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.

'Kids in America' singer returns to music because of UFOs

"Kids in America" singer Kim Wilde said an encounter with a UFO in 2009 was one of the reasons she decided to return to music and make a comeback.

Wilde told the BBC after leaving the music business she got married and raised her children. However, two events pushed her to come back and give music a second chance.

Wilde claims she had an encounter with a UFO in 2009. She said she was sitting in the garden at her home with a glass of wine when she saw something.

"Then I looked up in the sky and saw this huge bright light behind a cloud. Brighter than the moon, but similar to the light from the moon," she said.

"I said to my husband and my friend, 'That's really odd,' so we walked down the grass and looked to see if there was any source. All of a sudden it moved, very quickly, from about 11 o'clock to 1 o'clock. Then it just did that, back and forth, for several minutes," Wilde recalled.

"Whenever it moved, something shifted in the air — but it was silent. Absolutely silent."

The singer said she thinks about the moment every day and it gave her an idea for her new album, "Here Comes the Aliens."

She sings on the album that maybe the aliens will "save us from the apocalypse."

"Perhaps that's completely naïve," she laughs. "Why wouldn't they be angry with us and fling us off this beautiful Earth that we're ruining? I can't deny we haven't been a terrible disappointment."

She said her career started to flatline in the 1990s when she became older and felt she could not keep up.

"I'd been in it since I was 20, then I was 36 and everyone, I felt, was doing it a lot better than I was. They had the ambition that I didn't have anymore. When Madonna came along, I didn't feel I could compete, so I said, 'You know what? You're best off being who you are, and that's going to have to be enough,'" Wilde told the BBC. "Sometimes it was, and a lot of the time it wasn't."

Wilde announced she would be starting her comeback tour March 30.

Music really is a universal language

Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Motown – all names synonymous with the creation of often formulaic yet highly successful styles of popular music that swept out of the United States and spread around the globe. Without being aware of it, these mid-twentieth-century hit-makers underpinned the finding of a new study: there are universal elements in music that connect with people everywhere.

In a paper published in the journal Current Biology, researchers from Harvard University in the US and New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington say songs with a similar purpose – love songs, lullabies or dance music – tend to sound similar, no matter which culture they come from.

The findings are consistent with the existence of universal links between form and function in vocal music, the researchers say.

"Despite the staggering diversity of music influenced by countless cultures and readily available to the modern listener, our shared human nature may underlie basic musical structures that transcend cultural differences," says the report’s lead author, psychologist Samuel Mehr, from Harvard.

"We show that our shared psychology produces fundamental patterns in song that transcend our profound cultural differences," adds co-author Manvir Singh, also from Harvard. "This suggests that our emotional and behavioural responses to aesthetic stimuli are remarkably similar across widely diverging populations."

The researchers say they have found evidence of recurrent, perceptible features of three domains of vocal music across 86 human societies. These inform the striking consistency of understanding across listeners from around the globe – "listeners," the add, "who presumably know little or nothing about the music of indigenous peoples".

Among non-human animals, there are links between form and function in vocalisation. For instance, when a lion roars or an eagle screeches, it sounds hostile to naive human listeners. But it wasn't clear whether the same concept held in human song.

Many people believe that music is mostly shaped by culture, leading them to question the relation between form and function, Singh says, explaining, "We wanted to find out if that was the case."

In their first experiment, the researchers asked 750 internet users in 60 countries to listen to 14-second excerpts of songs. The songs were selected from 86 predominantly small-scale societies, such as the Fulani people in Africa and the Blackfoot Indians from North America. They also spanned a wide array of geographic areas designed to reflect a broad sampling of human cultures.

After listening to each excerpt, participants answered six questions indicating their perceptions of the function of each song on a six-point scale. The questions evaluated the degree to which listeners believed that each song was used.

The possible uses offered were: dancing, soothing a baby, healing an illness, expressing love for another person, mourning the dead, and telling a story.

In fact, none of the songs were used in mourning or to tell a story. The options were included to discourage listeners from assuming that only four song types were actually present.

Participants listened to more than 26,000 excerpts and provided more than 150,000 ratings. Despite listeners’ unfamiliarity with the societies represented, the random sampling of each excerpt, short duration, and the enormous diversity of the music, the ratings demonstrated accurate and cross-culturally reliable inferences about song functions on the basis of their forms alone.

In a follow-up experiment designed to explore possible ways in which people made those determinations about song function, the researchers asked 1000 internet users in the US and India to rate the excerpts for three "contextual" features: number of singers, gender of singer(s), and number of instruments.

They also rated them for seven subjective musical features: melodic complexity, rhythmic complexity, tempo, steady beat, arousal, valence (or "goodness"), and pleasantness.

Analysis found some relationships between various features and song function, but not enough to explain the way people were able to so reliably detect a song’s function.

Mehr and Singh say that one of the most intriguing findings relates to the relationship between lullabies and dance songs. "Not only were users best at identifying songs used for those functions, but their musical features seem to oppose each other in many ways," Mehr says.

