Company | MusicWorx Music Therapy News Advocate

International Music Therapy News Resource

As an international music therapy authority and advocate, MusicWorx welcomes and publishes
news from any source that promotes the field of music therapy.

Noelle Pederson

Sound Minds: Musical Bonding for Teens and Their Babies

Date	September 1, 2010
Source	Imagine, an online magazine
Publication	»Imagine
Article Location	»Download Full Article Here
Video Location	»Watch the GoodBye Song Video Clip
Publisher	Dr. Petra Kern

Introduction	Resounding Joy Inc., a non-profit organization based in San Diego, provides music therapy, recreational, and supportive music services to under-served populations. Resounding Joy’s Sound Minds is an early-intervention program which uses goal-directed music experiences to encourage and teach teen parents how to bond with their babies and increase school readiness for infants through three-year-olds. This program was started through an Innovative Grant funded by First 5 San Diego from November 2008 to January 2010 to provide music equipment and direct services twice a week for children and teens in four different San Diego schools.

Tim Ringgold and Daughter Bella

When Your First NICU Patient Is Your Own Child

Date	September 1, 2010
Source	Imagine, an online magazine
Location	»Listen Here
Publisher	Dr. Petra Kern

Background	Tim Ringgold, MusicWorx intern alumni, music therapist, father, and author, narrates in the podcast linked above his unique experience as both trained NICU-MT (neo-natal intensive care unit music therapist) and father of a fragile infant patient struggling for life against Epidermolysis Bullosa. Ringgold recounts using music therapy to prepare with his wife for their daughter Bella's birth, and after delivery, finding comfort in employing music therapy to connect with Bella.

Music Therapy Helps Sick Kids

Date	Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Source	Tampa Bay Online News
Location	»View Here

Video	Footage includes MusicWorx intern graduate (2009) Meryl Barns leading a music therapy session with a young leukemia patient at All Children’s Hospital in Tampa, Florida.

Davida Price

Rock-and-Roll Therapy

Date	Thursday, June 30, 2010
Source	San Diego Reader
Location	»View Here
Writer	Dave Good

Story	“There’s a study by Barry Bittman,” says Davida Price, “that found that 30 minutes of drumming actually improves the production of T-cells.” Price, 29, is a certified music therapist. “Those are the cells that are helpful to the immune system.” Bittman, a Pennsylvania medical researcher, for decades has been studying the effects of music and drumming on human health, a subject that Price is familiar with. Her own work, which she calls rock-and-roll therapy, is directed at kids and teens. “I developed it working with children at various local hospitals.” She says she’d rather not say which ones for reasons of confidentiality. “I get a one-time shot,” she says. “I’ll come in with a bass guitar and a regular guitar and some amps and some keyboards, and we all play music together.” Price says there is no time to teach the nonmusical how to play an instrument and therefore has developed a system. She tunes the guitars to open bar chords, then marks the fretboards and keyboards with strips of colored tape that tell a beginner where fingers should go. For example, red is the G major chord, while green is a C major chord and yellow a D major chord. “We could play ‘Three Little Birds’ with those chords.” She then sings the colors, by way of demonstration, over coffee in Normal Heights. The sounds of music, says Price, hold restorative powers. She describes a hypothetical scenario in which a patient has suffered sexual abuse and is depressed. “I’d say, ‘You’ve never played bass before?’ So then I’d put this big, heavy bass guitar in her lap. I’d say, play this cherry-red Ibanez. When she says ‘I can’t,’ I’d put her fingers in the right places and help her make some low notes.” That, Price says, is when healing begins to take place. “She’s playing this traditionally masculine instrument that is libidinous in a way, and she’s in control of it. Can you imagine how powerful that is?” Price got her degree from Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Price considered a career as a performer but says she found music therapy emotionally and monetarily more rewarding. Following an internship in music therapy at MusicWorx Inc., she opened »Bliss Music Therapy. In the final analysis, do drummers live longer than other musicians? “I don’t know,” Price laughs. “I don’t know if there are any studies on that.”

Aniruddh D. Patel, PhD

A Conversation With Aniruddh D. Patel

Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind

Date	Monday, May 31, 2010
Source	The New York Times, NY
Location	»View Here
Writer	»Claudia Dreifus
Photographer	Robert Benson for The New York Times

