Back to the Beat

A New Prescription: A Dose of Live Music for Hospital Patients:
A professional violist is playing for neurology patients at a Chicago hospital to study music’s effect on their anxiety and isolation; ‘It’s very comforting for people when they’re sick.’

A Jazz Drummer’s Fight to Keep His Own Heart Beating:

Milford Graves devoted himself to studying the rhythms of the heart. It turns out he was creating a technique to treat himself.

Music can get you moving, lift your mood, and even help you recall a memory, but can it improve your health? The National Institutes of Health and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have partnered to expand the scope of an initiative that NIH has had with the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) for several years called Sound Health.

For decades, art therapy has been used to help patients. But today, people like Moss are looking at how it can also help health care providers. It’s a shift that has come about out of necessity, experts say, because stress and burnout among doctors, nurses and other hospital staff has become a public health crisis.

"Music holds the secret,
To know it can make you whole
It's not just a game of notes,
It's the sound inside your soul
The magic of the melody
Runs through you like a stream
The notes the play flow through your head
Like a dream..."

Oliver Sack's discusses Parkinsonism and music's ability to heal

Music can make us better in terms of healing our bodies, in terms of exercising better. Even rewiring our brains after an injury.

The healing power of music with neurologist Alexander Pantelyat and others from the Johns Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine.

A program called Musicians on Call strives to bring music to the bedsides of patients too sick to leave their hospital beds. NBC’s Lester Holt reports. (2013)

Scientists have long wondered if the human brain contains neural mechanisms specific to music perception. Now, for the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a neural population in the human auditory cortex that responds selectively to sounds that people typically categorize as music, but not to speech or other environmental sounds.

Formed in response to the crisis of returning service members injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, MusiCorps is a conservatory-level music rehabilitation program that helps wounded warriors play music and recover their lives.

Veterans often find it hard to adjust back to daily life when they return home, but one fellow soldier says that music and art can help them regain a sense of healing and hope.

Warrior Songs has spent most of the past decade using songwriting and other artistic endeavors to assist veterans with PTSD help channel the flood of emotions they experience after returning from battle.

A program for Vets in Chicago that provides participants with free, one-on-one guitar lessons and their own instrument. The process of learning and "feeling" the music resonating from the instrument is helping them to process and work through depression and PTSD

Art and music therapy seem to help with brain disorders. Scientists want to know why

Despite his Alzheimer's, Tony Bennett prepares to perform with Lady Gaga