Listening to music while exercising helps combat fatigue, according to new study

In addition to offering entertainment whilst running on the treadmill, listening to music during a workout can also lessen fatigue, according to new research.

The study, conducted by Brunel University London and published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology, found that hearing Marvin Gaye's rendition of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" while being active resulted in stimulation in the region of the brain associated with easing fatigue.

Participants also reported feeling that their workouts felt shorter and more exciting while listening to the 11-minute song, the only song used in the study.

Of the findings, study author Dr Marcelo Bigliassi told PsyPost: "Music is a very powerful auditory stimulus and can be used to assuage negative bodily sensations that usually arise during exercise-related situations".

As the music increases stimulus in this region of the brain, people feel less tired - which can increase the amount of time they are capable of exercising.

Dr Bigliassi thinks the findings could be especially helpful during "the most critical periods of the exercise regimen, when high-risk individuals are more likely to disengage from physical activity programmes (e.g., individuals with obesity, diabetes, etc.)".

However, Dr Bigliassi does have practical concerns when it comes to the effects of music on workouts.

Although science proves music does lessen fatigue, he worries that humans may become too reliant on music as an escape from reality.

"We have learnt so much about the psychophysical, psychological, and psychophysiological effects of music in the past two decades that people are almost developing a peculiar form of stimulus dependence," he said. "If we continue to promote the unnecessary use of auditory and visual stimulation, the next generation might be no longer able to tolerate fatigue-related symptoms and exercise in the absence of music."

To study the effects of music while working out, the researchers had participants lie down in an MRI scanner and exercise with a hand-strengthener grip ring.

Participants engaged in 30 exercise sets, each lasting 10 minutes, to study the impact of music.

Despite his concerns, Dr Bigliassi said: "Music and audiovisual stimuli can and should be used and promoted, but with due care."

However, instead of relying solely on music, he also feels that it is important people learn other ways to cope with fatigue associated with exercise.

Sharp Objects' Music Contains a Chilling Message

Three episodes in, it's still not clear what HBO's Sharp Objects is about, exactly. A string of murders in a small Missouri town? The secrets of Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), a journalist addicted to booze, self-harm, and flashbacks? The ominousness of swivel fans? The creator/writer Marti Noxon's elliptical storytelling and the director Jean-Marc Vallée's wandering gaze make for an immersive trip, but one in which you can't guess at even the next mile.

One thing is clear, though. This is a show about music. The title sequence opens with a needle descending on a record player, and the accompanying song changes week to week. Camille is the hyperactive DJ of her own life, queuing up tunes on her cracked iPhone when on drives, in bed, and in the bath. Her stepdad plays piano, and the town's social life revolves around a karaoke bar. Almost always, the soundtrack is diegetic: Viewers hear the same thing as the characters do.

Which isn't surprising given the show's pedigree. Last year, Vallée brought his alternately gauzy and jittery sensibility to Big Little Lies, another female-led murder-mystery miniseries that, in a very real way, revolved around songs. The children on the show had an eerily deep knowledge of David Bowie, and the parents conducted their skullduggery while humming to the Temptations. Most of the music was diegetic, and the concept of listening was, itself, thematic: a proxy for how people dwell on their own frequencies but can connect by sharing what's in their heads.

In Sharp Objects, something similar but not the same is going on. Music voices the show's central question: Is it better to look at the darkness, or to hide it? This inquiry begins on a visceral level with the creeping dread of the soundtrack curated by music supervisor Susan Jacobs, whether heard in Sylvan Esso's spindly folktronica or in Led Zeppelin's surging doom. LCD Soundsystem, though synonymous with partying, provides a desiccated drum loop as Camille approaches a funeral. Even Franz Waxman's "Dance and Angela," a stately shuffle for 1951's A Place in the Sun, subtly hisses and pops in the first title sequence. Damage, it seems, is everywhere.

Music marks social class and inner attributes, too. Hence why the picturesque mansion of Camille's mom, Adora, wafts with placid classical and standards beloved by her husband Alan Crellin, he of preppy sweaters and a carefully kept library of records. Frequently, the show mines the primness of the Crellins' tunes for irony. During a traumatic flashback Camille suffers in her first night back in her childhood bedroom, there's a spooky clamor in the background. As she frantically runs out of the house in the present day, the sound coheres into "The Way It Used to Be" by shmaltz-master Engelbert Humperdinck. Adora and Alan are dancing to it.

Camille's tastes run darker than her parents, obviously. Led Zeppelin is a staple, and at the karaoke bar, we learn that her go-to song is "Ring of Fire": an on-the-nose choice for an inwardly tormented country girl. (Strikingly, it's the version not by Johnny Cash but by Eric Burdon and the Animals that gets cued up.) The obnoxious bar owner's karaoke fave is Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," a bombastic and indulgent pick. When Camille follows her secretive young half-sister Amma in Episode 3, we faintly hear from her headphones "Mama's Gonna Give You Love" by Emily Wells: a tellingly hip and sexy twist on the classical music played at home. (It's also a typically eclectic pick from Jacobs, who won the first ever Emmy for music supervision last year).