Story	Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published “Music, Language, and the Brain,” Oliver Sacks described it as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the »Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, was in New York City in May. We spoke over coffee for more than an hour and later by telephone. An edited and condensed version of the conversations follows. Q. You describe yourself as a neuroscientist of music. this has to be a new profession. How did you come to it? A. I’ve been passionate about two things since childhood — science and music. At graduate school, Harvard, I hoped to combine the two. But studying with E.O. Wilson, I quite naturally got caught up with ants. In 1990, I found myself in Australia doing fieldwork on ants for a Ph.D. thesis. And there, I had this epiphany: the only thing I really wanted to do was study the biology of how humans make and process music. I wondered if the drive to make it was innate, a product of our evolution, as Darwin had speculated. Did we have a special neurobiological capacity for music, as we do for language and grammar? So from Australia, I wrote Wilson that there was no way I could continue with ants. Amazingly, he wrote: “You must follow your passion. Come back to Harvard, and we’ll give it a shot.” Wilson and Evan Balaban, a birdsong biologist who taught me about the neurobiology of auditory communication, mentored me through my thesis, which was called “A Biological Study of the Relationship Between Language and Music.” When I defended it in 1996, this was unusual scholarship. The neurobiology of music wasn’t yet a recognized field. Q. When did it go mainstream? A. Not too long after that. By the late 1990s, all of neuroscience was being transformed by the widespread use of imaging technologies. Because it became possible to learn how the brain was affected when people engaged in certain activities, it became acceptable to study things previously considered fringy. Today you have the neuroscience of economics, of music, of everything. I published a paper in 1998 that really surprised people. It was the first imaging study showing what happens when the brain processes musical grammar as compared with what happens when it processes language. From what we learned, this was occurring in an overlapping way within the brain. And this was a clue that the neurobiology of music could give us a new path to access and perhaps even heal some language disabilities. Q. How would that work? A. One example. There’s a neurologist in Boston, Gottfried Schlaug, who uses music therapy to return some language to stroke victims. He has them learn simple phrases by singing them. This has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy. Schlaug’s work suggests that when the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that processes music to take over. Music neuroscience is also helping us understand Alzheimer’s. There are Alzheimer’s patients who cannot remember their spouse. But they can remember every word of a song they learned as a kid. By studying this, we’re learning about how memory works. Q. Recently, you’ve been working with a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Snowball. What prompted the collaboration? A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys! My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours. Q. What did you do with this insight? A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.” One day, Irena Schulz, the proprietor, played “Everybody” to amuse the abandoned creature. And Snowball began to move. Irena then made the YouTube video, which immediately went viral. Millions saw it. “Let’s design an experiment to see if this is real,” I proposed to Irena, who had a science background herself. We took the Backstreet Boys song, sped it up and slowed it down at 11 different tempos, then videoed what Snowball did to each. For 9 out of the 11 variations, the bird moved to the beat, which meant that he’d processed the music in his brain and his muscles had responded. So now we had the first documented case of a nonhuman animal who, without training, could sense a beat out of music and move to it. Q. You say that Snowball changed your thinking. How? A. Before Snowball, I wondered if moving to a musical beat was uniquely human. Snowball doesn’t need to dance to survive, and yet, he did. Perhaps, this was true of humans, too? Since working with Snowball, I’ve come to think we could learn more music neuroscience by studying the behaviors of not just parrots, but perhaps dolphins, seals, songbirds — also vocal learners. We eventually published the Snowball research in Current Biology. A group at Harvard published a paper right alongside ours in which they surveyed thousands of YouTube videos to see if there were other animals spontaneously moving to a beat. They found about 12 or 13 parrots. No dogs. No cats. No horses. What do humans have in common with parrots? Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music. Q. Is it difficult to find money for this type of research? A. It's easier than it used to be. One of the founders of this field, Dr. Robert Zatorre, before 2000, he never used the word music in a grant application. He knew it would get turned down automatically because people thought this was not scientific. Instead, he used terms like “complex nonlinguistic auditory processing.” But in recent years, it’s become O.K. to say: I study music and the brain. [ END ] Watch Snowball dancing to music in the video below.

Gift of $2.5 Million to All Children's Hospital to Keep Music Playing

Date	Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Source	St. Petersburg Times, FL
Author	»Richard Martin, Times Staff Writer

Story	St. Petersburg—Sometimes, a kid needs to bang a drum, sing a song or listen to a relaxing tune. That's the basic idea behind the music therapy program at All Children's Hospital, which has been a hit with patients for nearly 20 years. On Monday, the program got a big boost with the announcement of a $2.5 million gift from local music executive and businessman Bill Edwards. The gift comes just as the current grant for the program is about to expire, hospital spokeswoman Ann Miller said. But Edwards' largesse also will enable the hospital to train additional certified music therapists. Edwards is founder of Bill Edwards Presents Inc. and Big 3 Entertainment; chairman and chief executive of Mortgage Investors Corp.; and is one of the new owners of St. Petersburg concert venue Jannus Live. In a news release, he said, "we all owe a responsibility to our community to help our children stay healthy and happy." Music therapy is used for patients of all ages, for many types of therapy. It relaxes and soothes; provides a distraction from the pain, fear and stress of being in a hospital; and it also can help with motor skills. Meryl Barns, [ MusicWorx Inc. July 2009 intern alumna ] the hospital's lone board-certified music therapist, said the program works with about 90 to 100 children each month. A patient might write a song or play an instrument to express his feelings, Barns said. Kids who face long hospitalizations might set a goal, such as learning to play a song on the guitar. Edwards' gift will also help the hospital expand GetWellNetwork, an interactive education and entertainment system run through bedside televisions. Richard Martin can be reached at rmartin@sptimes.com or (727) 893–8330. Go to tampabay.com/health for more medical news.