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experiments in that kind of way, getting singers to sing in different styles and modalities, to see
what would happen when those variables, if you like, were changed. In parallel to that, I happened
to be watching Annie Lennox, who at that point had separated from the band, the Eurythmics,
and was having a solo career. I thought I would write about what she does as a solo artist in her
performances, so I looked at a number of performances of the same song over time to see how
it varied, and so on.
As I began to do that, I realized that I wasn't really looking at how she varied the music across
interpretation. What I was looking at was how she, as a social being and somebody in a role of
leadership, as the lead performer in a band—'cause she had her backing band, her backing
vocalists, her guitarists and her drummer and keyboard player. She was also the leader of this
huge audience, sometimes playing in massive venues, other times in smaller venues. What I
started to study was what she did in response to her band or how she led them, how she
coordinated them musically, how she gave them cues visually or in the music, and likewise, how
she cued her relationship with the audience.
For instance, what really fascinated me in that example was in one venue, all they did was play
the introduction. It could have been the introduction to any song. It was just a slowly rising chordal
pattern, arpeggiated pattern, and there was a massive pause. At the end of that pause, she just
started to vocalize the first word of the song, and the song was "Who's That Girl?" It's from the
80s. She just sang the first word, which is, "the language of love," so she sang "the." As she sang
that first word, the audience just erupted because all they needed was that word and their
knowledge of the context and the ritual of that performance, from having heard it a million times
on the radio or whatever, and they all applauded.
They listened intently to that sort of introduction, and then as soon as the chorus, so the refrain
came up, they all started to sing, thousands and thousands of people. This, for me, was a
fascinating study of how she was, in a way, manipulating the audience, but it was based on a
social practice, a social relationship that she'd built up with them. Even though she'd never met
any of them, it was something through her music and the ritual of that and the structure of the
music that helped facilitate that relationship. It was a really key piece of research I did, and it has
actually been very well cited, and yeah, it was something that happened almost by accident.
Interviewer:
Yeah, it's amazing to hear, in all of the stories from key researchers in the field, that sometimes
it's about confirming a hypothesis, but other times it's about being surprised by something else
that also emerges, or perhaps instead of. Tell us about where you've come to from there, Jane.
I know it's a vast career, but just in terms of this capacity to be interested in the social aspects of
music performances, what's driving you now and how did you get to that?
Interviewee:
Well, I suppose, shortly after that, or about that—well, it's complicated because, in parallel to that
kind of work, I was also developing a career as both an opera singer and an opera director in one
area. Then in another area, I was also doing a lot of work in a supervision of and mentoring of
music therapists. This was in the UK at the time, and so I have a deep, personal social
commitment to all kinds of people getting access to the arts—in particular, music—and so this
work on the, if you like, the power of music in the performance, led me to start to think about what
that could be. Not in a therapeutic relationship, so not where somebody is trying to implement a
kind of change with the person on a particularly framed journey, but just what that therapeutic
process could be, if you like, in a kind of self-regulation.
I started to look at communities' music generally, but community singing in particular, and
began—this is a long time ago, so again, in the early 2000s, if not the late 90s—working with a
colleague with a homeless choir in Canada. Then after that, we worked with some different
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groups of singers. Eventually, I started working with people living with dementia, other elderly
people with a variety of conditions that were accompanying their lives, Parkinson's and so on.
From that, I've become very committed to finding good quality of life solutions for people to
manage their everyday lives and the grumbles and groans they have that accompany that, using
the arts, and so I've been very passionate about that kind of work.
Interviewer:
Yeah, that's fantastic, and I do remember those early pieces, which actually transformed some
directions in the music therapy field, which is a related field. Maybe if I take choirs as the frame
to finish up our interview today, choirs make sense because you're personally a singer, because
it connects in with your interest in social encounters, and because you have this larger social
justice access frame as well, and so it makes sense that you would be looking at different forums.
Choirs have become a really popular topic, from Steven Clift’s work, through choirs such as those
with people who have different issues and challenges that they face in the world. Where do you
stand, at the moment, in terms of the values, the potentials or what choirs afford, and what would
you love to know more about?
Interviewee:
Well, what I [clears throat]—sorry, what I'm particularly interested in, at the moment, is about
social cohesion and social resilience, which connects directly with the work about the homeless
people done many years ago. Now this is on intercultural cohesion and using music, broadly put.
