Music decreases perceived pain for children in Pediatric ER

Newly published findings by medical researchers at the University of Alberta provide more evidence that music decreases children's perceived sense of pain.

Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry researcher Lisa Hartling led the research team that involved her colleagues from the Department of Pediatrics, as well as fellow researchers from the University of Manitoba and the United States.

Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Pediatrics today.

The team conducted a clinical research trial of 42 children between the ages of 3 and 11 who came to the pediatric emergency department at the Stollery Children's Hospital and needed IVs.

Some of the children listened to music while getting an IV, while others did not. Researchers measured the children's distress, perceived pain levels and heart rates, as well as satisfaction levels of parents, and satisfaction levels of health-care providers who administered the IVs.

The trial took place between January 2009 and March 2010.

"We did find a difference in the children's reported pain – the children in the music group had less pain immediately after the procedure," says Hartling.

"The finding is clinically important and it's a simple intervention that can make a big difference. Playing music for kids during painful medical procedures would be an inexpensive and easy-to-use intervention in clinical settings."

The research showed that the children who listened to music reported significantly less pain, some demonstrated significantly less distress, and the children's parents were more satisfied with care.

"There is growing scientific evidence showing that the brain responds to music and different types of music in very specific ways," said Hartling.

"So additional research into how and why music may be a better distraction from pain could help advance this field."

The study noted that previous research has shown that the mood of the music, whether it has lyrics, and whether it is familiar to the listener could have an impact on pain perception as well.

Dyslexia: Music Ability Helps Reading

Playing a musical instrument from a young age appears to create new pathways in the brain that process written words and letters, reports Ann Lukits in the Wall Street Journal.

The findings, which may help children with reading disorders such as dyslexia, appeared in the journal Neuropsychologia.

“Fifteen professional musicians who had played an instrument since childhood and 15 control subjects who couldn’t read music participated in two experiments in Milan. Subjects were 26 to 31 years old.

In one experiment, subjects pressed a button if they recognized the notes E, F, G, A and B (mi, fa, sol, la and ti on the musical scale) which randomly appeared in 300 short musical scores flashed on a computer screen.

In the other experiment, they pressed the button when they spotted the letters B, G, L, M and S in 300 randomly selected words. An electroencephalogram (EEG) measured brain-wave activity. Musicians recognized notes significantly faster than controls; letters, only slightly faster. Musicians made fewer errors in both experiments.

But EEG results showed striking differences. In musicians, reading musical notes and words activated both the left and right sides of the brain, whereas in controls, only the left side responded to words and the right side to notes.

Language is normally a left-brain function and music a right-brain function. The involvement of the right side in a typically left-sided function probably resulted from reading music, researchers said. Musical training may be quite helpful for children struggling to read, they said.”

Read more here

Dyslexia: 'My three sons and their music'

Three brothers with dyslexia have overcome their struggles with reading music to be chosen to play in the National Schools Symphony Orchestra.

"I shudder to think what it would have been like without music," says Sasha Baldwin, mother to three teenage sons who are all dyslexic.

Luke, 17, plays the violin and guitar. Patrick, 15, plays the piano, organ and trumpet while Robert, 14, is a gifted French horn player. They all sing too.

Yet at primary school they struggled from early on as dyslexia manifested itself in different ways in each of them.

"Luke had difficulties learning how to read, Patrick had problems with short-term memory and couldn't remember instructions from school or telephone numbers and Robert had real problems with personal organisation and retaining information, as well as reading," Sasha says.

The North Yorkshire school they attended recognised their learning difficulties and enlisted the help of educational psychologists to support them.

But Sasha, who now lives in Perthshire, realised that music could provide a valuable outlet for their development and she encouraged the boys to start learning the piano aged five.

Although they were enthusiastic, they all had issues with reading music.

"Robert had to give up the piano after a year as he couldn't read two lines of music simultaneously and became very frustrated," Sasha says.

Read more of Sasha's story here

Dyslexia: Learning to Read Music

Dyslexia can be more than simply a problem with words. Music students often find it difficult to understand musical notation, especially when they are trying to read sheet music and play their instrument a the same time.

Dyslexia can be more than just a problem with letters and words. Many talented music students run into problems when they try to learn to read sheet music.

Just as they experiences problems with words in print, the dyslexic musician may see a baffling array of lines and circles, with note symbols jumping around and the lines of the staff wavering and shifting.

Confusion about letters leads to disorientation and frustration; confusion about musical notation has the same result.

The people of Davis Symbol Mastery, the process of modeling symbols in clay, believe they can provide an effective solution.

Their solution is to form each musical symbol in three dimensions, using clay.