Yet it turns out that Camille's tastes aren't entirely her own. In a flashback saga in the most recent episode, "Fix," we watched her check herself into a facility after cutting herself. There, she bonded with another self-harming patient, a teenage girl. That girl asked her about what she listened to, and Camille—bafflingly to viewers—replied, "It's not really my thing, music." Back then, apparently, she didn't listen to much. But the girl advised Camille that her headphones were the only healthy way she knew of dealing with pain. The two listened to Led Zeppelin's "Thank You" together, and Camille briefly borrowed the phone—only to return and find the girl had killed herself. Horrified though Camille was, she kept the phone.

The message here is as clear as it is queasy. Music acts as a way to self-medicate for Camille and for others like her, not unlike alcohol and long drives. It also reflects—or hides—truth. The women and girls of Sharp Objects have been policed to project one reality: doll-like rather than tomboy, purple rather than black, Engelbert Humperdinck rather than Jimmy Page. The penalties for stepping out of line can be brutal, but for Camille, the choice is between rocking out or hurting herself. When this latest episode ended with her hurling her iPhone from a car window in a fit of angst, it set up one of the show's most gut-churning mysteries yet: Can she survive the silence?

Friends for life, and music

Embracing wide-ranging cultural strains is hardly a new notion when it comes to the performance of music, even Western classical music. That certainly applies to the Nimrod Ensemble. The Berlin-based quartet will make its first appearance in this country Sunday evening at the YMCA in Jerusalem at 8 p.m.

The troupe's stratified ethos comes across, on the most basic level, simply by virtue of the members' nationalities. The foursome comprises Swiss violinist Christophe Horak, Italian violist Francesca Zappa, Belgian pianist Yannick Van de Velde, and "our very own" clarinetist Nur Ben Shalom, who was born and grew up in Tel Aviv. Ben Shalom has called Berlin home for the past decade and in the interim, has furthered his promising career with synergies all across the globe, including stints with the German Opera House Orchestra in Berlin, the Berliner Philharmoniker and a fun gig with classical composer John Williams. Now 27, highly personable Ben Shalom is delighted to come here with his pals in a professional capacity.

As befitting their variegated personal baggage, they have cooked up quite an eclectic program for the Jerusalem concert, which goes by the perfectly name of "From Berlin to Jerusalem." The repertoire takes in Mozart's Kegelstatt Trio for clarinet, viola and piano, and Two Songs for Voice Viola and Piano, and the Violin Sonata No. 2 – both by Brahms, with the vocal role of the former transposed to clarinet. Things get more contemporary with Bartok's Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano, written in 1938, and the musical and cultural zeitgeist will come bang up to date with the world premiere of Nizar Elkhater's Samai Nimrod, for violin, viola, clarinet and piano.

Elkhater and Ben Shalom go back a long way.

"I've known Nizar since the age of 12," says the clarinetist. He and 32-year-old Lod-born Muslim pianist-composer Elkhater were members of the multidenominational youth ensemble Arab Jewish Orchestra, and Ben Shalom has performed with the orchestra, which Elkhater now conducts. The orchestra's operational theme embraces the inclusion of Western and Eastern instruments and readings of cross-cultural material, so it is only natural that Elkhater's specially commissioned work, which will be given its first public airing later today, feeds off western classical and Arabic sensibilities and sounds.

For Ben Shalom, classical music has been something of a life saver.

"I started out on recorder, like most kids," he notes. "There was a wonderful music teacher there, called Hanan Shomroni. I went to the Open Democratic School in Jaffa, which I didn't like very much. I basically survived the school because of Hanan," Ben Shalom chuckles.

Besides bringing his young charges humus from the nearby feted Abu Hassan eatery, Shomroni also instilled Ben Shalom and quite a few other kids at the school, who subsequently went on to take their music very seriously – and even made a profession out of it – with an enduring love for musical creation.

"Hanan was a sort of mentor," the Berliner recalls. "At recess we'd go to his room and, even if we only had a five-minute break, he'd say 'let's play some music together.' We'd talk about all sorts of things, too. He really was a guiding light."

Shomroni left his inspirational imprint on other Open Democratic School students who later become professional musicians, such as New York-based jazz flutist Itai Kriss, blues-pop musician Itai Pearl and internationally renowned Indian-oriented Israeli wind instrument player and producer Shye Ben Tzur.

Ben Shalom's musical epiphany actually took place outside the school.

