Europe, Austria, Vienna, 2009

Art-Project: R-STRIPES

Artist: Alexander Janda, Mag.Phill. Jon Griebler

www.r-stripes.com

Music Therapy:

What is the structure of healing? The goal is to heal by reducing the burden of disease from the body. But what is the structure of art therapy or in special music therapy? The goal is an holistic: to reduce the burden of a disease from body and mind. Preferably without medical drugs and/or without medical invasions.

So our auditory system is one of the first parts which emerges in the fetal brain. Thus the fetus is able to hear noises in its environment, like the heartbeat of the mother, her respiration frequency and even music which comes from outside. And the fetal brain reacts emotionally to this auditory stimuli like rhythm timbre, harmonics, form and dynamics.  This imprinting is at least for life. Emotional responses interact with the autonomic nervous system and may cause physiological effects like skin resistance or blood pressure. Without such indicators we wouldn´t be able to use musical representation as a therapeutic effect.  

There is a thousands of years old history in music therapy, shamans or healers in ancient Sumer and Egypt use music as an important part of the healing ritual. Music as an integer part of medical care in the middle ages and it´s also seen there as a process of recreation of mental harmony. The old Chinese character for medicine[1] seems to be derived from the character for music[2], so both may have healing in common. Chinese physicians use music in their treatment at least since the Huangdi neijing, a more than two thousand years old book about medicine from the legendary ´yellow emperor´ Huángdì. Herein (and later on, of course) is discussed in the sense of the daoist theory how to use music as a holistic therapy to reconstitute the harmonic unity of body and mind.

Music therapy in our days whether in the east and in the west is an ´evidence based medicine´, it depends on the specific medical conditions and the individual preferences. Any human individual is highly different in sensitive dimensions, comparable to fingerprints, so the therapist has to find out whatever the patient needs and/or, most notably, prefers. This indicates the most complex role the therapist plays in the construction of an relationship between therapist and patient. Music can be seen as an emotional form of nonverbal communication and thereof as much more intuitive then the verbal speech.

A few important features are to point out:

Music has the ability to raise awareness in mentally handicapped people or people with dementia. Because music attains the brain subliminal via the auditory system. Music avoids neuro-physical filters like in mentally problems and reaches the brain also in the sleep or even in anesthesia. When there is played music during surgery, most patients describe that the first remembrance after anesthesia is the music. So we can use music even as a basic contacting with e.g. stroke patients or people with dementia.

Music has the potential to modulate some motor skills on patients after a stroke or with Parkinson. Pieces of music will be selected whose rhythmical and melodic characteristics fits the characteristics of the symptoms and the beat measure appears suitable to support and accelerate the moves of the patient. The side effect is the improvement of the emotional situation of the individual, which causes a positive effect on the social domain either.    

Hearing music touches emotional and as this emotions interact with the autonomic nervous system, music can affect blood pressure, respiration frequency or the rhythm of heartbeat. Therefore music therapy is helpful before and after heart surgery or after a heart attack. Listen to preferred music increases the production of endorphins and helps to reduce fear, pain and stress and relaxes patients before surgery.

All of this was the use of passive music therapy, the active music therapy includes/involves the patient in the process of creating some music. In doing so it´s unnecessary to have instrumental skills, here is important to act with the instrument or the voice and to make a diagnosis where problems of the patient are. The second part is the improvisation, a crucial point in music therapy, here is on the one side the nonverbal communication, on the other side creativity. Creativity in several cases is the first step for a patient to arrange his environment new after an affliction through bad medical conditions. In the active music therapy the patient or the patients in groups use familiar and unfamiliar musical instruments to express the hope for healing and/or the desire of a return to a normal life. Improvisation comes from Latin and means “unpredictable”, in the improvised music making with unpredictable issues, skills will be exercised for the handling of almost new situations.  

Art and especially music acts here as an agent to afford an active managing of a disease and thus have a vast array on positive modifications, for the patient, for his/her relatives and for his/her personal environment.

So, again, the goal of art and music therapy is to lift the burden of a disease from the victim and show a path back to normal life.