A new perspective

"Music is an outburst of the soul"

Altered states of consciousness and musictherapy

How does music effect patients in persistent vegetative state, or people whose self-perception is impaired by pathological processes?

How can a song from an early period in life trigger spiritual questions in a person at the end of his or her life, and give consolation and hope?

(Aldridge, Fachner and Schmid, 2006)

From the stance of musicology, music cognition, performance and psychology there is a growing interest in how music is perceived and processed in altered states of consciousness and possible heuristic benefits as a comparison to the so-called ‘normal’ processes of perception, experience and performance. Currently, we have opportunities of using music-induced states of altered consciousness to promote physical and mental healing, treat substance dependence, and in spiritual and palliative care, and that will be exposed here.

Blood & Zatorre (2001) designed and developed a study to investigate neural correlates of intensely pleasurable responses to music, where it was used positron emission tomography (PET) to study neural mechanisms underlying these emotional responses. The pattern of activity observed in correlation with music-induced chills is similar to that observed in other brain imaging studies of euphoria and/or pleasant emotion, like sex, food or drug use.

Test persons listening to favorite music changes not only in the activity of the autonomous nerve system, as demonstrated by changes in cardiac beat, muscletone, skin resistance and depth of breath, but also in blood flow in brain structures that are involved in processing emotional stimuli. This activation pattern - blood flow - of specific regions in the brain has a primarily euphorising effect, what indicates that the perception of favorite music directly interacts with brain structures associated with emotions, like ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and ventral medial prefrontal cortex.

This is quite remarkable, because music is neither strictly necessary for biological survival or reproduction, nor is it a pharmacological substance. Activation of these brain systems in response to a stimulus as abstract as music may represent an emergent property of the complexity of human cognition. Perhaps as formation of anatomical and functional links between phylogenically older, survival-related brain systems and newer, more cognitive systems increased our general capacity to assign meaning to abstract stimuli, our capacity to derive pleasure from these stimuli also increased.

The ability of music to induce such intense pleasure and its putative stimulation of endogenous reward systems suggest that, although music may not be imperative for survival of the human species, it may indeed be of significant benefit to our mental and physical well-being.

This emotion quake may also be a shortcut to induced altered states of consciousness, explaining why music therapy is helpful in cancer or demential patients, persons at the end of their life or in irreversible processes as degenerative diseases.

Ludwig (1966) in "Archives of General Psychiatry" described altered states of consciousness as changes in thinking, time perception, loss of control, changes in emotionaly, body shceme, perception, experience of meaning: a feeling of the unexpressable, of renewal and rebirth and hyper-suggestibility.

This patients are kept away from falling into a deep depression with the emotional wave that musictherapy is able to fulfill. Music provides altered states of consciousness, giving something to look forward to, and brought meaning to this patients days in the hospital, despite reliefing some negative symptoms induced prompt by the diseases, which included nausea, dizziness, fatigue, and itchiness. State specific memories and processes may be triggered by hearing or singing clidwood songs that help to create a present time structured by music through intensive memories of the past, of youth and health.

Concluding, we realize that musictherapy can provide a revival process. T

he term states stresses the temporary character of what is

experienced in illness and in therapy.

Music,

as a special form of sharing and creating time processes allows musictherapists to meet

their cl

ients, to help them to alter their altered states of illness and self perception, and to show them a different perspective of their own being.

For those challenged by devastating diseases, music is

hope.

Bibliography:

• Aldridge, D., Fachner, J., & Schmid, W. (2006, 31. März). Music, perception and altered states of consciousness [Electronic Version].
  Music Therapy Today, 7, (1) 70-76. Retrieved 1. April from http://
  www.musictherapyworld.net/modules/mmmagazine/issues/
  20060331100549/20060331101804/MTT7_1_Fachner.pd
• Blood, A.J., & Zatorre, R.J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 98(20), 11818-11823.
• Fachner, J. (2007) Researching music and altered states in therapy and culture. Music Therapy Today Vol. VIII, (3) December. available at http://musictherapyworld.net
• Ludwig, A. M. (1966). Altered states of consciousness. Arch Gen Psychiatry, 15(3), 225 -234.
• http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTNssieqf1GE8w3t4h-gi55XXEkdBidlRBIAQC7s3wvoWDw4NSN (image)

A música está ao alcance de todos

No seguimento do post anterior, encontrei um vídeo que demonstra como Nick Vujicic, um jovem sem membros, é capaz de tocar música recorrendo a algumas adaptações... ;)

E dá-nos uma grande lição de vida acerca de como seguir em frente quando tudo na vida parece falir... vale a pena ver!

Dia Internacional da Pessoa com Deficiência

Hoje, 3 de Dezembro, celebra-se o Dia Internacional das Pessoa com Deficiência.

