Strum a ukulele and the children will flock to you. Davida Price learned this from the reception she received last summer while working in Northern Uganda.
After hearing about the “night marchers” — children who flee their homes each night to keep from being forced into the army — Price and a fellow music therapist, Vanessa Contopulos, decided they had to help.
Price spoke about their project, “ChildSong Uganda,” at last week’s conference of the American Music Therapy Association’s Western Region chapter, held at the Ala Moana Hotel.
On the Net:
www.teachingchildrenpeace.com, for information on the Shropshire Music Foundation.
In her presentation, “Creating Peace Through Music with Children in War-Torn Areas,” Price spoke of kids living in refugee camps for those displaced by the decades-long Ugandan civil war.
Each night the children trek to “safe zones” where they’re protected from abduction into the Lord’s Resistance Army, she said. “For the child soldiers rehabilitated from the bush, it is a huge privilege to study and sit and rest. The children had a great appreciation for simple things.”
She and Contopulos, both from San Diego, trained 15 leaders to carry on their mission during their five-week stay. “They learned how to read and write music, how to play ukulele and penny whistles and how to teach others.”
And it’s not just about performing. Music, she said, it inspires pride in culture, self-esteem, leadership and social interaction. She hopes to continue with programs in other parts of Africa, and notes that the need is great all over the world, including at home in the United States.
She and Contopulos began their work with training, free penny whistles and teaching materials from the Shropshire Music Foundation, an agency that brings music education to children in war-struck areas.
In these places, Price believes, people need a renewed sense of hope — and music helps provide this. “They need it just as much as food and shelter. It reminds us of why we want to live, gives meaning to life and without this, the other things are just not as important.”
Long before the lyrics to “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” were written, children across France sang the words you see above to the same tune. Seventeen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart must also have been familiar with the song, since he used its melody as a starting point for his playful, ever expanding Variations on Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman (K. 265). Might the brilliant teenager have chosen this melody to tease his notoriously stern, ambitious father, Leopold, for his taskmaster approach toward raising a son? Given Wolfgang’s love of jokes and clever wordplay, it certainly seems likely.
More important, though, Mozart’s Variations, now practiced and memorized by intermediate music students around the world, perfectly evoke the way we humans best think and grow creatively. After all, as Mozart might tell us if he were alive today, pleasing, organized melodies such as this one do have great value , particularly for children. Music speaks in a language that children instinctively understand. It draws children (as well as adults) into its orbit, inviting them to match its pitches, incorporate its lyrics, move to its beat, and explore its emotional and harmonic dimensions in all their beauty and depth. Meanwhile, its physical vibrations, organized patterns, engaging rhythms, and subtle variations interact with the mind and body in manifold ways, naturally altering the brain in a manner that one-dimensioned rote learning cannot. Children are happy when they are bouncing, dancing, clapping, and singing with someone they trust and love. Even as music delights and entertains them, it helps mold their mental, emotional, social, and physical development — and gives them the enthusiasm and the skills they need to begin to teach themselves.
In recent decades, an enormous amount of research has been conducted on the specific ways in which sound, rhythm, and music can improve our lives. The results of the research using Mozart’s music have been especially stunning and have given rise to the term the Mozart Effect. I use the phrase to encompass such phenomena as the ability of Mozart’s music to temporarily heighten spatial awareness and intelligence; its power to improve listeners’ concentration and speech abilities; its tendency to advance the jump in reading and language skills among children who receive regular music instruction; and the startling increase in SAT scores among students who sing or play an instrument. But the Mozart Effect refers to more than just raising children’s test scores.
By learning to recognize and consciously implement the Mozart Effect in your child’s life, you can:
Begin to communicate and connect with him even before he is born.
Stimulate brain growth in the womb and throughout early childhood.
Positively affect his emotional perceptions and attitudes from prebirth onward.
Provide patterns of sound on which he can build his understanding of the physical world.
Reduce his level of emotional stress or physical pain, even in infancy.
Enhance his motor development, including the grace and ease with which he learns to crawl, walk, skip, and run.
Improve his language ability, including vocabulary, expressiveness, and ease of communication
Introduce him to a wider world of emotional expression, creativity, and aesthetic beauty.
Enhance his social abilities.
Improve his reading, writing, mathematical, and other academic skills, as well as his ability to remember and to memorize.
Introduce him to the joys of community.
Help him create a strong sense of his own identity.
