“People ask me as a professional music therapist, ‘How does music do these things?’ and I really couldn’t tell them, and that always bothered me,” says Professor Taylor. “And so what I’ve done is to create what I call a biomedical theory of music therapy, and that biomedical theory basically says that music affects human behavior by affecting the brain. And by knowing what those effects are, they can be replicated. My work shows how music therapy helps decrease stress, lowers anxiety and improves those areas that are damaged when anxiety and stress are at high levels, such as the immune system for example.”
Continues Professor Taylor, “The first real attempt that I made at explaining music therapy in terms of brain functioning was to come up with a neurological model for treating aphasia. When those parts of the brain that are damaged are language parts of the brain it is called aphasia. And so what I’ve done is propose a system for using music to help healthy parts of the brain take over the language functions of the damaged language centers, which in 97% of the population are in the left hemisphere. So what I’ve done is to use the music functions of the right hemisphere to help regain those functions that were lost through damage to the language centers in the left hemisphere.”
According to Professor Taylor, the neurological basis of that recovery process is based on findings showing that when a person talks, the most active parts of the brain are the language centers in the left hemisphere, but when a person is involved in music, the scans of the brain show (by measuring oxygen consumption in different parts of the brain) that much more of the brain, particularly the right hemisphere, is activated. And so there are billions more neurons brought to bear on the task.
“Using music, we can get the brain to start doing some things that it cannot do when there’s no music, simply because it’s much more of the brain working on it. The brain then will shift that task from the damaged area in the left hemisphere, perhaps over to the right hemisphere in a corresponding area. And because the brain has been shown through lots and lots of research to have that ability to shift functions from one part to another, I call that ‘functional plasticity’. And so we’re using music to activate the functional plasticity of the human brain,” Dr Wigram elaborates.
Dr Wigram believes that the effect on heart rate and blood pressure and other physical parameters has evoked a lot of research, not just from music therapists but from music psychologists as well. And it’s a lot to do with arousal levels and with the elements in the music. “What’s really important when making this type of research is to define and describe the musical parameters in the music that you’re using,” he says. “For example, to say somebody’s heart rate reduces over a period of 30 minutes when they listen to Mozart, may indicate to the general population that if they go out and get a piece of Mozart and listen to it for 30 minutes their heart rate will go down. But, of course, that can’t be true. We have to know which piece of Mozart, and what were the musical parameters in that piece that may have caused heart rate to reduce.”
One of Dr Wigram’s research areas has been the physiological effect of sound on the body, in particular, low frequency sounds. In some of the research, he found that arousal levels did reduce over time if pulse low frequency sinusoidal vibration together with sedative or relaxing music was used.
“Sedative music is going to be music that’s very predictable, because if you have music which has got a lot of surprises in it, where you don’t expect sudden crescendos, sudden accents, changes in tempi, then you’re always being surprised and your heart rate will fluctuate accordingly,” he says. “So if we define the parameters of predictable music as being very stable, very equal level of intensity and without sudden changes in tempo, then I found that over time, heart rates reduce significantly with this type of music. And that can be very useful for somebody who has anxiety or stress-related disorders, who needs to find a way of slowing down.”
Emma O’Brien is the music therapist in oncology and palliative care at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She is a firm believer in the theory that music aids the curative process. “We use music therapy methods to help treat the symptoms for chemotherapy, for bone marrow transplants, and to help patients cope with their treatment and long periods of hospitalization,” she says. “We help alleviate sensory deprivation, feelings of loneliness, emotional stresses and also physical stresses that they may experience as part of the experience of being in hospital and having the diagnosis of cancer.”