Dance songs were generally faster, rhythmically and melodically complex, and perceived by participants as "happier" and "more exciting". Lullabies, on the other hand, were slower, rhythmically and melodically simple, and perceived as "sadder" and "less exciting".

The researchers say they are now conducting these tests with listeners who live in isolated, small-scale societies and have never heard music other than that of their own cultures. They are also further analysing the music of many cultures to try to understand how their particular features relate to function and whether those features themselves might be universal.

The study asks: Why do songs that share social functions have convergent forms? If dance songs are supposed to indicate unity, their context and musical features should amplify that signal. The research supports this idea: "Dance songs tend to have more singers, more instruments, more complex melodies, and more complex rhythms than other forms of music," the authors write.

Meanwhile, they add, if lullabies are supposed to signal parental attention to infants, their acoustic features should amplify that signal. Indeed, lullabies "tend to be rhythmically and melodically simpler, slower, sung by one female person, and with low arousal relative to other forms of music."

The researchers say their study raises two key questions about the basic facts of music.

They note that despite the geographic spread of the experiment participants, all could read and write English, and all had access to a wide range of music through the Internet.

This raises the question of whether the same assumptions about form and function will be found among people who are familiar only with music from a single culture. The authors suggest exploring this idea would result in "a stronger test of universality".

Second, they believe a stronger demonstration of universals in music would require "in-depth analyses of a cross-culturally representative sample of music from small-scale societies, informed by expert listeners, music information retrieval, and modern approaches from data science".

Nevertheless, they conclude, the present work demonstrates that cross-cultural regularities in human behaviour results in music that fits into recurrent, recognisable forms while maintaining a profound and beautiful variability across cultures.

Independent musicians lack shows, venues to showcase original music

Ken Shiles and Cibon perform multiple shows each week in South Jersey, but they find one issue with every venue or show they play at: they're often asked to play covers rather than original music.

"We get around and do our cover gig, but when we play at Harrah's and other dates around here, 99 percent of them are gigs where we play cover songs," said Shiles, of Atlantic City. "There are a couple original music venues around here, but catering to what we're doing? I don't know. It's tough."

Shiles and Cibon, like other artists, are finding it difficult to find shows or venues to perform at.

The Boneyard Bar & Grill, which housed local acts and shows in Atlantic City, closed in the beginning of October. Another venue, Le Grand Fromage, closed around the same time.

Jerry Ryan is a festival organizer and the founder of the annual Elephants for Autism festival as well as the Elephant Talk Indie Music Festival, which takes place at The Watering Hole in Mays Landing.

While he said that there are still some places that house original acts, specifically in Hammonton and Mays Landing, venues are generally few and far between.

"From 2012 to 2015, we had, like, five different promoters in the scene booking bands and pushing original music," said Ryan, of Smithville. " There is a lack of venues and a drought in the scene. We're reverting back to the old days where original music is being forced out."

So when South Jersey bands can't play original songs, they head elsewhere.

Ken Shiles and Cibon will travel to Philadelphia and New York to play elsewhere.

"In my honest opinion, we could try and put original shows here, but I almost don't see a benefit in it as much anymore as it would be to go to Philadelphia," Shiles said.

The two artists recently took a trip to Nashville to check out local acts and play some shows. The scene, they said, was like day and night with South Jersey.

Cibon said that even the hole-in-the-wall spots had multiple acts each night. And the crowds would show up not to just drink and socialize but to sit down and really listen to an artist perform.

"You could hear a pin drop," she said.

The city had a real music-friendly atmosphere, with multiple artists playing in each venue every night, Shiles said. The scene was also less competitive and more accommodating.

"One guy told us next time we were there to call him and that we'd have a place to stay. It's heartwarming to see other musicians help one another," Shiles said.

At least one local venue is trying to create that same vibe.

Randy Beane is the bar manager for the Watering Hole in Mays Landing. He also takes care of live promotions. He's worked with Jerry Ryan to host Elephants for Autism as well as the Indie Music Festival.

Beane said it's all about a bar or restaurant or venue being willing to work with promoters and to host the shows. If the shows or festivals produce, they'll host them again. And if a band wants to contact Beane to play a show, he'll give them an available date and write them down.

"A lot of other venues are not helping, it puts the ball in my court and I can say ‘hey, I'm the only place available'," said Beane, of Mays Landing.

Beane said that shows vary: some more popular than others, adding that more music should pick up around March. He expected about 10 or more bands for the Elephant Talk Music Festival.

"It's great. Some bands I'm like ‘why aren't these bands on tour' and then some I'm like ‘you can probably stay in the garage.' Some bands that were not the greatest had friends there for a night to socialize and you can't even move," Beane said.

With the possibility of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Atlantic City, Shiles and Cibon hope that it could bring original music back to the boardwalk.

"I'm optimistic about that but I don't know how they're going to do it or if it'll just be saturated with cover music," Shiles said.

"It depends on how they work it," Cibon said. "It could open up and be an awesome thing for musicians in the area."