Playing with a Potential Musical Cure

As a busy Saturday evening dinner service became a very busy Saturday evening dinner service, I watched as a fellow waiter burst suddenly into tears.

The restaurant’s background music had just transitioned from a soulful Diana Ross ballad to Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” and I couldn’t decide whether “men are dogs,” “insufficient tip,” or “another waiter’s gibes” was a likelier explanation for her sorrow. “My mother played this when she got the divorce papers,” she explained without inquiry. Stunned, I did what any human would do in my situation—I asked the manager on duty to put on That Funk.

Upon exiting the ladies room, makeup comparatively less smudged, Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” welcomed her back. A fortified smile quickly emerged over her still salt-stained face. Moving confidently to a full banquette, she plied a group of patrons to order another round of cocktails, and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

It goes without saying that music can greatly influence mood and behavior—more so for some than others, and often in unpredictable ways. A group of researchers in Austria, however, has recently taken this truism to trial—clinical trial, that is—and has begun to market what might be the most promising music therapy system to date, SANOSON.

The concept of music as clinically-proven therapy is not as foreign as it might have once been. The fortune cookie wisdom of my grade school years, for instance, dictated that children weaned on classical music would grow up smarter. Playing an Antonio Vivaldi or Antonin Dvorák cassette tape while studying one’s times tables conferred A’s, so it went.

SANOSON, however, does not claim to have made strides in the field of child-smartening, nor does it aim to mimic the musical folk therapy employable on, say, crowded restaurant floors. Rather, it aims to combat the stressors that many long-term hospital patients and the gravely ill face during recovery. Patients are prescribed a schedule of musical compositions, the energy levels of which are designed to parallel their daily activities. SANOSON patients are prescribed sets of music to listen to for a set number of hours over the week to this end, the ultimate goal of which is to ease the strain of recovery.

To date, there has been little clinically-backed research in this field, for the simple reason that music therapy exists outside of any single discipline. The research into the effects of music on the body requires adeptness in a diversity of fields, and an incorporative application of that knowledge. This is strange new territory. Any forays into “musical pharmacology” are bound to be fraught with resistance and skepticism from doctors and patients alike.

Though they draw upon the varied fields of neurobiology, endocrinology, psychology, sociology, and physiology, SANOSON hopes to synthesize these diverse disciplines into a single, clinically-proven treatment. The key, researchers believe, lies in synchronizing a patient’s regulatory processes to the prescribed music. SANOSON is one of the first companies to demonstrate the effectiveness of such synchronization in a clinical setting. As noted in a recent New York Times article, when these processes and structures were properly paralleled in patients with hypertension over a four week program, “patients experienced clinically significant improvements in heart-rate variability.”

These results, though only a first step, are as compelling as they are thought-provoking. If music is to be harnessed for its pharmacological powers, might it not hold the potential for dangerous interactions? Remember the crying waitress? Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” is good to write to, and the electronic band MSTRKRFT quite great to run to, but such selections would certainly have deleterious effects on performance if poorly prescribed. Last year, Harvard students downed the strange cocktail of the Wu-Tang Clan, Gavin DeGraw, Joey DeGraw (sigh), and whatever other substances they chose to introduce into their systems that day.

Although SANOSON offers therapies comprised generally in lyric-less, original compositions, one can’t help but relate the researchers’ clinical findings to one’s own musical habits. It’s hard to predict, for instance, how a swig of Sara Bareilles will pair with a rip of Ratatat. Whatever the blend, it will define the collective mood for the day. These most recent developments by SANOSON are exciting for the simple reason that we all know the raw power music has to influence us—whether we be YardFest attendees or restaurant waitresses. But until science offers us an equation for managing pain or stress with music, we will continue to self-medicate, ignorant of the calculus of our hearts but wise to their temperaments.

—Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvard.edu.