It is amazing to think that music and rhythmic verbal sounds, which have been available to us throughout our lives, can have such a powerful effect on the mind and body. Yet the evidence is indisputable. There’s far more to good music than meets the ear. Wisely used, it can create a healthy and stimulating sound world for your family and profoundly enhance your child’s growth.
How I Wonder What You Are
From the beginning of time, humankind has sensed the power of vibration, rhythm, and sound. Many cultures’ creation myths describe a primordial sound or vibration that created matter from nothingness. The ancient Chinese and Egyptians considered music a fundamental element — one that reflected the principles governing the universe. It was believed that music had the power to uplift or degrade the psyche, to change the fate of entire civilizations. As a result, humans have made music throughout history to celebrate the passing of the seasons and mark passages in the lives of each member of the community, and have used rhythm to instill a sense of oneness among members of tribes and other groups.
Now, as one millennium ends and a new one begins, science is confirming the truth behind this age-old intuition. A recent article inScience News tells us that sound in the early universe, in the form of vibrational waves, may have helped orchestrate the striking pattern of galaxy clusters and huge voids we see in the sky today. We know that the moon itself vibrates, essentially “ringing” like a bell in a process known as spherical harmonics, probably in response to a long-ago meteor strike. In a similar fashion, tsunamis are created by the vibrational effects of earthquakes, which cause very small (yet detectable) wave that can grow enormously high. Music is simply a special case of this kind of vibration — a wave of energy that transfers some its power to us.
In “The Mozart Effect for Children,” author Don Campbell shows that music is the perfect tool to improve children’s language, movement, and emotional skills at home, school, and play. He presents a wealth of dynamic, inventive ways for parents and teachers to invigorate a child’s imagination with music, sounds, and songs, supplying simple exercises and fun activities tailored for each age group and stage of development, from prenatal through age ten. Campbell offers ideas and exercises both practical and profound, from special ways for parents to bond with their newborns to tips on fostering good study habits and stress reduction for elementary school students.
“The Mozart Effect for Children” is an invaluable resource for any parent and every child, as well as for grandparents and educators. With Campbell’s fascinating, informed, and compassionate guidance and with the incredible, uplifting power of tone, rhythm, and melody — you can help the child in your life aspire, achieve, and grow healthier in mind, body, and spirit.
Don Campbell has spent more than three decades exploring and writing about the benefits of music for lifelong learning, and is a world-renowned authority on music and its role in education and health. A classical musician, educator, writer, and teacher, he works with symphony orchestras, schools, music educators, and health professionals worldwide. He has helped children in thirty countries improve their abilities to learn, create, and experience the joy of life through music. He serves on the boards of the Boulder Philharmonic and the American Music Research Center. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. Mr. Campbell lives in Boulder, Colorado.
From BBC News | Last Updated: Monday, 5 November 2007
Training may have changed the way a conductor’s brain works
Our brains can turn down our ability to see to help them listen even harder to music and complex sounds, say experts.
A US study of 20 non-musicians and 20 musical conductors found both groups diverted brain activity away from visual areas during listening tasks.
Scans showed activity fell in these areas as it rose in auditory ones.
But during harder tasks the changes were less marked for conductors than for non-musicians, researchers told a Society for Neuroscience conference.
“Imagine the difference between listening to someone talk in a quiet room, and that same discussion in a noisy room – you don’t see as much of what’s going on in the noisy room.” Dr Jonathan Burdette, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
The researchers, from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and the University of North Carolina, used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which can measure real-time changes in brain activity based on the blood flow to different areas of the brain.
Previous research has identified various parts of the brain involved in vision and hearing.
The experiment involved 20 professional orchestral conductors or band leaders and 20 musically untrained students, all aged between 28 and 40.
While lying in the scanner, they were asked to listen to two different musical tones played a few thousandths of a second apart and identify which was played first.
The task was made harder for the professional musicians than for the non-musicians, to allow for the differences in their background.
What the scientists found was that while activity rose, as expected, in the auditory part of the brain, it correspondingly fell in the visual part.
As the task was made harder and harder, the non-musicians carried on diverting more and more activity away from the visual parts of the brain to the auditory side, as they struggled to concentrate.
However, after a certain point, the conductors did not suppress their brains, suggesting that their years of training had provided a distinct advantage in the way their brains were organised.
Finely-tuned brains
Dr Jonathan Burdette, who led the study, said: “This is like closing your eyes to listen to music.