Em honra a todas estas pessoas, e na perspectiva de consciencialização para estas questões, escrevi este post, pretendendo dar a conhecer algumas adaptações que podem colaborar com o fazer musical pedagógico ou terapêutico para pessoas portadoras de deficiência.

A inclusão social deve ser uma das prioridades de qualquer comunidade. A música é uma representação cultural e social, pelo que se compreende a necessidade de que também a sua prática siga uma política inclusiva.

Os profissionais que trabalham com a musicoterapia e atendem pacientes que têm algum tipo de deficiência devem ter em conta que é necessário nunca trabalhar tendo em conta as limitações da pessoa, mas sempre com base nas capacidades de cada um, perspectivando evidenciar a sua eficiência e não a sua deficiência.

De modo a contribuir para a qualidade de vida de portadores de necessidades especiais, torna-se essencial viabilizar o fazer musical a estas pessoas, por recursos a técnicas ou métodos adaptativos sensíveis à diversidade individual de cada um.

O uso de adaptações para a prática musical pode ser classificado em:

DISPOSITIVOS - qualquer tipo de utensílio pré-existente ou especialmente criado, acoplado ou não ao instrumento musical, para o seu devido posicionamento e manipulação, ou facilitação da função física essencial para a sua execução.

(Exemplo: dispositivo criado para segurar a pandeireta)

MOBILIÁRIO - alterações em móveis com o fim de facilitar o estudo musical ou o posicionamento da adaptação para a prática instrumental

ALTERAÇÕES MUSICAIS - alterações na escrita da obra musical face à original, de forma a não alterar o seu conteúdo e sentido primordial

ALTERAÇÕES TÉCNICO-MUSICAIS - alterações na maneira de conduzir a música ou em aspectos técnicos, frente ao convencional, sem alterar o conteúdo essencial da obra, modificando apenas a maneira/forma de tocar.

ADAPTAÇÃO DO INSTRUMENTO MUSICAL - quando há alteração de um instrumento em si ou a criação de instrumentos específicos para portadores de necessidades especiais a partir de instrumentos pré-existentes

(Exemplo: teclado adaptado, com teclas em proporções maiores - 5,5cm cada)

MOVIMENTOS COMPENSATÓRIOS - quando é utilizado algum movimento ou parte do corpo não-convencional para se executar um determinado intrumento musical ou uma determinada música

ADAPTAÇÕES DO PRÓPRIO ORGANISMO - quando através da plasticidade cerebral e sua relação com motivação e exercícios, o organismo se adapta de forma a adquirir uma função física antes inexistente que colabora para a execução instrumental

SOTWARES - programas específicos que permitem o acesso ao computador através de comandos simples, adaptações no teclado ou rato do computador, associados a programas musicais, de forma a permitir a escrita musical ou a programação e gravação de arranjos musicais.

ÓRTESES - quando a pessoa utiliza um aparelho prescrito e fabricado por

profissionais da área da saúde, para promover ou estabilizar e, assim, colaborar na execução musical

(Exempo: órteses desenvolvidas para facilitar o manuseio das baquetas)

Informação e imagens acedidas em:

http://www.musicaeinclusao.com.br/xmedia/artigos/Adaptacoes_para_o_fazer_musical_de_pessoas_com_deficiencia.pdf

Oliver Sacks: “the poet laureate of medicine”

This post has written in honor of Oliver Sacks, an eminent neurologist, who wrote: “The power of music to integrate and cure … is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest non-chemical medication.”

Sacks's work helped provide the foundation on which the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (IMNF) is built. In 2000, IMNF honored Sacks with its first Music Has Power Award. The IMNF again bestowed a Music Has Power Award on Sacks in 2006 to commemorate his 40 years at Beth Abraham and honor his outstanding contributions in support of music therapy and the effect of music on the human brain and mind.

BIOGRAPHY

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England, into a family of physicians and scientists (his mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner). He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen’s College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a practicing neurologist. In July of 2007, he was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was also designated the university’s first Columbia University Artist.

In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter (“A Kind of Alaska”) and the Oscar-nominated feature film (“Awakenings”) with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Sacks is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer’s disease. He has investigated the world of Deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of colorblind people in The Island of the Colorblind. He has written about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001, and his most recent books are Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007) and The Mind’s Eye (2010).

Sacks’s work, which has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, regularly appears in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet.

He is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts, and the Catholic University of Peru.

Information borrowed in http://www.oliversacks.com/about-the-author/biography/

MUSICOPHILIA

"Musicophillia" investigates the power of music to move us, to heal and to haunt us. It's a New York Times bestseller, and has been named one of the Best Books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the editors ofAmazon.com.

Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience.

In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people–from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth; from people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds–for everything but music.

Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer’s or amnesia.

Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.

Information borrowed in http://www.oliversacks.com/books/musicophilia/

Oliver Sacks' existence is undoubtedly a great privilege to mankind.

Images acessed in:

http://www.oliversacks.com/oliverpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Sacks-at-Columbia-Univ-2007-150x150.jpg

http://www.oliversacks.com/oliverpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/musicophilia.jpg

"Arte" e "Ciência" escritas na mesma linha?

"Gosto muito de Ciência e custa-me pensar que tantos temam o assunto ou sintam que optar pela ciência significa não poder escolher a compaixão ou as artes, ou não ficar maravilhado com a Natureza. A ciência não tem o propósito de nos curar do mistério, mas reinventá-lo e revigorá-lo."
Robert Sapolsky, Why zebras don't get ulcers, p.12

Com este excerto começa uma das sugestões de leitura que disponibilizei à direita desta página, "Uma paixão Humana - o seu cérebro e a música", de Daniel J. Levitin. O autor aborda a dada altura a dicotomia Arte-Ciência:
"(...) Os trabalhos dos artistas e dos cientistas envolvem fases de desenvolvimento similares: uma fase brainstorm criativa e exploratória, seguida pelas fases de teste e aprimoramento que envolvem naturalmente a aplicação de um conjunto de procedimentos, apesar de, muitas vezes, serem inspiradas por soluções de problemas adicionais e criativas.
Os estúdios dos artistas e os laboratórios dos cientistas são também semelhantes: decorre ao mesmo tempo um vasto número de projectos em diversas fases de acabamento. Ambos requerem ferramentas especializadas e os resultados são (...) susceptíveis de diferentes interpretações. Os artistas e os cientistas têm em comum a capacidade de viverem num estado permeável à interpretação e reinterpretação dos produtos do seu trabalho."

O artista, seja qual for o campo da sua criação (literatura, teatro, dança, artes plásticas, fotografia, cinema, etc.), recorre à imaginação para criar a sua arte.

Mas também o conhecimento de que é feita a ciência resulta, inquestionavelmente, de um exercício da imaginação.

No entanto, o senso comum associa o conhecimento à ciência e a imaginação à arte, acreditando que a imaginação é estranha à ciência.

Deve-se a Albert Einstein, cientista que defendeu a teoria da relatividade, a frase: “O conhecimento permite-nos ir de A para B, mas a imaginação permite-nos ir a qualquer lado”. Afirmou também: “Sou suficientemente artista para me deixar levar pela imaginação”. E assim se criou um dos maiores cientistas dos últimos tempos...

Não separemos duas entidades indissociáveis.
Façamos ciência através da arte e arte a partir da ciência :)

Imagem acedida em:
http://luizcarlos-jr06.sites.uol.com.br/einstein_violino.jpg

AudioCubes by Percussa

Touring the social network Linkedin, I had the pleasure of discovering the latest technology for those who enjoy exploring the music production world. Obviously, it is intended for people who like to challenge their creativity :) Take a look!

The information below was borrowed from http://www.percussa.com/

"The AudioCubes are a platform for audio-visual creation and exploration.

What are they?
They are a collection of beautifully designed and hand-made objects, each containing its own self-powered wireless computer system.The objects are intelligent and can detect and interact with each other, with humans and computer software, providing visual feedback at the same time.They come with software that lets you create and explore sound, music and visuals through hands-on interaction,whether it be in the studio, in live performances or in art installations.

How do they work?

Each AudioCube is identical. You connect them with a USB cable to your computer, one after the other, and assign a colour and behaviour. After that, they work wirelessly with each other, and use their four onboard infrared sensors to

communicate and measure distances to objects nearby. One cube stays connected, to pass the information from the cubes to the software on your computer.Location, orientation and distance information is passed to the software, while you interact with the cubes.

The software can connect via MIDI or OpenSoundControl (OSC) to any software or hardware for music or visuals which you already have, or you can use it within your DAW (digital audio workstation) software as a VST plugin, or as a host for VST instruments to let you create sound immediately.

There is no limit on the number of AudioCubes you can use, the placement or configuration of the cubes or how you use them. For example, you could create a large setup of 16 cubes for an art installation or a live performance.

If you want, you can even use our software development kit for AudioCubes and communicate with the hardware seamlessly from within your own software or Max/MSP.

These possibilities for interaction can stimulate and empower artists to create new and unique work, whether it be in the studio, in live performances or in art installations.

Such an interface is called a Tangible Interface, and because there were none available that worked without complicated setup and were portable and affordable, PERCUSSA decided to create AudioCubes."

More info here