Experimenting with Music

I have planned to perform an experiment... on the students and staff of BASIS Phoenix. It will take place over several weeks starting in April and will consist of multiple trials that measure memory recall. I will be using an online memory game to test the participants while they listen to different genres of music, or no music at all.

At this point I have narrowed down the genres to classical, rap, hip-hop, electronic dance music (EDM), and hard rock, as well as the no music control. I am not sure what the outcome of the experiment will be, but I am hypothesizing the classical or no-music treatments will yield the highest memory scores because they are less distracting and allow for better focus.

I think in terms of strictly long-term memory, the outcome would be different. Music can be used to trigger declarative long-term memory, such as in the memorization of certain facts such as words or items after the span of a few minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even longer.

I might have to conduct another experiment.

This One Client

Each week at music therapy we work with a small group of men and women. We might see some faces on Wednesday and different faces on Friday, but generally the group remains the same. One particular participant, I'll call him Bernard, is younger than many of the others-- maybe late fifties, early sixties. While I do not know what he suffers from, it leaves him unable to communicate and move of his own free will.

I spoke with the music therapy student who began interning in October, and she told me how when she first met Bernard, he would often sleep through the hour-long therapy session and his movement would be minimal to none. Since then, and especially since I have seen him over the past three weeks, Bernard has improved. While still nonverbal, the start of each session puts a happy grin on his face. His feet begin tapping to the music, and his eyes follow the therapist as she guides the activities and leads the songs. I am not the only one who has noticed this improvement; the music therapist has caught on as well and has begun giving him extra time and attention while the therapy student takes over. Today she held a hand drum slightly above his knee, asking him to lift his leg to tap it. And he did-- multiple times even. Last week he was able to popcorn drum (see previous post They Don't Know It's Therapy) at his own pace where before he would not even move his arms at all. Bernard's progress with the help of music therapy is truly amazing and very rewarding for everyone involved. Music therapy works.