Resources & references

This video (in Spanish) presents a child with a neurologic disorder who received music therapy services in Spain. It includes interviews from the child's mother, the music therapist, and a music therapy student.

 Elizabeth Stegemöller presents at the TEDx Iowa State University event on music therapy and it's impacts on the brain. She is a music therapist and utilizes music therapy to treat people with Parkinson's disease.

Watch the music therapy journey of a young girl with cerebral palsy and blindness. Her mother tells the changes she witnesses in her daugther during music therapy sessions. Also, this video explains how music therapy is provided in Northen Ireland. The Royal National Institute for the Blind advocates for more music therary access for children in this country. 

Music is now being used as medicine at the Foothills Medical Centre intensive care unit in Calgary, helping everyone from palliative care patients to stroke victims.

 Article describes research findings of music therapy with individuals recovering from a stroke or who are managing Parkinson's disease. This article discusses the use of music therapy for neurorehabilitation

Entrainment is defined by a temporal locking process in which one system’s motion or signal frequency entrains the frequency of another system. This process is a universal phenomenon that can be observed in physical (e.g., pendulum clocks) and biological systems (e.g. fire flies). However, entrainment can also be observed between human sensory and motor systems. The function of rhythmic entrainment in rehabilitative training and learning was established for the first time by Thaut and colleagues in several research studies in the early 1990s. It was shown that the inherent periodicity of auditory rhythmic patterns could entrain movement patterns in patients with movement disorders (see for a review: Thaut et al, 1999). Physiological, kinematic and behavioral movement analysis showed very quickly that entrainment cues not only changed the timing of movement but also improved spatial and force parameters. Mathematical models have shown that anticipatory rhythmic templates as critical time constraints can result in the complete specification of the dynamics of a movement over the entire movement cycle, thereby optimizing motor planning and execution. Furthermore, temporal rhythmic entrainment has been successfully extended into applications in cognitive rehabilitation and speech and language rehabilitation, and thus become one of the major neurological mechanisms linking music and rhythm to brain rehabilitation. These findings provided a scientific basis for the development of Neurologic Music Therapy.

Modern music therapy, starting around the middle of the twentieth century was primarily conceived to promote emotional well-being and to facilitate social group association and integration. Therefore, it was rooted mostly in social science concepts. More recently, music as therapy began to move decidedly toward perspectives of neuroscience. This has been facilitated by the advent of neuroimaging techniques that help uncover the therapeutic mechanisms for non-musical goals in the brain processes underlying music perception, cognition, and production. In this paper, we focus on executive function (EF) and attentional processes (AP) that are central for cognitive rehabilitation efforts. To this end, we summarize existing behavioral as well as neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies in musicians, non-musicians, and clinical populations. 

In this news report, giants in their fields of music and science, soprano Renee Fleming and phyician and geneticist Francis Collins, are merging their knowledge to propel advancements in body and mind. Recent discoveries are shared. A recent international gathering of researchers, therapists and artists took stock of what is known and what is yet to be discovered. 

The objective of this study was to explore the effects of an interdisciplinary singing-based therapeutic intervention (ParkinSong) on voice and communication in people with Parkinson’s disease. The results show that ParkinSong is an engaging intervention with the potential to increase loudness and respiratory function in people with mild to moderately severe PD.

The aim of this study is to test the feasibility and acceptability of an online mode of delivery for a Parkinson’s singing intervention (ParkinSong) as well as remote data collection procedures. This mode of delivery aims to increase the accessibility of singing interventions.

 An individual who suffered from polio as a child described the impact of music therapy on his recovery over the years.

Music-based interventions (MBIs) are emerging as a new potential treatment strategy for neurologic and psychiatric patient populations, as they are safe, economic, and can be creatively tailored to meet specific functional goals. MBIs are typically selected and delivered by a credentialed music therapist based on empirically supported models and can involve active (improvisation, singing, clapping, or dancing) and/or receptive (purposeful music listening to identify emotional content emerging from music) techniques. Mechanistically, MBIs appear to engage both cortical and subcortical areas governing attention, working memory, planning, and flexibility and can modulate these areas over time.