"Hanan ran weekly concerts at Bet Tami, on Sheinkin Street. I was just six or seven years old. One day, the program included the Mozart Clarinet Quintet for clarinet and a string quartet," he recalls. The boy's enthusiastic response to the music did not go unnoticed. "To this day, Hanan relates how I sat there transfixed by the clarinet. After that I started on clarinet."

IT HASN'T all been plain sailing for Ben Shalom.

"That concert on Sheinkin initiated my love-hate relationship with Mozart," he laughs. "Mozart's works are some of the most challenging around for musicians." The 18th century Austrian composer's charts do not, at first look or listen, seem to be overly complex. But appearances can be deceptive.

"There aren't too many notes or technical aspects in there, but the minimalism and the simplicity of the sound and the instrument and who you are, are expressed in a very basic way. That's very difficult to achieve."

While he remains rooted in his Western classical training, Ben Shalom says he takes a keen interest in works that feed off of different cultural lines of thought and creation.

"I am not a jazz player, I am a classical musician. But I have connections with electronic music, and I have always been intrigued by interfaces between old and new music, to see what exists between the old cultural world that produced Mozart's work for clarinet, and the specific sounds the clarinet can produce, and compare that with the modern or postmodern world. It is that paradox that interests me."

Unless you're playing solo, you have to be empathetic – not to say sympathetic – toward your partners in musical arms. That, says Ben Shalom, is a basic tenet of the quartet's philosophy, and is an element that is reflected in the group's work and, in fact, even in its name. In the Bible, Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah, was a hunter. It also happens to be the name of the ninth of the 15 Variations written by British composer Edward Elgar, which, in turn, was named for German-born British music producer Augustus J. Jaeger. Jaeger was a close friend of Elgar's, and his surname means "hunter" in German. Hence the connection with the Berlin-based quartet.

"Besides playing music together, we are all really good friends," says Ben Shalom. There is more subtextual intent in the quartet's moniker. "It also references Nimrud, which was destroyed by ISIS," says the clarinetist, referring to the ancient historical site in Iraq.

More than anything, Ben Shalom wants us all to take a deep breath and, to paraphrase and borrow from 1960's countercultural climes, "turn on and tune in." That goes for him and his quartet cohorts, too.

"There is that magical moment when we listen to each other. It doesn't matter where you come from, personally or culturally. There is the moment the connects us all, as long as you are listening and receptive." That avenue of thought pointed Ben Shalom in the direction of smaller groups, rather than full-scale orchestras. "That's why I prefer chamber music. With chamber music you have to know how to listen, and to be open."

Ben Shalom says his old pal's work is a prime example of that.

"Nizar's composition, which we will play for the first time ever, is exactly that – listening. We [musicians] all come from our background, with our own specialist field."

It is the extraneous which, paradoxically, draws everyone in.

"Suddenly, we have to cope with music from a very different cultural place, like Samai Nimrod, with its Eastern elements, we have to be receptive. That generates a special moment. That's also why we chose to play it at the YMCA, and what the place represents – an interface between cultures. That's exciting."

How music helps rehab patients learn how to move again

'Music is part of the most complex auditory language the brain ever invented'

Lynn Lewis has a neurological disorder and uses music to help her regain the use of her arms.

She's not alone.

Research on patients who've suffered some injury to the brain that affects movement — like stroke or Parkinson's disease — have suggested that using music with the right tempo "can improve their walking ability."

"Music is part of the most complex auditory language the brain ever invented," said Professor Michael Thaut, who's at the forefront of research on how music can alter the brain networks to heal the body.

The former professional musician's research journey into neurological music therapy started 25 years ago when he studied if music could be used as a tool or language of rehabilitation.

Music's rhythm has a very profound effect on motor system, said the director of the Music and Health Research Collaboratory at the University of Toronto.

"If you don't  have a sense of rhythm then your movement coordination will always be out of control."

Can music improve motor function?

He questioned if music's profound effect on the motor system could be harnessed to improve the motor function of patients who are neurologically compromised,

To find an answer, Thaut conducted experiments on patients who were suffering from limited mobility due to a stroke or Parkinson's disease.

Those experiments, he said, revealed that using music with the right tempo can improve their walking ability by synchronizing their movements to a rhythmic beat that gives them the timing for their movement.

The results were surprisingly positive, recalled Thaut. 

Thaut said they had stroke patients walk. "They had, you know, certain asymmetric walk — very slow, very unsafe."

But then the music was turned on, and the patients were told to "walk to the beat," said Thaut.

"All the parameters of movement almost instantaneously changed very dramatically."

When the brains of these patients were studied, they revealed that the auditory system in the brain is very closely coupled to the motor system, according to Thaut.

"We found that the auditory system can actually make up for some of the deficiencies in a motor system, and it gives additional information that helps the brain program movement and  … control the movement better."

Once a patient relearns how to move using music, and continues to exercise, they no longer need the music to regulate their activity, said Thaut.

