Music therapy, a fusion of music and medicine dating back all the way to 1789, has been shown to cause marked improvements in the states of people suffering from psychological disorders or physical injuries. In music therapy, a professional assesses the needs of the patient and designs a program of creating, singing, or listening to music to improve the patient’s health.
The idea of music as a form of healing originated with Aristotle and Plato, who both explored music’s healing nature in their writings. They, along with other Greek philosophers, believed that music had a mathematical relationship with the cosmos that resulted in an ability to improve a patient’s condition.
The first documented mentions of music being used for therapy arose in the early 1800s with medical dissertations by Edwin Atlee and Samuel Matthews. Atlee and Matthews were pupils of Dr. Benjamin Rush, a renowned physician who believed that music’s medicinal powers could improve one’s mental state [1]. Atlee’s “An Inaugural Essay on the Influence of Music in the Cure of Diseases” noted the emotions expressed by sick patients while listening to music: mainly joy and grief [2]. Building on his research, pioneers in the field began to push for associations, academic programs, and real-life implementations of music therapy in medical settings. However, it was only after World War II that the field began to take off. When musicians volunteered to play in veterans’ hospitals in the United States, physicians noticed improvements in the mental and physical states of their patients. As a result of these observations, musicians were hired by the hospitals because of the benefits their music could provide to the injured and sick.
Recent research in the area includes a study by Hisako Nakayama et al., wherein researchers played music for patients with terminal cancer after tailoring the playlists to their preferences and needs. The researchers found that music therapy greatly reduced anxiety and stress, thereby improving the patients’ quality of life and likelihood of survival [3]. A study by Linda Chlan used similar methods to treat patients on ventilatory support and reached the same conclusion [4]. A further study by Anna Maratos et al. used customized music sessions to treat depressed patients and found that, when combined with normal treatments, music therapy resulted in a significant improvement in patients’ moods [5].
Beyond anxiety and depression, music therapy has been found to aid seizure treatment, discourage wandering in Alzheimer's, and improve social skills in autistic children. A study by Mark Bodner et al. found that when patients with epilepsy were exposed to select music during sleep, their seizures were remarkably reduced and sometimes even eliminated [6]. Another study by Robert Groene used reading and music listening sessions to treat different Alzheimer’s patients who exhibited wandering symptoms. The study concluded that music listening was drastically more effective at reducing wandering than reading, sometimes eliminating wandering entirely [7]. Furthermore, Monika Geretsegger et al. found that customized music sessions for children with autism spectrum disorders led to improvement in social interaction, verbal communication, initiation of behavior, and social-emotional reciprocity, abilities that autistic children and adults tend to struggle with [8].
But how does merely listening to something lead to distinct positive changes in patients’ mental and emotional states? Somehow, our brains take sound waves in the air and turn them into something we can understand—something that triggers complex emotions. A study by Lauren Stewart et al. investigated how this occurs. The study used functional brain imaging while playing music, varying either the pitch, the rhythm, or the timbre. It was found that distinct areas of the brain activate to process these three aspects of sound. Additional trials in the same study investigated the areas of the brain that activated when pleasant music was played and compared them to those that activated for unpleasant music. The study saw that the emotional “shiver” we feel when we listen to music, the physical manifestation of experiencing something pleasant, occurs when music stimulates the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and ventral striatum [9]. These areas are known for their roles in the storage of positive memories, regulation of body function in response to emotion, and response to rewards, respectively, suggesting that our brain sees enjoyable music as a reward, which in turn releases the hormones that correspond with pleasure. This results in the medical benefits that so many studies have found: stress and anxiety reduction and uplifts in mood, both of which are caused by the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is associated with rewards.
Current research in music therapy continues to uncover new implications in trauma, disease, and mental illness. Music therapy could be a supplemental treatment for depression, a way to comfort terminally ill patients, or a partial replacement for anesthesia in surgical procedures. Nonetheless, music therapy is not commonly used in the medical community, and it lacks conclusive studies or clinical trials to encourage its widespread use. For this reason, the full potential of music therapy has yet to be discovered.
[1] “History of Music Therapy,” American Music Therapy Association, https://www.musictherapy.org/about/history/.
[2] Edwin Atlee, “An Inaugural Essay on the Influence of Music in the Cure of Diseases,” Internet Archive, 1804, archive.org/details/2541081R.nlm.nih.gov/page/n11/mode/2up.
[3] Hisako Nakayama, Fumio Kikuta, Hidekatsu Takeda, “A Pilot Study on Effectiveness of Music Therapy in Hospice in Japan,” Journal of Music Therapy, January 2009, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmt/46.2.160.
[4] Linda Chlan, “Effectiveness of a Music Therapy Intervention on Relaxation and Anxiety for Patients Receiving Ventilatory Assistance,” Heart & Lung, 1998, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0147-9563(98)90004-8.
[5] Anna Maratos, C. Gold, “Music Therapy for Depression,” The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2003, https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.cd004517.
[6] Mark Bodner et al., “Reduction of Seizure Occurrence from Exposure to Auditory Stimulation in Individuals with Neurological Handicaps: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” PLOS, November 2012, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045303.
[7] Robert William Groene, “Effectiveness of Music Therapy 1:1 Intervention with Individuals Having Senile Dementia of the Alzheimers Type,” Journal of Music Therapy, January 1993, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmt/30.3.138.
[8] Monika Geretsegger et al., “Music Therapy for People with Autism Spectrum Disorder,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.cd004381.pub3.
[9] Lauren Stewart et al., “Music and the Brain: Disorders of Musical Listening,” Brain, 2006, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awl171.