Music Therapy, Explained

I’m a music therapist. And announcing my occupation, most of the time, requires an explanation. The thing is, there is really no short explanation, which is pretty much the only thing that frustrates me about what I do.

I was at a friend’s birthday party recently, and as always, the dreaded question came up from new acquaintances.

“What do you do?”

Usually I make something up, or I just say “musician” or “therapist” or “barista.” It’s just not the setting where I want to be addressing ALLLLL of the inevitable follow-up questions, comments, and unsolicited explanations of my own job. Here are some actual responses I’ve gotten from people.

• Music therapist?? Is that real?
• Does music therapy really work?
• Oh my gosh, your mood is all about [frequencies/wavelengths/harmonics]!
• Oh, so you like, help injured musicians get better? (Spoiler alert – NO.)
• My [mom teaches piano lessons/friend writes songs/sister teaches yoga] – she’s totally kind of a music therapist too. (Spoiler alert – also no.)
• What exactly does your day to day look like?
• Oh. Well, I’m an astronaut.

Listen, come to my office tomorrow and I’ll address all these when I’m on the clock and not trying to socialize and turn my mind off for a bit.

(Hello to all the people who said one of these things to me at a party and got the link to this post from me in response!)

I love what I do, because yes, it works. 

And it really changes people beyond helping them feel relaxed. 

And the science and rationale behind it is fascinating.

Like I said, music therapy has no simple or single explanation. It’s multifaceted and complicated and if it took me 8 years of training to fully understand it, then it’s going to take more than one blog post for me to be able to explain it adequately. I can’t wait to get to all the current research and uses and applications, but I’m going to start with two of my favorite basic research points that I feel set the foundation really well for understanding why music therapy exists and works.

Music therapy is an entire field based on the changes we see in the brain when we are processing music. People found these few phenomenons and decided to test them and apply them to helping people through real life situations. The first point is this:

Music facilitates neurogenesis.

Fukui, H., & Toyoshima, K. (2008). Music facilitates the neurogenesis, regeneration and repair of neurons. Medical hypotheses, 71(5), 765-769.

This means engagement with music literally makes new pathways in your brain.

The article quoted is theoretical, but it cites real findings that scientists found in the brains of rats and birds. (Makes sense, right? Birds are always singing, and they’re super smart.) This is my favorite article to cite to people who are newly curious about music therapy. Our brains control everything we do, so if something makes our brain function better, it’s a good indicator that it can help us improve just a ton of things.

The second point is this:

Musician brains are different than non-musician brains.

Gaser, C., & Schlaug, G. (2003). Brain structures differ between musicians and non-musicians. Journal of Neuroscience, 23(27), 9240-9245.

A few of my favorite differences to note – musicians have an enlarged corpus callosum – a structure in between the two hemispheres credited with connectivity and communication within the brain. Basically, helping everything up there work well together. Also, the hippocampus, a little oblong structure near the center of the brain that is regarded as a long-term memory converter, has increased plasticity in musicians. This means it has an easier time adapting and changing.

These two things may seem strange and abstract, but for scientists, it’s very exciting, because a lot of things that make life hard for humans have to do with brain changes or abnormalities. The fact that something as noninvasive as singing or music training could address that is a little bit mind blowing.

There is still a lot of work for music therapists and researchers to do to find out exactly what is happening here. As far as the amazing things we have found already regarding music, rehabilitation, and healing – I’ll be sharing some of those here on the blog! I can’t wait to introduce you to it all.

Remember to send me questions about music therapy, brain science, and allied health! Tell me what you want to know about music therapy, and I’ll see you in the next installment.

---

Here are some more citations for the research mentioned here:

Schlaug, G., Jäncke, L., Huang, Y., Staiger, J. F., & Steinmetz, H. (1995). Increased corpus callosum size in musicians. Neuropsychologia, 33(8), 1047-1055.

Herdener, M., Esposito, F., di Salle, F., Boller, C., Hilti, C. C., Habermeyer, B., … & Cattapan-Ludewig, K. (2010). Musical training induces functional plasticity in human hippocampus. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(4), 1377-1384.

---

Sign up for our newsletter!