Thus, the participatory and sensory input will help the student develop a full understanding of the meaning of each symbol.

NB: Read more about this at The Dyslexic Reader

Olivier Messiaen: Synaesthesia - Music and Colours

Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992)



Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, widely regarded as a major composer of the 20th century.

Messiaen was gifted with Synaesthesia, whereby he perceived colours when he heard sounds and musical chords. He cited the importance and relevance of using these colour combinations in his compositional process.

His music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources); harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations.

Many of his compositions depict what he termed "the marvellous aspects of the faith", and drew on his deeply held Roman Catholicism.

Messiaen was deemed as 'a bit eccentric' and he had a particular fascination for birdsongs; he believed birds to be the greatest musicians and considered himself as much an ornithologist as a composer.

He notated bird songs worldwide and incorporated birdsong transcriptions into most of his music.

His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, his use of birdsong and his desire to express religious ideas are among features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.

The Scientific Power of Music - YouTube

Is music humanity's drug of choice? What is the mysterious power behind it's ability to captivate, stimulate and keep us coming back for more?

Find out the scientific explanation of how a simple mixture of sound frequencies can affect your brain and body, and why it's not all that different than a drug like cocaine.

FACEBOOK: AsapSCIENCE

David Byrne and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin Discuss Science and Music

David Byrne and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music, discuss the inner workings of music. Byrne’s new book, How Music Works, is an absolute must-read.

The conversation is part of SEED magazine’s Science Is Culture series, pairing artists and scientists to explore the intersection of science and society.

Dyslexia: Music underlies language acquisition, theorists propose

Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language.

"Spoken language is a special type of music," said Anthony Brandt, co-author of a theory paper published online this month in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience.

"Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence, and music is often treated as being dependent on or derived from language. But from a developmental perspective, we argue that music comes first and language arises from music."

Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School, co-authored the paper with Shepherd School graduate student Molly Gebrian and L. Robert Slevc, UMCP assistant professor of psychology and director of the Language and Music Cognition Lab.

"Infants listen first to sounds of language and only later to its meaning," Brandt said. He noted that newborns' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception depend on the discrimination of the sounds of language -- "the most musical aspects of speech."

The paper cites various studies that show what the newborn brain is capable of, such as the ability to distinguish the phonemes, or basic distinctive units of speech sound, and such attributes as pitch, rhythm and timbre.

The authors define music as "creative play with sound." They said the term "music" implies an attention to the acoustic features of sound irrespective of any referential function.

As adults, people focus primarily on the meaning of speech but babies begin by hearing language as "an intentional and often repetitive vocal performance," Brandt said.

"They listen to it not only for its emotional content but also for its rhythmic and phonemic patterns and consistencies. The meaning of words comes later."

Brandt and his co-authors challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language cognition and is more difficult. "We show that music and language develop along similar time lines," he said.

Infants initially don't distinguish well between their native language and all the languages of the world, Brandt said.

Throughout the first year of life, they gradually hone in on their native language. Similarly, infants initially don't distinguish well between their native musical traditions and those of other cultures; they start to hone in on their own musical culture at the same time that they hone in on their native language, he said.

The paper explores many connections between listening to speech and music. For example, recognizing the sound of different consonants requires rapid processing in the temporal lobe of the brain.

Similarly, recognizing the timbre of different instruments requires temporal processing at the same speed -- a feature of musical hearing that has often been overlooked, Brandt said.

Read the full article here

Molecule Synth:An Electronic Musical Instrument for Everyone by Travis Feldman — Kickstarter

Molecule Synth:An Electronic Musical Instrument for Everyone by Travis Feldman — Kickstarter

A Study That I Used to Know! - Video parody

CollegeHumor’s Favorite Funny Videos

AirPiano 3D: Allows the user to trigger invisible keys and faders in midair

Credit to www.airpiano.de

The airpiano is an innovative MIDI and OSC controller. It allows the user to trigger invisible keys and faders in midair.

Touch-Free Interface

The airpiano is the first musical interface to introduce an intuitive and simple touch-free interaction. Most touch-free interfaces require users to stare at a display.

The user’s hand gestures in 3D space control elements on the screen. However, musicians and performers need to be able to play their instruments in a more free and intuitive way.

The airpiano’s keys and faders are therefore not on the screen, but above the airpiano surface. The performer knows the position of each controller in the air, so no display is needed, and the interaction becomes much more natural.

Discrete and Continuous Control

The airpiano is often compared with the Theremin. The Theremin is a wonderful instrument which is quite difficult to play. One reason for this is that it provides only continuous control.

The airpiano has a matrix of 24 discrete keys and 8 faders, which makes it much more simple to use.