In recent times, I've been working with a colleague who was a post-doctoral research fellow I
had. That's been on a lullaby choir and how we can unite people from incredibly different
backgrounds and life challenges, and so on, if you give them a common theme.
A musical theme is often quite a neutral theme. It's emotional—sorry, this sounds like a
tautology—but it's emotionally very charged and deep and salient to them, but the meaning of it,
in this context a lullaby, is about strong, positive connection to somebody. It's usually calming,
soothing. Not all lullabies are soothing, by the way, but as a general principal. As a tool to bring
people together, it can be useful. We did a study in Melbourne quite recently, working in an
environment where there were people from many different cultural backgrounds, and we went to
that workplace and asked them what they would like to know about one another and how they
could maybe do something together that they thought would help them in the workplace but help
them understand one another culturally much better.
It came from the working environment that those people thought sharing lullabies, so the thing
they'd first done as an infant in their lives. That's what we did, and it was just so hugely successful.
They, as all groups do, got hooked, not just on process of being together and sharing and
laughing and crying together about the history of their lullaby and the nostalgia of home and
everything, but they also got hooked on performance. We ended up doing a performance in the
Melbourne Recital Centre, so that was a wonderful achievement for everybody and something
that took the project to a completely different level.
I suppose, in my little talk with you, now I'm coming full circle because I started by saying I got
interested in group music making because, if you look at the most primal form of communication
we have, I would argue it is through the human voice and singing with a mother and infant or this
sort of proto-musical behavior. That's at one level, and the other level is that, as a singer, I'm very
interested in the power of performance and what that can do. Whilst it's wonderful to interact with
people socially, making music, there's something about once that goes into a slightly different
status or a different lens and it becomes a performance, that ritual, that space of the performance
does something for the performers, which lifts them in a different kind of way to simply doing the
music together, so they're—the two things, I suppose, are the extremes that I'm currently
interested in.
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Interviewer:
Thank you, it's been wonderful spending some time with you today, and we are really grateful to
have your expertise in music psychology. Thank you, Jane Davidson.
[End of Audio]
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Music and memory [Audio transcript]
B a i rd, Aimee and McFerran, Katrina. Music and memory [Podcast t ra n s c ri p t]. University of Melbourne.
Interviewer:
All right, I'm very excited to be talking today with Dr. Amee Baird, who is an expert internationally
and locally on the topic of music and memories. Amee, it's so great to have you here—
Interviewee:
Thank you for having me.
Interviewer:
As you know, what we're really tryin' to do is have a conversation that allows students to fully
understand what it's like to be a researcher in this area, and what's inspired you, as you've
undertaken quite a large number of investigations about music and memory. Maybe we could
just start off by asking you the most obvious question, which is why do you think that this is an
important area for investigation?
Interviewee:
Well, I think there's two reasons, really. The first is the link between music and autobiographical
memory. Autobiographical memory is our personal memories of our lives. We know that music is
a really powerful trigger of autobiographical memory, and that type of memory is really crucial for
our identity and our sense of self. I think understanding the links between music and memory, in
particular autobiographical memory, can help us to understand ourselves and what is being called
the self is.
The second thing is, I think this has clinical implications in that people with different neurological
or psychiatric disorders often have alterations in their sense of self, and also have reduced
autobiographical memory. There's some examples of people who can have memory impairment
with neurological disorders, like acquired brain injury, people with dementia, certainly the most
common type of dementia like Alzheimer's dementia, caused by Alzheimer's disease. They have
significant memory impairments. The use of music in memory rehabilitation for those types of
disorders is important to investigate.
Also, in different psychiatric conditions in which there's an alteration in the sense of self—say
depression, personality disorders, schizophrenia. Most mental health conditions, people have
changes in their sense of self, and also they can have changes in their ability to remember their
personal life, so their autobiographical memory. I think music can have a really important
therapeutic impact for those patient populations, too. I think it's important for scientific reasons,
but also for clinical, therapeutic reasons for different patient populations.
Interviewer:
I could hear immediately the impact that your work is probably having in the lives of people. Not
just people that are influenced by the papers that you publish, but also in your practice, as a
neuropsychologist. Do you mind if I ask you about why you became interested in this topic
initially? It sounds very personal. You're interested in the personal, but what was it for you that
led you to investigate the field?
