These reports were presented at the VII International Music Medicine Symposium held in July 1998 at the Faculty of Music, Melbourne University, Australia. All those mentioned participated and provided their input, which we record for the benefit of our readers and a better understanding of music as sheer therapy.
According to Dr Rosalie Rebello-Pratt, Vice President of the International Society for Music in Medicine, and Professor of Music at Brigham Young University in the United States, “What we do is look at these specific effects of music on behavior. Such as the effects of music on premature infants; physiological parameters; chronic fatigue syndrome in women; anxiety in the dental patient; women in childbirth and so on.
Not just any music, we’re looking at specific kinds and characteristics of music. Such as the amount of repetition, the amount of melody, tonic chords, things that the ear hears and wants to hear again.”
Dr Jane Standley is Professor of Music Therapy at Florida State University in the United States. She’s been researching the effect of music on premature babies with feeding difficulties. Her experience makes her believe that music is very effective for babies, particularly those who are in a very stressful environment.
“If you can imagine a newborn baby who’s going to spend the first two or three months of its life 24 hours a day in an environment with lights and lots of noise and alarm systems and equipment noises from ventilators, and the machines that are keeping the babies alive, you can imagine why good music might be very soothing in that environment,” says Dr Standley.
An experiment was conducted wherein commercially recorded lullabies with female vocalists were used for babies to identify with. Newborn babies prefer the female voice because they’ve heard the mother’s voice during the last trimester in the womb.
Steady piano or guitar accompaniments were used as opposed to an orchestra where instruments are coming in a flood. This had to be done because each of those factors is an alerting response for the infants, and premature infants, as the ones in the study, are easily overwhelmed.
So a pacifier with an air pressure transducer that converted air pressure to an electrical energy tape recorder was created. Two switches were available; one allows programming the amount of time that the baby receives music, usually about 10 seconds, so if the baby sucks within the 10 seconds, the music will just continue and not get cut off.
If the baby fails to suck after 10 seconds, the music cuts off and the baby has to reactivate the music with an additional suck. The other switch allows setting the amount of pressure the baby has to use. So as the baby learns to do this, increasing the pressure that’s required increases the baby’s endurance. They have to suck a bit harder to keep the music on.
This experiment ran for several months, and the results were that all the babies discriminated when the music was on and off, and increased their sucking rates about 2lh times in order to receive the music reinforcement, and that they very quickly learned the discrimination. It only took about 2’/2 minutes on an average for the babies to learn the skill.
In an earlier study, using music and massage with agitated premature babies, Dr Standley found that baby boys left hospital one and half days sooner than those not receiving music. But the females, in typical form, did even better: they left hospital 11 days sooner!