Music in Medicine

Description of the project

What happens in musician’s brains during live concerts in hospital settings?

Music in Medicine is an ongoing art–science research initiative exploring how live musical performances in clinical environments shape brain-to-brain and brain–body dynamics. To achieve this, the project employs cutting-edge mobile brain-body imaging technology to capture, analyze, and record the neural activity of professional musicians.

Live music has the power to comfort, connect, and heal, yet its neural impact in real-world clinical environments remains largely unexplored. Music in Medicine seeks to understand how shared musical experiences influence brain activity, movement, and emotional states in hospital settings.

The Music in Medicine project is a longitudinal art-science performance and research study at the nexus of music, and neuroengineering. Live concert programs are designed to reflect principles of human connection, integrating musical structure and performance context within clinical environments.

Data preprocessing, multimodal synchronization, and exploratory analyses are currently underway. Ongoing work focuses on characterizing neural coordination, physiological responses, and emotional dynamics associated with live music performance to observe and analyze the intra- and inter-neural dynamics of the two dancers while performing. Findings from these analyses will be reported in forthcoming scientific publications, and will have important implications for social neuroscience, the study of creativity, and the design of artistic brain-computer interfaces.

Overall, Music in Medicine offers a fascinating insight into the neural processes involved in and the creative processes that underlie choreographed performances. This research opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of creativity and the development of brain-computer interfaces that can capture and respond to our creative impulses.