Hitting the Right Note

For most of us, music in some form is essential to our lives. Researchers are delving into how and why music affects our emotional, physical and spiritual health.

Music is used therapeutically in health-care facilities like Baycrest, including in the care of residents who have Alzheimer’s disease and palliative patients in the hospital and the nursing home. Familiar songs stimulate reminiscences and social interaction. Music is known to relieve stress and anxiety. Its presence creates a warmer environment for health-care practitioners, clients and their families, and it helps foster caring and empathy – the foundation of emotionally intelligent health care.

An upcoming research study being conducted at the Baycrest Community Day Centre for Seniors will measure the potential health benefits of being in a glee club. Some of the 35 seniors recruited for the choir will be mildly cognitively impaired; others will have normal cognitive function. The study will also recruit staff members and Baycrest volunteers to see if any health benefits accrue to them.

All participants will be pre-tested and post-tested for general and emotional health, loneliness, feelings, anxiety, quality of life, and their degree of cognitive impairment. The choir will be conducted and accompanied over 16 weeks by two music therapists.

Primary investigator and senior music therapist Dr. Amy Clements-Cortes will observe the choir and take notes during the sessions. Participants will be interviewed about their choir experience at the end of the study period, and re-tested using the same measures to see what might have changed.

“I’m hoping that the experience will provide seniors an opportunity to raise their self-esteem by actively making music and participating in a group experience which will lead to them feeling good about themselves,” says Clements-Cortes. “I’m also hoping that it helps them focus less on pain and anxiety, and that it leads to opportunities for social interaction.”

Learning to Play the Drums may help Stroke Patients

In a small room in Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute, a set of drums and a keyboard are being used in another music-related study. This one is investigating whether music training can help people who have suffered a stroke regain the use of their upper limbs.

“Previous research using brain imaging technology shows which parts of the brain are stimulated when healthy people hear music and respond by moving to the beat,” says scientist Takako Fujioka. She and fellow scientist Dr. Bernhard Ross are investigating whether learning to play the drums could cause a reorganization of areas in the brain where the stroke damaged patients’ sensorimotor functions.

Study participants are at the stage where further improvement in their recovery is not expected. During a course of 15 lessons over one month, participants use their hands to hit the drums (which are programmed to produce piano-like sounds) and repeat simple patterns and tunes played by Dr. Fujioka. Their responses to musical tones along with their sensory processing are assessed using a brain imaging machine before, during and at the end of the study period.

Preliminary results for one participant – an 87-year-old man who learned to play the drums using both hands four years after having a stroke – showed that he was able to play more and more complex patterns as the 15 lessons went along. Areas in his brain where sensations such as touch are felt showed distortion prior to the training. This was shown to have normalized in post-training images, explains Dr. Fujioka.

She believes that this normalizing of sensory perception may be due to the effort required to combine the timing of a familiar tune (O Canada, for example) with hitting the drums, as opposed to just striking them without the musical cue. This “action planning involves engaging a wide network of the brain,” she says. “The patients try very hard to get the timing right because they know how it should sound. They are guided by their musical memory of O Canada, and each action is very deliberately planned because they want to make it work as musically as possible.”