Another month of reading research goes by quickly! In this post you will find a blast of recently-release research related to music and therapy.

The new issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Science was released. This contains several articles of interest including:

Tomano, C. (2012) writing about effective techniques to use with non fluent aphasia. This article covers the use of singing in therapy, with attention to different musical elements and the interactive nature of music therapy. Zipse et al. (2012) presented a case study on a girl with aphasia, using a modified MIT protocol. They demonstrated changes in the frontal lobe and white matter gains (tracts) on the right side of the brain, indicating cortical plasticity (brain changes) facilitated by the therapy.

Rodriguez-Fornells et al. (2012) reviewed music-supported therapy for patients of stroke. The aricle covers the use of electronic instruments for upper body movement patterns. Both this article and the one authored by Fujioka et al. (2012) talk about audio-motor coupling in rehabilitation therapy.

Those are just four of the 20+ articles in this jam-packed issue on music and neuroscience. To browse more of the issue visit: this link.

We haven’t explored background music on the MTRB yet. Shih et al. (2012) looked at the effect of background music with and without lyrics on 122 persons completing attention tasks. Results indicated that music with lyrics decreased work performance. I don’t think theses findings are surprising. I’m including this because of the larger sample size in the study.

A new study by Lai et al. (2012) showed that children with autism process speech and music differently than typical children. Overall, they had decreased cortical responses for speech stimuli, but increased responses for musical stimuli (in the speech areas). This study is interesting because it was completed on children who were considered “low-functioning”. Furthermore, the data are from 36 persons with autism were used in the study.

Another study that came up in my search is Patel’s (2011) new OPERA hypothesis for why music is an optimal stimulus for speech encoding. I won’t repeat what OPERA stands for, since it’s the major idea of the article and I’d like to respect copyright – but you can get the idea from the abstract. If you work in this area, I suggest you read the abstract! Patel wrote a follow-up article for the Annals of the NY Acad issue (link provided above).

I’d also like to point out a new resource: Music Cognition U – get latest music research from around the world, view conferences, and explore the news!

References:

Fujioka, T., Ween, J.E., Jamali, S., Stuss, D.T., & Ross, B. (2012). Changes in neuromagnetic beta-band oscillation after music-supported stroke rehabilitation. Ann N Y Acad Sci., 1252(1), 294-304. PMID: 22524371 

Lai, G., Pantazatos, S.P., Schneider, H., & Hirsch, J. (2012). Neural systems for speech and song in autism. Brain., 135(Pt 3):961-75. PMID: 22298195

Patel, A.D. (2011) Why would musical training benefit the neural encoding of speech? The OPERA hypothesis. Front. Psychology, 2, 142. PMCID: 3128244

Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Rojo, N., Amengual, J.L., Ripollés, P., Altenmüller, E., & Münte, T.F. (2012). The involvement of audio-motor coupling in the music-supported therapy applied to stroke patients. Ann N Y Acad Sci., 1252(1), 282-293. PMID: 22524370

Shih, Y.N., Huang, R.H., & Chiang, H.Y. (2012). Background music: Effects on attention performance. Work, 42(4), 1-12. PMID: 22523045 

Zipse, L., Norton, A., Marchina, S., & Schlaug, G. (2012). When right is all that is left: plasticity of right-hemisphere tracts in a young aphasic patient. Ann N Y Acad Sci., 1252(1), 237-45. PMID: 22524365