Actually, the airpiano software makes the device so versatile that there is no real reason for a comparison.

These are completely different instruments.

Check out the airpiano features. User Experience Some people ask: why not just use a box with lots of buttons and shiny LEDs? what can i do with an airpiano that i can’t do with other controllers?

Well, we love all kinds of musical interfaces, and there are many wonderful and innovative alternative controllers out there.

However, we strongly believe that the airpiano introduces a new user experience, a magical and cool performance tool and an experimental instrument to explore.

The airpiano software allows setting the device in numerous ways and since there are no “rules” of how to play an airpiano, new creative ideas and playing techniques will come to life!

Can Playing Maternal Voice and Heartbeat Sounds Benefit Premies?

Nearly five years ago, Amir Lahav became a parent of twins born prematurely at 25 weeks. They weighed just over 1 pound each.

Welcoming two newborns into the family certainly changed his life, but as a neuroscientist, it also ended up changing the course of his research.

Lahav studies how the brain processes sounds, and worked primarily with neurologically impaired adults, but with the birth of his twins, his paternal instinct kicked in.

He approached the chief of newborn medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where the babies lay in incubators.

“Could I put a recording of my wife's voice in there?” Lahav asked, convinced that hearing their mother’s soothing tones would improve the babies’ development. The answer: It's certainly worthwhile.

Using his computer, Lahav recorded his wife’s voice telling the babies they’re fighters and urging them to be strong.

He also included some soothing piano music, figuring it could prove relaxing for preemies. Then he tinkered with the sound to make it resemble what a baby would hear in utero.

While we hear through air, babies in the womb process sound through fluid so what passes as hearing consists of more low-frequency vibrations. (Think about slipping beneath the surface of the bath as someone talks to you, or try speaking while putting a finger in each ear.) “It’s as if babies are living in a micro-subwoofer,” explains Lahav.

The twins seemed to like the recordings, and doctors and nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) were intrigued.

Moreover, it proved therapeutic for Lahav and his wife. “It was not a controlled trial,” says Lahav, “but just a crazy father trying to do something because especially in the case of premature babies, you feel very helpless.”

Once his twins left the hospital, Lahav returned to thank the chief for letting him experiment.

One thing led to another, and they found themselves in a serious conversation about prematurity and how the focus of neonatal medicine has changed from saving the lives of these babies, doctors have grown expert at keeping preemies alive, to helping them grow into healthy children.

Studies have shown that premature infants are at greater risk of having low IQ and developing metabolic or chronic conditions in young adulthood that can shorten their lives.

Could keeping them bathed in mom’s comforting sounds lower the incidence of some of these adverse effects on their health? Lahav wound up with a job offer to find out.

Read more: Can Playing Maternal Voice and Heartbeat Sounds Benefit Premies?

Mrs. Books - Apples Gosh Golly - YouTube

A Children's Educational video. Sharing Fun with the whole Family! Counting Funny, Silly Apples from 1 to 10 with Mrs. Books. Wonderful Music to Sing and Dance Along with too!

Interactive Metronome Demo Video - YouTube

The IM program provides a structured, goal-oriented process that challenges the patient to synchronize a range of hand and foot exercises to a precise computer-generated reference tone heard through headphones. The patient attempts to match the rhythmic beat with repetitive motor actions.

A patented audio or audio and visual guidance system provides immediate feedback measured in milliseconds, and a score is provided.

Beating Dyslexia Through Music

Musical skills may translate into reading skills — particularly for children with dyslexia. Research published by Martina Huss, Usha Goswami, and colleagues in Cortex indicates that musical games may be useful in treating dyslexia in young children because an inability to distinguish between strong and weak “beats” is closely related to dyslexia.

Huss and Goswami asked 10-year-old children to listen to pairs of simple songs in which certain notes were accented. To make the songs different, the scientists changed the length of the accented notes.

Non-dyslexic children were able to distinguish between identical and non-identical song pairs by perceiving “rise time,” which is the time it took for notes to reach peak intensity. Dyslexic children had more difficulty using rise time to distinguish between tunes.

According to the research team, these results show that the ability to perceive the pattern of beats in music and the ability to read are closely linked. Early interventions based on music may allow children to perceive the sounds of language more efficiently, leading to greater success when they learn to read.

Non-dyslexic children may benefit from music training too: Research published by Sylvian Moreno in the October issue of Psychological Science shows that preschoolers can improve their verbal intelligence after 20 days of music-based cognitive training cartoons.