“Imagine the difference between listening to someone talk in a quiet room and that same discussion in a noisy room – you don’t see as much of what’s going on in the noisy room.”
Another researcher, Dr David Hairston, said that the study showed just how flexible this ability was.
“How this operates can change with highly specialised training and experience,” he said.
Dr Bahador Bahrami, from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said the study showed the difference in “brain organisation” between musicians and non-musicians.
“It demonstrates the mechanisms developed in the brain in the face of distraction. The brains of the conductors are highly tuned to tones.”
23 April 2004 – New Scientist | by Emily Singer, San Francisco
New research has revealed a molecular basis for the “Mozart effect” – the observation that a brief stint of Mozart, but not other music, may improve learning and memory.
Rats that heard a Mozart sonata expressed higher levels of several genes involved in stimulating and changing the connections between brain cells, the study showed. The team, including the researcher who first proposed the Mozart effect, hope the results will help them design music therapy treatments for people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
The Mozart effect first came to light in a 1993 paper in Nature (vol 365, p 611), when Fran Rauscher, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, US, and colleagues showed that college students who listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major for 10 minutes performed better on a spatial reasoning test than students who listened to new age music or nothing at all.
The findings sparked excitement from the general public – specially designed Mozart CDs lept up the music charts – and some skepticism from the scientific community.
Rhythmic qualities
Scientists argued over whether the phenomenon had a relatively simple explanation, such as just improving a person’s mood, or if the effect was tied to a unique quality of the Mozart’s compositions. One study reported that the particular rhythmic qualities of Mozart’s music mimic some rhythmic cycles occurring in human brains.
Now Rauscher and her collaborator Hong Hua Li, a geneticist at Stanford University in California, think they have found the molecular basis of the Mozart effect. Their study used rats, which, like humans, perform better on learning and memory tests after listening to the sonata.
The researchers found that these smarter rats had increased gene expression of BDNF, a neural growth factor, CREB, a learning and memory compound, and synapsin I, a synaptic growth protein, in their hippocampus, as compared to control rats who had listened to equivalent amounts of white noise.
“The findings are intriguing,” says Howard Gardner, an IQ expert at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and skeptic of the Mozart effect. “It suggests stimulation in general has measurable neurochemical effects. But whether this effect is due to music, let alone Mozart, still has to be determined.” Other experiments have shown that enriching a rat’s environment with toys can spur growth of new neurons.
Electrical activity
Whether Mozart is in fact a special form of enrichment or not, his presence is already being felt in the clinic.
Patients with Alzheimer’s disease perform better on spatial and social tasks after listening to the sonata. And playing Mozart for severely epileptic patients quietens the electrical activity associated with seizures, while other kinds of music do not.
Li hopes to use this latest work to design better music therapy for patients suffering form a variety of neurological disease or brain injuries. She and Rauscher also plan to study if there is a critical period during development for the Mozart effect, and if other types of music have the same properties.
The new research was presented by at the Cognitive Neuroscience Symposium in San Francisco this week.
By Cathy Wong | About.com Guide | Updated June 12, 2012
Music therapy is a treatment method that involves using music to enhance health. There are many different approaches to music therapy, including creating music, listening to music, and talking about music.
Although music therapy is often used to promote mental and emotional health, it may also help improve quality of life for people coping with physical health conditions.
Uses for Music Therapy
Music therapy is often used to help treat the following conditions:
Alzheimer’s disease
anxiety
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
autism
depression
insomnia
Parkinson’s disease
tinnitus
In addition, music therapy is sometimes used to enhance mood, reduce stress, and relieve pain.
What Does Music Therapy Involve?
A music therapy session may incorporate a number of different elements, such as making music, writing songs, or passively listening to music. While music therapists often aim to foster the patient’s emotional expression, there can be many other different goals in a music therapy session (including enhancement of quality of life for people dealing with illness).
Research shows that patients do not need to have any musical ability to benefit from music therapy.
Benefits of Music Therapy
Here’s a look at some key study findings on the health effects of music therapy:
1: Music Therapy and Depression
Music therapy may help some patients fight depression, according to a report published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2008. For the report, researchers sized up data from five previously published studies, four of which found that participants receiving music therapy were more likely to see a decrease in depression symptoms (compared to those who did not receive music therapy). According to the report’s authors, patients appeared to experience the greatest benefits when therapists used theory-based therapeutic techniques, such as painting to music and improvised singing.
