SYN News 15 October 2013

In November, Melbourne will hold Australia’s first Music, Mind and Health conference to highlight the revolutionary new science being explored in the study of music. 

Music neuroscience is revealing exciting new information about how our brain perceives music and this knowledge is being used to alleviate the impairments of people with physical and neurological disabilities. 

TENNILLE SECOMB spoke to several of the conference speakers to find out more about the remarkable new developments. 

Photo Credit: Tennille Secomb
Photo Caption: A soundproof room at The Bionics Institute of Melbourne used for psychoacoustic testing.

TRANSCRIPT:
TENNILLE SECOMB: We all listen to music for different reasons, and each listener’s experience is unique. Understanding the way we perceive music is revealing remarkable new information about the human brain. 
HELEN FARRELL: With brain scanning technology there has been absolutely exponential growth in that technology and what that’s saying is that music goes right across all the major areas in the brain.
TENNILLE SECOMB: Doctor Helen Farrell is a research fellow at the world-first Music, Mind and Wellbeing initiative at the University of Melbourne. She has been using music in therapy with people with disabilities and impairments for more than 30 years, and says what researchers are learning through music about the way the brain works is having an extraordinary impact on people’s lives.
HELEN FARRELL: I’ve had experience of working with people who have severe physical disabilities, cerebral palsy for instance, and through music I can get them to slowly open up the contracture.
TENNILLE SECOMB: Because music has no fixed centre in the brain, when faculties like speech or motor control are damaged, music training can enhance what is known as ‘neuroplasticity’.
HELEN FARRELL: The brain is not a fixed organ. For instance in a person with a stroke who has damage to their language neural pathways, the idea of neuroplasticity is that the brain will retrain other neural pathways to take over those functions.
TENNILLE SECOMB: James Richmond is a provisional psychologist at the University of Melbourne.
JAMES RICHMOND: Music is firing the brain in so many different ways and through multiple neural systems, and so has the capacity to train the brain like no other activity.
TENNILLE SECOMB: By harnessing the higher number of frequencies on which music vibrates in the brain, researchers are not only able to reroute speech and motor control functions, but also restore sight and sound.
JAMES RICHMOND: There’s research suggesting that the limited range of frequencies that are available through cochlear implants could actually be increased, that we can retrain the brain to experience more frequencies than we thought was currently possible.
TENNILLE SECOMB: Now, here at The Bionics Institute in Melbourne, the amazing technology behind cochlear implants, otherwise known as the Bionic Ear, is driving the groundbreaking development of the Bionic Eye.
JEREMY MAROZEAU: The Bionic Ear is a hearing device that will connect directly into the inner ear and excite the auditory nerve through some electric impulses, and it allows people that are profoundly deaf to be able to hear again.
TENNILLE SECOMB: Dr Jeremy Marozeau is a senior research fellow who shed some light on the amazing science behind the Bionic technology.
We have implanted three patients with a bionic eye, which is fairly similar in terms of technology except that the electrode will not go inside the ear, it will go inside the eye. 
Those three patients are at the stage where they can start to see little blobs of light or very big letters.
TENNILLE SECOMB: Doctor  Marozeau’s work is dedicated to improving music perception in people with hearing impairment. He says that music has enormous benefits that extend beyond the physical. 
JEREMY MAROZEAU: To help those people to better appreciate music, is also to put them back into society.
TENNILLE SECOMB: Revolutionizing science, promoting mental health, creating social cohesion and fostering empathy, music is absolutely one of the most powerful art forms we have. 
Tennille Secomb, Melbourne.
