Music, mind and health : how community change, diagnosis, and neuro-rehabilitation can be targeted during creative tasks.

Abstract

As a culture, we have the capacity to lead creative lives. Part of that capacity lies in how something like music can touch on just about every aspect of human thinking and experience. If music is such a pervasive phenomenon, what does it mean for the way we consider our lives in health? There are three problems with connecting the richness of music to scientifically valid clinical interventions. First, it is unclear how to provide access to something as seemingly complex as music to a diverse group of subjects with various cognitive and physical deficits. Second, it is necessary to quantify what takes place in music interactions so that causality can be attributed to what is unique to the music experience compared to motivation or attention. Finally, one must provide the structure to facilitate clinical change without losing the communicative and expressive power of music. This thesis will demonstrate how new music technologies are the ideal interfaces to address the issues of scale, assessment, and structured intervention that plague the ability to introduce creative work into healthcare environments. Additionally, we describe the first neural interface for multisensory-based physical rehabilitation, with implications for new interventions in diverse settings. This thesis demonstrates the design and implementation of devices that structure music interaction from the neural basis of rehabilitation. At the conclusion of this research, it is possible to envision an area where users are empowered during scientifically based creative tasks to compose neurological change.