Interviewee:
It was actually a job application that came up. It was a post-doctoral research position in Paris—
and who wouldn't wanna go and live in Paris? The topic of the post-doc was Neuropsychology of
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Music and Memory. I'd finished my Ph.D. a couple of years ago and had been working clinically.
I'd worked in a hospital in London, but at that point in time, when that job ad came up, I was back
in Australia, but I was missing Europe. I thought, how could there be this amazing job on
neuropsychology of memory and music? I've played the cello and piano all my life, so it sort of
enabled me to tap back into that musical experience of my own, but also I was a
neuropsychologist.
I just thought, "I've gotta get this job," applied for it, luckily got it, and then my husband and I
moved to Paris for a year. That was back in 2007. I spent the year living in Paris, reading all this
literature on memory for music. My job in that post-doc was to write a literature review on music
and memory. In English, luckily not in French. I couldn’t speak French fluently, but I learned a bit
while I was there. Enough to order good food in restaurants. [Laughter]
In reading all of that literature that had been ever written on music and memory, I read some case
studies about people with Alzheimer's dementia who were musicians prior to developing
dementia, who were still able to play their musical instruments, even when they had very severe
Alzheimer's dementia. It was those case studies that really inspired me in that reading and
triggered my interest and my desire to look into that particular topic further—the topic of music
and memory in dementia. At that point in time, back in 2007, there'd really only been a few case
studies on that topic, and I decided that I'd pursue more research in that field then.
Interviewer:
That's an extraordinary opportunity, just to become a part, or return to the international
community, but also to take up a topic that brings together your personal passion for music and
what you were doing as your day job.
Interviewee:
It was a very lucky opportunity, and to have that experience of living in Paris was fantastic. I think
it really was a formative point in my career, really, to sort of dip out of the clinical work and just
spend a year doing research, but on a fascinating topic that's led me down the path I've been on
for the last 13 years.
Interviewer:
I think that the fact that you had to do a literature review—a systematic literature review, no doubt,
is really important to point out to students as well, because people often see the pointy end of
research, when you're doing an original investigation that's developing your knowledge, whereas,
we all start back here, don't we, in really coming to understand that which has already been
discovered and learned and theorized as the basis for what we do. For you, having done that
literature of you, and having been inspired by those case studies, in particular, which is also
noteworthy, what did you learn from that, that then took you forward into the rest of your research?
Interviewee:
That literature review was a really good set of building block because what I did was I looked at
how memory had been categorized for different, non-musical information like verbal and visual
memory as the traditional memory domains in neuropsychology. We know that memory was
categorized in semantic, episodic, and procedural memory. I took those categories and
developed a framework for musical memory following those categories and looked at how those
different types of memory domains were spared or impaired in people with dementia. That was
kind of a nice framework to then develop future studies from.
When I came back to Australia after that, the first grant that I ever got was the Hazel Hawke
Dementia Australia grant. Hazel Hawke was Bob Hawke's ex-wife, who was actually a really
accomplished pianist, and she developed Alzheimer's dementia. This grant is in memory of her.
Because of her musical interests, I think they like to award it to people who are doing music
research. I was really lucky. That was a one year grant, and I won that back in 2008, I think it
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was—2009. For that research, as I said, the first research grant I had, I looked at whether people
with dementia could remember when it was sung compared to when it was spoken. If the
information was presented in a musical way, did they remember it better?
Obviously, it had to be experimental, like compare people with dementia with people who were
healthy. Also, I was keen on this idea of whether musicians had a particular advantage in that. I
compared musicians and non-musicians. It was a bit ambitious, 'cause it's pretty hard to find
musicians with dementia and it was only a small study. The crux of the findings of that was that
the musicians with dementia did show better learning of information that was presented in a sung
form rather than spoken. The non-musicians with dementia found it much harder to learn the
same information compared with the spoken information. Obviously, when you're a non-musician
and you're hearing lyrics, you have to kind of decode the music from the words. I think my
interpretation of what was going on there was that was quite cognitively demanding for nonmusicians to do that—to disentangle the music from the words, whereas, with the musicians,
they've got the advantage of the musical training, and they could benefit from that in learning the
verbal information.
