The Future of Therapy Is Theremin
“The Theremin is the only instrument in the world that is played without being touched,” says Thereminist Kip Rosser, an endorsing artist for Moog Music, which builds Theremins under the brand name Etherwave.
“That, combined with the physical interaction with the instrument, allows for a number of unique applications in music therapy—emotional, psychological, and physical.”
Rosser was speaking to a conference of the American Music Therapy Association (www.musictherapy.org) held in late 2006 in Kansas City, Missouri. The Theremin’s use for stress relief, as a catalyst for imagination, its potential as a mode of nonverbal expression, and its use in combination with other healing modalities was discussed. “This instrument can have a dramatic effect on the well-being of music therapy patients,” explains Rosser.
The Theremin is known as the world’s first commercially available electronic instrument. It was invented in 1919 by Russian Léon Theremin and popularized by American Robert Moog. The instrument produces an electromagnetic field between two prongs that when disturbed by the hand, creates a spectrum of musical notes. Its eerie sound is a staple of horror flick soundtracks.
Make Music Wherever You Go
You’ve heard of the rock concert T-shirt, but now technology has taken the music-meets-fashion concept one step further with what’s being dubbed the “air guitar shirt.”
Scientists in Geelong, Australia, have created a T-shirt that recognizes arm movements and relays them wirelessly to a computer, which makes music. Different arm positions create different sounds. The left arm chooses the chords and “plays” them by adopting a certain position, while the right arm strums the “strings”.
The shirt—a collaboration between computer, textile, and music experts—is the brainchild of research engineer Richard Helmer, who is also an amateur guitarist. He says he was inspired by the “intelligent knee sleeve” being used in a trial by the Geelong Australian Rules football club, which tells wearers whether they are landing correctly.
His response to the knee sleeve was pretty instantaneous. “I thought, ‘Let’s make a guitar out of that,’” says Helmer.
Keep Your Mind Sharp with Mental Exercise
So, you eat granola for breakfast, go for a jog, and cool down with yoga—but what exercise regimen have you chosen for your brain? Now that the leading edge of the baby boom generation is turning 60, there is new interest in preserving not only physical health but mental acuity as well.
“We’re seeing a sort of memory-fitness movement,” says Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Center on Aging and author of The Longevity Bible: 8 Essential Strategies for Keeping Your Mind Sharp and Your Body Young.
Like most researchers, Small advocates a use-it-or-lose-it approach to cognitive fitness. Though it doesn’t guarantee you’ll never fall victim to Alzheimer’s disease—just as a healthful diet and exercise don’t guarantee you’ll never have a heart attack—it may delay the onset of the disease or at least make a normal but aging brain more efficient.
Like other parts of the body, the brain does change with age. Synapses fire more slowly, some cells die off, and the overall mass of the organ shrinks. But recent studies on brain function show that older brains can be trained to perform certain tasks as quickly as younger brains, that physical exercise is closely linked with mental sharpness, and that older adults who kept working or stayed active after retirement did significantly better on IQ tests than those who didn’t.
In fact, researchers have found that seniors are able to reverse the decline in mental abilities typically associated with aging by doing memory, reasoning, and mental-processing exercises, along with activities that challenge the brain such as playing music and participating in group activities.
Composer Reveals Music’s Hidden Geometry
Composers often speak of fitting chords and melodies together, as though sounds were physical objects with geometric shape. Now composer Dmitri Tymoczko, an assistant professor of music at Princeton University, is using topology and non-Euclidean geometry as a way of understanding how music is constructed.
His findings resulted in the first paper on music theory the journal Science has printed in its 127-year history.
Making graphical representations of music is not a new idea. Most people are familiar with the five-line musical staff, on which notes that appear physically higher represent sounds that have higher pitch. Other common representations include the circle of fifths, which illustrates the relationships between the 12 notes in the chromatic scale as though they were hours on a clock’s face.
To understand the melodic relationship between chords, Tymoczko connects the points with lines that represent how they have to change their notes to get from one chord to the next.
One of Tymoczko’s musical spaces resembles a triangular prism, in which points representing traditionally familiar harmonies such as major chords gather near the center of the triangle, forming neat geometric shapes with other common chords that relate to them closely. Dissonant, cluster-type harmonies can be found out near the edges, close to their own harmonic kin.
Tymoczko says that composers have traditionally valued harmonic consistency that does not require that the listener jump far from one region of the space to another too quickly. “This idea that you should stay in one part of space,” he says, “is an important ingredient of our notion of musical coherence.”
Music Therapy Reduces Schizophrenia Symptoms
New research continues to show the benefits of music for mental health. British researchers, led by Mike Crawford, MD, have recently published the results of a small trial investigating the effects of music therapy on patients with acute schizophrenia. The initial trial proved that music therapy can significantly reduce symptoms of schizophrenia.
Researchers observed the effects of eight to 12 music sessions in which patients were given musical instruments and encouraged to express themselves. Patients who received music therapy had a greater reduction in symptoms, compared to a treatment group of patients who only received standard therapy.
While it has been known that psychological treatments can help treat symptoms of schizophrenia such as depression and anxiety, the new study is the first to address the use of music therapy for acutely unwell inpatients. Researchers are optimistic that further studies will continue to demonstrate music therapy’s usefulness in treating mental illness.
Apes Sing with Syntax
Southeastern Asian forests harbor small apes, known as gibbons, that sing like rainforest Pavarottis. Now biologists have gone behind the music to discover that the apes rearrange notes to communicate with their comrades.
This simple musical syntax represents a step toward human language that had not previously been demonstrated in apes, says psychologist Esther Clarke of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
Researchers have traditionally held that syntax arose only as the vocabulary of prehistoric people grew large and unwieldy. “We’re finding the opposite in gibbons,” says psychologist Klaus Zuberbühler, also of the University of St. Andrews. “One way of escaping the constraints of their limited vocal abilities is to combine signals into more complex sequences, which carry meaning.”
Although a substantial gap separates human language from ape communication, the new study of gibbon mating and warning calls shows that “in gibbons, the difference in degree of vocal complexity and sophistication is not as large as some have been tempted to think,” remarks biological anthropologist Barbara J. King of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. However, biologist Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia points out that syntax in gibbon songs falls short of that in language, which uses words to serve specific functions in sentences as well as to refer to features of the world.
Your Brain On Music
Cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker calls music a “spandrel.” Spandrels are the spaces between arches of a traditional cathedral, an architectural necessity that became useful in their own right as spaces for decoration and painting.
Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould coined the term in evolutionary biology to mean one useful adaptation that arose as an unintended result of another. Pinker argues that the human capacity for music arose out of the necessary brain structures and wiring needed to create language. In other words, music is a by-product of language evolution that has taken on its own significance.
