Alison Barrington from North Yorkshire Music Therapy Centre.
Also featuring Noteworthy Ladies Barbershop Quartet.
How do we engage with music? Does it provide the ultimate exercise for your brain?
This evening we uncover some extraordinary developments in the use of music as a therapeutic tool across health care settings, hospitals, schools and daycentres - with a chance for you to participate too.
Noteworthy, the award-winning York Ladies Barbershop Quartet, will entertain us before and after the presentation.
Vote of thanks by Prof Paul Blenkiron
‘Music As Medicine’ Started on a perfect Summer’s evening as members gathered with drinks in the YMS Garden to the sound of the Minster Bells. We were then entertained by ‘Noteworthy’, the York-based ladies barbershop quartet who harmonized perfectly in the still air with melodies old and new. They were obviously destined for further musical success and we later learned they won first prize at Cleethorpes musical festival the following day.
Our guest speaker was Dr Alison Barrington, a practicing senior music therapist at the North Yorkshire Music Therapy Centre. As well as being a writer and lecturer, Alison has advised the NHS on the value of non-verbal therapies as an adjust to psychological services.
This was very much an interactive lecture, with video clips (before and after therapy) , audience participation and recorded music. Alison skillfully covered both the biomedical and the psychosocial aspects of music, its effects on the brain and its role in our lives as a universal social language.
Her talk was in three parts – Music as Therapy, Music as Medicine, and Music in the Community.
As therapy, we learned that music has applications for all age groups – from childhood learning disability, autism and selective mutism, to adult neurological conditions (learning to walk again post stroke using singing) and end of life care. For example, there is preserved recall in old age for listening, singing and playing despite cognitive impairment. And next time you have a person with pain and expressive dysphasia, rather than asking them to rate pain levels on a scale of 1 to 10, why not ask them to sing their reply instead?
As a form of medicine, music releases dopamine, giving us pleasure, reduces stress whilst improving sleep and memory (mediated via cortisol) and helps us to bond and feel part of a group when singing in a choir (the oxytocin effect). 74% of us say that music improves our quality of life. For patients, music delivered by any means (including playlists via Airpods) aids discharge from hospital sooner and reduces the need for analgesic medication. If you play a musical instrument (even if taken up later in life) then twin studies show that it decreases the risk of dementia by 36%. For those with established Alzheimer’s disease, musical memory is relatively preserved, and it’s the period of our lives known as the ‘musical bump’ (between the ages of 10 and 30 years old) that we recall and enjoy best.
For music as a community activity for all, Alison engaged us in lively audience interaction. This saw members clapping rhythmically whilst saying ‘Pear, Apple, Pineapple, Watermelon’, each word adding one more syllable to the mix of sound. The choice of recorded music was eclectic – moving from Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat to Tracey Chapman and even a YMS rendition of ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’. Noteworthy joined us again towards the end of the lecture to entertain and impress us with two final musical numbers. ‘Dancing In the Dark’ (whoever thought Bruce Springsteen could work as a barbershop song?) and – most appropriately – Amy Winehouse’s ‘ Rehab’.
Following questions, and a chance to try out the Tibetan chanting bowl and other musical instruments, members departed or stayed for supper after an educational – and highly enjoyable – evening. PB.
The meeting was attended by 33 people in the audience, including some guests, and 7 members on Zoom – run by Sarah Anderson