References and Further Reading:

Huss, M., Verney, J. P., Fosker, T., Mead, N., & Goswami, U. (2011). Music, rhythm, rise time perception and developmental

Natalie Merchant Sings Children´s Poems at Ted

Natalie Merchant’s absolutely breathtaking live performance at TED earlier this year, which, though not doing justice to her live stage charisma. The rich emotion oozing from Merchant’s voice as her melodic storytelling unfolds is just otherworldly.

It's good to be a Father: Dad's life music video

Research Claims No link between dyslexia and lack of musical ability

No link between dyslexia and lack of musical ability

There is no link between a lack of musical ability and dyslexia. Moreover, attempts to treat dyslexia with music therapy are unwarranted, according to scientists in Belgium writing in the current issue of the International Journal of Arts and Technology.

Cognitive neuroscientist Jos- Morais of the Free University of Brussels and colleagues point out that research into dyslexia has pointed to a problem with how the brain processes sounds and how dyslexic readers manipulate the sounds from which words are composed, the phonemes, consciously and intentionally.

It was a relatively short step between the notion that dyslexia is an issue of phonological processing and how this might also be associated with poor musical skills - amusia - that has led to approaches to treating the condition using therapy to improve a dyslexic reader's musical skills.

Morais and colleagues demonstrate that theoretically this is an invalid argument and also present experimental evidence to show that there is no justification either for the link or for using music therapy to treat dyslexia.

Language and music are apparently uniquely human traits and many researchers have tried to find direct links between the two. A whole industry of music therapy hinges on this purported association with claims that language remediation is possible through the application of learning in music.

Given the social importance of literacy, a role for music in helping poor or dyslexic readers to overcome their difficulties has been at the forefront of therapy for many years. Morais' team points out that the notion is based on studies that are generally flawed in two respects.

The first problem with studies that attempt to link a lack of musical ability with reading difficulties is that the quality of published empirical studies is quite variable and many reviews of the field fail to discard papers containing insufficient information, either on materials and methods, or on the experimental results.

The second flaw is that many studies imply an explicit causality between amusia and dyslexia on the basis of results that are themselves merely statistical correlations.

Such an approach to science leads to a circular argument in which some researchers argue that music discrimination predicts phonological skills, which in turn predicts reading ability and that reading ability implies phonological skills and so on.

More recent studies have broken the link between hearing and reading by showing that deaf children, who often learn to perceive speech accurately using lip reading and visual clues can have literacy levels just as high as hearing children.

Of course, most of those children do not develop good musical ability with respect to musical pitch. Conversely, people who are unable even to hum a familiar tune show normal literacy levels.

Music and speech do overlap, but musical sounds and phonemes are not the same, the researchers explain. Musical tones are simply sounds, however, they are produced and can be heard without recourse to complex auditory analysis.

Phonemes, in contrast, whether spoken or read, are abstractions of the units into which language might be broken down. They are purely symbolic and require significantly more interpretation to understand than simply hearing a sound.

Child Development: Talk to your babies

Talk to your babies | ScienceBlog.com

Northwestern University researchers have found that even before infants begin to speak, words play an important role in their cognition. For 3-month-old infants, words influence performance in a cognitive task in a way that goes beyond the influence of other kinds of sounds, including musical tones.

The research by Alissa Ferry, Susan Hespos and Sandra Waxman in the psychology department in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, will appear in the March/April edition of the journal Child Development. In the study, infants who heard words provided evidence of categorization, while infants who heard tone sequences did not.

Three-month-old infants were shown a series of pictures of fish that were paired with words or beeps. Infants in the word group were told, for example, "Look at the toma!" ?-- a made-up word for fish, as they viewed each picture. Other infants heard a series of beeps carefully matched to the labeling phrases for tone and duration. Then infants were shown a picture of a new fish and a dinosaur side-by-side as the researchers measured how long they looked at each picture. If the infants formed the category, they would look longer at one picture than the other.

Therapeutic Games and Music for Auditory Hypersensitive and ADHD Children

Therapeutic games and music for auditory hypersensitive, autistic, downs syndrome, pdd and add children.

Lecture delivered to the World Organization Meeting of the
Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. May 1994, by
William P. Mueller Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors

Transient Electronic Auditory Stimulation

The Institutes have known for forty years that certain brain-injuries cause hyperactive auditory sensitivity.

In the past twenty years others have also begun to study this problem. I first beame aware of that condition when I met David, an eight year old brain-injured child at The Institutes who had this problem.

He screamed at the slightest noise. In fact, he screamed eight hours a day. His parents whispered all day to keep from setting him off.

When they arrived at The Institutes he was given the auditory stimulation program as part of his overall program. His parents were instructed to bang pots and pans randomly around the house!

David's mother told me she laughed all the way home after that initial visit. However, they did The Institute's auditory stimulation program and within two weeks David was no longer hypersensitive to sound.