2: Music Therapy and Stress
Music therapy may help ease stress for certain people. For instance, a 2008 study from the Journal of Clinical Nursing found that music therapy helped reduce stress during pregnancy. The study involved 236 healthy pregnant women, while the treatment entailed listening to a half-hour of soothing music twice daily for two weeks. Compared to a control group, the 116 study members who received music therapy showed significantly greater reductions in stress, anxiety, and depression.
In a report published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2009, investigators found that listening to music may also benefit patients who experience severe stress and anxiety associated with having coronary heart disease. The review included two studies on patients treated by trained music therapists. Results showed that music listening had a beneficial effect on blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and pain in people with coronary heart disease.
3: Music Therapy and Autism
Music therapy may help improve communication skills in children with autistic spectrum disorder, according to a report published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in 2006. However, the review’s authors note that the included studies were of “limited applicability to clinical practice” and that “more research is needed to examine whether the effects of music therapy are enduring.”
4: Music Therapy and Cancer
Research suggests that music therapy may offer a number of benefits for people coping with cancer. For instance, a 2011 study from Oncology Nursing Forum found that music therapy helped reduce anxiety in patients receiving radiation therapy, while a 1998 study from the same journal found that music therapy may ease nausea and vomiting resulting from high-dose chemotherapy.
5: Music Therapy and Pain
Music therapy may help reduce pain for people dealing with certain health problems. A 2011 study from Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, for example, found that music therapy may have both short- and long-term benefits on alleviating pain in breast cancer patients after undergoing mastectomy.
The study involved a total of 120 breast cancer patients who’d recently undergone surgical breast removal. Starting the day after surgery, 60 patients participated in music therapy while the other 60 patients received routine nursing care only. The study continued until the participants’ third admission to the hospital for chemotherapy. By the study’s end, members of the music therapy group showed a significantly greater decrease in pain (compared to those in the control group).
In addition, music therapy may reduce pain in burn patients, according to a 2010 study in the Journal of Burn Care and Research. Involving a total of 29 patients, the study found that music therapy also helped relieve anxiety and lessen muscle tension.
6: Music Therapy and Parkinson’s Disease
A small study published in Psychosomatic Medicine in 2000 indicates that music therapy shows promise for people with Parkinson’s disease. For the study, 32 patients with Parkinson’s disease were assigned to three months of treatment with either music therapy (involving practices like choral singing and voice exercise) or physical therapy. Study results revealed that music therapy led to improvement in motor and behavioral functioning. Music therapy also appeared to improve quality of life.
Using Music Therapy for Health Purposes
If you’re considering the use of music therapy, consult your doctor about how to go about finding a qualified practitioner in your area. It should be noted that music therapy should not be used as a replacement for standard care in treatment of a chronic health problem.
Sources:
Bradt J, Dileo C. “Music for stress and anxiety reduction in coronary heart disease patients.” Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2009 15;(2):CD006577.
Chang MY, Chen CH, Huang KF. “Effects of music therapy on psychological health of women during pregnancy.” J Clin Nurs. 2008 17(19):2580-7.
Ezzone S, Baker C, Rosselet R, Terepka E. “Music as an adjunct to antiemetic therapy.” Oncol Nurs Forum. 1998;25:1551-1556.
Gold C, Wigram T, Elefant C. “Music therapy for autistic spectrum disorder.” Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2006 19;(2):CD004381.
Li XM, Yan H, Zhou KN, Dang SN, Wang DL, Zhang YP. “Effects of music therapy on pain among female breast cancer patients after radical mastectomy: results from a randomized controlled trial.” Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2011 Jul;128(2):411-9.
Maratos AS, Gold C, Wang X, Crawford MJ. “Music therapy for depression.” Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2008 23;(1):CD004517.
Pacchetti C, Mancini F, Aglieri R, Fundarò C, Martignoni E, Nappi G. “Active music therapy in Parkinson’s disease: an integrative method for motor and emotional rehabilitation.” Psychosom Med. 2000 May-Jun;62(3):386-93.
Smith M, Casey L, Johnson D, Gwede C, Riggin OZ. “Music as a therapeutic intervention for anxiety in patients receiving radiation therapy.” Oncol Nurs Forum. 2001 28(5):855-62.
Tan X, Yowler CJ, Super DM, Fratianne RB. “The efficacy of music therapy protocols for decreasing pain, anxiety, and muscle tension levels during burn dressing changes: a prospective randomized crossover trial.” J Burn Care Res. 2010 Jul-Aug;31(4):590-7