There's also some research—not my own, but other people have looked into how music training
and playing music can be protective from cognitive decline and can actually protect people from
the risk of dementia. I think that fits into that broader thing as well. That was sort of my early
research, and then over time, I've developed more of an interest in how music can trigger
autobiographical memories or music-evoked autobiographical memories, as they call it, or
MEAMs, to shorten it.
Interviewer:
MEAMs—I always wonder when I see that word. Music-evoked memory. Autobiographical
memories. Thank you. That'll help us all, no doubt, to have it explained to us. Maybe you could
tell us a little bit about why you became more interested in the autobiographical space, as well
as what you went on to do. Because to me, it feels like it touches with this notion you have about
the self, and about identity. It's moving a little bit away from a laboratory interest and more towards
a how this is actually impacting people's lives. I realize that both of those things impact people's
lives, so what was that for you?
Interviewer:
As you said, I'm a neuropsychologist, so I've always worked clinically with patients. That's sort of
my main occupation. Then my research is done alongside that. Often, the patients that I see
inspire the research that I do, so I very much work in that clinical research space. I was working
at a brain injury service clinically, and I saw a patient there who'd had a motorbike accident. He
loved music, was really keen on music, and he was using music in his recovery after that
motorbike accident. He'd had a severe brain injury. He was using music in the car with his son,
sort of like car karaoke—which has been popular on YouTube—to trigger memories of his past.
He actually mentioned that in one of my neuropsych assessment sessions with him.
Because I'd done my post-doc and was interested in music and memory, I thought, "Oh, I wonder
if there's been any research in using music with people with severe brain injuries to help them
remember their past?" That kind inspired a case series that I did of people with severe brain injury
looking at MEAMs, and how they can use music to trigger memories. I still had that interest in
dementia from my post-doc, and there was another fellowship advertised by the government.
Dementia's a big public health problem with the aging population, so the government put some
money into some dementia research fellowships, which I applied for, looking at the relationship
between music, memory, and the self in people with dementia. I was lucky enough to get one of
those fellowships, which is a four-year fellowship. I've just focused my attention on that topic.
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As part of that fellowship, I've done a whole series of studies of MEAMs in people with dementia.
I've looked at how—compared music-evoked memories with photo-evoked memories, so
PEAMs, I called them [Laughter] to match it with the MEAMs and PEAMs. The crux of that study—
the main finding—was that the frequency of MEAMs was the same in people with dementia as in
healthy elderly people, whereas, people with dementia had much-reduced PEAMs or photoevoked memories. This is showing photos of famous events and getting them to talk about
whether those photos triggered personal memories.
Similarly, playing them songs from different periods of their past and getting them to talk about
any memories that evoked from those songs. Just counting the frequency of how often they said,
"Yes, I've got a memory, and this is the memory." MEAMs were the same whether you had a
brain that had dementia in it, or whether you had a healthy elderly brain. The other important
finding from that study was that the songs from people's youth, from when they were age 10 to
30 years of age, were much more likely to trigger memories than songs from other time periods.
In other memory research, that period of time, from when you're 10 to 30, is called the
reminiscence bump. It's been known that you're more likely to have a peak in your
autobiographical memories from that time period.
You can probably illustrate away why that is, but that's a pretty formative time in our life when
there's a lot of first-time experiences. You get your first job, maybe you fall in love for the first
time. It's an important time in our lives, and it seems that music from that time in our lives is really
potent in triggering autobiographical memories. Another study I did on MEAMs and dementia as
part of that fellowship, was looking at different types of dementia. I mentioned that Alzheimer's is
the most common type, but there are actually lots of different types of dementia. Another type is
behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. As the word suggests, it affects the frontal lobes of
the brain more than other parts of the brain, and this type of dementia, unlike Alzheimer's, which
affects memory in particular, behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia affects people's
behavior and personality. That changes quite dramatically in these patients. A lot of the research
on music and memory in the dementia space has been only done on people with Alzheimer's. I
thought, "Well, we know there's people out there with lots of different types of dementia, we know
that MEAMs are preserved in people with Alzheimer's dementia, but what about these other
types?"
