SOPHIE BUSHWICK: You talked about there being a variety of genres, a variety of different kinds of music.
NextYou know, what— and it also helps us compare very creative and different music interventions.
So you mean like specific songs that are meaningful to the people playing the music? So if you can imagine hearing Louis Armstrong kind of beebopping around but then hearing that in Italian, I think that is so genius. And the older adults get such a kick out of hearing their favorite song on the clarinet or on the piano.
NextCan you really standardize it from a scientific perspective? Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media.
And she did a lovely job categorizing music in a really smart way.
NextJENNIE DORRIS: So what we were looking at is general thinking and memory.
JENNIE DORRIS: Thanks for having me. Are people able to kind of build different memory muscles through the use of music? And then I had people who were like, can I now try to demonstrate that for you at the end of class, so, say, 30 minutes later? What would we find? There was a drum circle in Taiwan that had beautiful results in terms of affecting anxiety, and that was really neat to see. JENNIE DORRIS: I think all of those things are important.
Specifically, can playing music have therapeutic effects? Can you see similar effects? When we were reading research, so often you would see so much music mixed together, whether people were listening or whether they were actively participating.
We also saw some really beautiful work coming out of South Korea, where the design is to really have you reminisce about childhood songs. We talked about there being like a small effect. SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Is music difficult to study because of that variety? We looked at a range of things, both cognitive functioning as well as emotional well-being, like your quality of life, your mood, anxiety, and depression.
Can making music, whether by playing a musical instrument or singing, have an effect on the brains of people in the early stages of cognitive decline? JENNIE DORRIS: Well, I used to lead a class for older adults with mild cognitive impairment that was a marimba band.
JENNIE DORRIS: Thanks for having me.
SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Over the course of teaching this class, did you personally see some of the small improvements, the small effects that you described in your paper? They were making their own instruments? Yes, you can play an instrument.
And so one of the fun results is to be able to say that, yes, you can sing. But we also saw that single studies were affecting mood, quality of life. And we would play songs, both songs that were familiar and brand-new songs to the participants.
NextHow am I going to play it? Now, I think that this is the direction that research is going to go.