"The most important thing to remember with any form of therapy is the brain says, 'Use me or lose me.'"

Music as a tool for rehabilitation

Calgary's Foothills Medical Centre is actively using music therapists to put Thaut's research findings into clinical application.  Music is the medicine prescribed to help some of their patients get better.

On a recent spring afternoon, the sounds of music wafted through the corridors of the hospital. The source is patient Lynn Lewis, who suffers from a neurological condition, sitting in her wheelchair singing the Gene Autry classic, Don't fence me in. Accompanying her is music therapist Jennifer Buchanan on the guitar.

For Lewis, the singing brings back joyful memories of singing and dancing with her mum. It's what she needs to relax and lift her spirits in the dreary routine of her hospital stay. 

But the music is much more than a mood enhancer.

It is providing neurorehabilitation for Lewis, who is experiencing numbness that has limited the mobility in her arms.

Her music treatment includes playing various drums and noise makers to maintain the rhythm set by the music therapist.  Keeping up the tempo forces her to use the injured arm.

As Buchanan explains to Lewis, rhythmic exercise "gets your brain starting to be engaged about the function you are about to be doing."

Music and cognitive impairments

In the last 10 years, Thaut has expanded his research interests to explain how music can help patients slow down the progress of cognitive impairments in patients with dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

While it is well known that musical memories and their associated biographical information is preserved longer than all other types of memory, nobody could explain why that happened, according to Thaut.

In a new study yet to be published, Thaut's research team at St. Michael's Hospital took brain scans of cognitively-impaired patients after they listened to music they were familiar with and after they listened to music that was new to them. 

The brain scans revealed the long-term music memory activates a large part of the brain, including areas not affected by cognitive impairment. That means there are lots of reserve or backup regions in the brain where that memory can be accessed.

On the other hand, the short-term music memory only shows up in a network with only three or four regions  in the brain.

"That network will probably not survive. It may be gone 60 minutes after they leave the brain scan. The traces are not that distributed," said Thaut.

In another part of the study, the patients listen to a playlist made up of their musical memories which they are required to listen for an hour each day for a month. 

At the end of the month when their brains are scanned, Thaut said, it shows better connectivity between brain regions. That means "we can maintain longer levels of functioning, but we cannot reverse the progression of the disease at this point."

Applying this research to treat traumatic brain injury with music is more challenging.

"The impact of the injury is very broadly distributed over the whole brain. So that means people with traumatic brain injury have multiple issues to deal with," said Thaut.

While music can help with mobility, unlocking the music solution to other areas of the brain affected requires a lot more research.

Nicki Minaj To Debut New Music On 'SNL' Finale, Embark On Global Arena Tour

Nicki Minaj delighted fans earlier this month when she dropped "Barbie Tingz" and "Chun-Li," her first singles since 2017 and a preview of her upcoming fourth studio album. Last night, she further stoked anticipation for the new project by teasing a globe-spanning arena tour and announcing she'll debut a new song during her Saturday Night Live performance on May 19.

Minaj shared the news on Twitter, where she regularly engages with her 21.3 million followers. She hyped the upcoming arena tour as a must-see event, as it will mark her first extended outing since she wrapped up The Pinkprint Tour in early 2016. "If u miss it, don't be mad at Chun. Be mad at YOU! Chun gave u ALLLL the time in the world," she wrote.

The New York MC confirmed she's already finalized the tour dates and will hit the United States first before visiting the rest of the globe. Apparently, fans who catch her worldwide trek are in for a special treat.

"US first. Then ALL AROUND THE WORLD. BUT THERE'S another surprise you won't know. Bwahaaahahaaaaaa. The ones at the tour will be elevated to Team Minaj ELITE," she tweeted. "Yes, I'm leaning towards M&G's [Meet and Greets]. Only cuz my babies been so patient. But pls don't hold me to it."

Minaj also shared a few details about songs off her upcoming fourth studio album, which still does not have a title or release date. The rapper said she'll perform the opening track, which she called her "fave on the album," on the SNL season finale, where she'll star alongside host Tina Fey. The album, whenever it does come out, will mark Minaj's first full-length since 2014's The Pinkprint, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.

The announcement comes at an auspicious time for Minaj, as the rapper returned to the Billboard Top 10 this week with "Chun-Li." The track leapt from No. 92 to No. 10 this week, marking Minaj's 16th Top 10 entry and the biggest Hot 100 jump since Katy Perry's "Roar" skyrocketed from No. 85 to No. 2 in 2013, according to Billboard.

The success of "Chun-Li" follows a relatively dormant commercial period for Minaj, who failed to make a splash in March 2017 when she released three simultaneous singles: "Regret in Your Tears," "No Frauds" and "Changed It." But if the rapper maintains her current chart grip and social media buzz, she can reverse her career narrative and turn the release of her fourth studio album into a truly momentous event.