I did a small case series on MEAMs in people with this behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia
and actually found that the MEAMs are not preserved in those patients. I thought that was quite
crucial because often the media blows up this relationship with music and memory and dementia,
and, "Look, it can be this amazing reaction you can get from patients," but it's important to realize,
well, actually, that's—particularly for people with Alzheimer's dementia—not necessarily all types
of dementia. I've raved on a bit about [Laughter] my MEAMs and dementia research, but that's
been really fun to have that period of time to explore that topic over a longer period than just the
one year grant. To have four years of funding to do a few series of studies on that topic.
Interviewer:
Methodology is really interesting to just take a moment to reflect on because you've mentioned
case studies and then your decision to use a case series. I'm not hearing that you're drawn to
this kind of evidence-based framework, where you have to do a randomized control trial before
you're willing to say anything. I can really hear that you have this investigative urge, which comes
from practice, and you want to answer questions—which is a fantasy that we all have—rather
than having to prove anything via a controlled comparison. It's very theoretically driven. To you,
what's the benefit of these case studies and case series? Why have you been drawn to that
frame?
Interviewee:
I think I've been forced into that frame just because of the way that I work. Working clinically as
a neuropsychologist, I deal with the individual. When I see a patient, I see one person for four
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hours. I spend a lot of time with them, and so I have an individual focus. Although RCTs are
crucial in evidence-based research, for me, I don't have access to that big patient population to
run an RCT. I have access to individuals, and I think those RCTs can develop from an initial idea
that comes from an individual. I think doing—a lot of people sort of pooh-pooh case studies and
think, "Well, what can we learn from them. That's ridiculous. It's only one patient," or five patients,
or eight patients, but a lot of initial ideas come from that very close individual study. I think it's a
lot of neuropsychological syndromes have been discovered at that individual level.
We can't go on and do those big case RCT studies unless we have an idea of that initial, "What's
going on here?" from the very beginning. Given that there wasn't a lot of MEAMs research at the
time that I started in this field, for me it was important to really characterize the phenomenon in
patients at that individual level to start with. As I said, I was kind of forced into doing it that way
anyway, 'cause I didn't have the access to huge populations of people with behavioral variant
frontotemporal dementia. It was really just the individuals I was working with clinically who I could
study at the time. I've been really lucky to meet some fascinating individuals. People of contact
have heard that I'm doing music and memory research, and I've had people contact me. One
case in particular, or two cases come to mind.
One was the daughter of a woman with dementia who was in an aged care facility. She was in
her early 90s, and she said, "My mum's always loved singing. She never trained musically, but
she just sang all her life. I took her to the doctors the other day from her aged care facility, and
she could remember a pop song that was on the radio that was played last time we went to the
doctors, and she sang along to it." She wrote me this email saying, "Mum's singing along to pop
songs, she's got severe Alzheimer's dementia."
That really perked my interest, 'cause I thought, well, most of the studies show that these patients
sing along to songs from the 1920s or '30s, but this woman's remembering—I think it was that
Gotye song, Somebody That I Used to Know, which is a really catchy song. She'd picked up the
tune and could remember it. I actually asked this daughter if I could go and meet her mum, and
she became one of my case studies that I published. I actually taught her a Norwegian song.
She'd never been to Norway. I knew that she hadn't been exposed to it. It was just sort of an easy
melody, but one that she didn't know before.
I visited her and trained her up in teaching her that song, and then went again 24 hours later, and
she could—with prompting, she needed some prompting—but she could recall that tune, which
was quite a marked difference from her ability to recall, like if I said to her, "I want you to remember
these three words. I'm gonna ask you about them in a little while." Five minutes later, she couldn’t
remember the three words that I told her, but 24 hours later, she could recall the new tune. It just
showed again that that memory for music, there's something special about it for people with
dementia. That just came out of the daughter emailing me out of the blue.
There was another case study that I've written up. The husband of a woman with dementia, he
approached me and said, "I think you'd be interested in what happened with my wife, because
music played a really important part in our lives." What happened with her, she was also a woman
with severe Alzheimer's dementia who was actually quite severely aphasic. She couldn’t speak.
She had expressive language difficulties and was really, pretty much non-verbal. Also as part of
her dementia, she developed a delusion—a misidentification delusion, where she couldn’t
recognize her husband.
