Week 3: Broadening my focus

Hello again! Before spring break, I developed a short survey to be sent out to my Friday music group participants at the Life Story Club, and following our preliminary group call, I received a few responses and now have a better understanding of older adults’ connection to music. I will include the data from this survey in my final presentation, but for now I hope to observe how these individuals connect with the music which we will be listening to and discussing in our weekly groups. After our six group meetings, I will present the same survey (including questions such as “music has been a resource I have turned to over the years,” and “I would be open to using music therapy in my everyday life”) and see how attitudes towards music and music therapy have changed with more exposure. Today I will be hosting the first of six music-based sessions with this group of older adults, where we will discuss how music affects our mood. Next week I will share how this first session goes!

On Monday, I also attended my weekly Monday music-based group, where we discussed songs that remind us of important people or times in our lives. This group of older adults is incredibly thoughtful, and it is always wonderful to hear them discuss difficult times in their lives through the medium of music.

This week I finally completed my first music therapist interview! On Thursday, I sat down over Zoom with licensed music therapist Brianna Jones to speak about her work specializing in music therapy for preschool-age children with developmental and intellectual disabilities. I enjoyed getting to speak with someone so knowledgeable and passionate about music, and I learned a lot about this alternate side of music therapy. Though most of my work has centered around older adults, I am excited to incorporate neurodevelopmental perspectives into my final presentation, as, based on my conversation with Brianna, music therapy can provide a low-stress, music-empowered environment for children with intellectual disabilities to focus on their social interactions and communication skills.

Inspired by our conversation, I read “Music Therapy for Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and/or Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Systematic Review.” In this paper, an analysis of thirty-nine studies found that social interaction, adult-child relationships, and reading comprehension in those with dyslexia seem to have improved in multiple studies and deserve more focus in the future. Following my interview, I found these results fascinating, especially because I could see the empirical data behind Brianna’s work.

Finally, I also read “Positron-Emission Tomography of Brain Regions Activated by Recognition of Familiar Music.” This study used Positron-Emission Tomography (PET), a non-invasive method to measure metabolic activity and blood flow through the organs, to study the movement of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) when participants listened to familiar music. After having participants complete both a familiarity task (recognizing a famous nursery rhyme) and an alteration-detection task (locating the altered note in the same well-known melodies as the familiarity task), researchers found that multiple temporal lobe regions aid in our recognition of familiar melodies. If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading through this study. It was fascinating, and researchers went in depth into the numerous regions of the brain that take part in music listening and recognition!