This would come out of the blue, it would last for a few hours at a time. He'd be in the house with
her, and she'd turn to him and say, "Who are you? Get out. What are you doing in here?" She
thought he was a stranger. He'd actually have to leave the house because she'd be in a panic
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shooing him out of the house. He'd have to go and sit in their car outside or drive around the
block until this sort of delusional state passed. This happened a number of times, and he really
didn't know how to deal with it. He asked the geriatrician—who was a very insightful geriatrician—
who said, "Is there a particular song that's important to you? Maybe you could try playing that or
singing that."
There was a crucial song that was important to them. It was Unchained Melody. Who sings that?
The Righteous Brothers, I think, is the name. That had played on the night that they met. It was
the last song of the night, and they danced to it together, so it'd always been a really crucial song
in their relationship. He started to sing that song to her every day, and he said to me, "That
delusion never happened again. Once I started singing that song, she recognized me." It
essentially cured this misidentification delusion. He said, "I swear to you, it was me singing that
song. Within a couple of days of singing that song, she didn't leave my side, and she knew who
I was."
That was an incredible case study as well, and I went and met with them and did a more
experimental study of that phenomenon with them. I've also written about that couple and how
music was crucial in re-establishing their relationship, really. For me, these case studies are just
absolute gold nuggets. That human story and how music can be such an intimate and crucial part
of reestablishing a relationship or demonstrating to a daughter that she still has an intact ability.
I think a lot of dementia research is about what they can't do, but this sort of music stuff can show
well, there's things that they can still do. I've also met a lot of musicians with dementia. Five or
six musicians who have really severe dementia, but can still play their musical instruments, which,
it's always really inspiring to see that, too. I've been very lucky in who I've met in my path on this
music and memory research.
Interviewer:
I feel pretty lucky to have met you, too, mate. Really, they're touching stories, and I think it really
speaks to the importance of case studies, case series. As a psychotherapist myself, just
understanding that Freud, for all his limitations and attempts to generalize perhaps too far, did
the same thing. Was just really grounded in practice and was trying to explain a phenomenon
which hadn’t previously been articulated.
I always think that's fantastic. From there, then, to finish up. If you had every possibility open to
you about where you might go next, or what you think the field needs to investigate next based
on all this theorizing that you've done and these really detailed accounts, as well as some other
objectivist studies that you've been involved in, what would you suggest to an up-and-coming
researcher? Or what would you like to do, if that was the case?
Interviewee:
I guess in the music and memory space, I think there's still a lot of work to do. As I mentioned
before, a lot of the work has been with Alzheimer's dementia, so I think there's still a really
important path to take in exploring how music can help people with other types of dementia. I've
tried to tackle that a little bit looking at frontotemporal dementia, but there's also Parkinson's
related dementia. I think it's important not to just be mono-focused on Alzheimer's dementia,
although they are the biggest population. I think that's crucial.
A lot of people have heard that music's beneficial for dementia, but they're not quite sure how to
go about it, and music therapists are not necessarily everywhere. Sometimes hard to access. I
think enabling people to use music in the home and understand how they can use music in their
own way to help their loved one with dementia is important. I mean, music's very accessible,
there's no doubt about that, but sometimes people wanna do it in a more formal way, or just have
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an understanding of the background of how to approach music-related rehabilitation or activities.
Getting that out there.
A lot of aged care facilities are the same. They have these vague music programs where they
just sit around and play a bit of music, and they don't necessarily have access to a music therapist
giving them a more structured way of using music to help their patient populations is important. I
guess just getting the message—the message is out there to the public. Most people have heard
of this now, 'cause there's been that Alive Inside, that wonderful documentary, and other YouTube
clips that people have got ahold of. Being sure that people have not just that media popularized
notion of it but have access to a more structured way of doing it.
Also, being aware that sometimes music is not that magical cure that's gonna make your
grandma come alive. Maybe she has a different type of dementia that doesn't necessarily have
preserved musical memories. Maybe certain songs are gonna trigger negative memories of the
past and knowing what to do in that situation. Music therapists are well-versed on how to handle
that, but the everyday person who's out there just trying to trigger memories in their loved one
might not be aware that it could trigger quite a significant emotional reaction. Being sure that
people know how to deal with that is important, too.
Interviewer:
I can hear you really did care for the people that you've worked with, and I'm thrilled to know that
you'll continue to do that. Thank you so much for your time, your expertise, and your deep, rich,
and subjective and objective knowledge about this topic.
Interviewee:
Thanks for the opportunity to share it.
Interviewer:
Thank you.
[End of Audio]
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