Dr. Joanne Loewy: The fetus hears the mother’s heartbeat 26 million times before the baby is born. So with this Gato box we could actually recreate the heart sounds.

The Gato box is actually a drum, but we use it without the mallet as a box. And we try to entrain to the baby’s heart rate so we could create a rhythm for the suck, much like if you went to the gym and you went on the treadmill and you play music, you would entrain to that beat. It would help you work out, the rhythm would support your movement.

We use it without a mallet because it would be too jarring. You’ll notice it’s a kind of quiet sound and it’s enclosed, much like the baby would experience in the womb.

We expect the heart rate to go up a little bit in the transition, so we saw that at the beginning. It was high 189, 190. But then very soon the baby was stable transitioning from quiet alert to almost a sleep state.

Ronit Azoulay, flautist: The flute is to work with her breathing. I’m breathing as I play the flute. I’m noticing her breathing rate and matching it with maybe one or two note phrases, maybe longer. She is on a respirator. One of the things that can be a struggle on a respirator is that it can be uncomfortable. So we’re both looking to influence the rhythms but also the relaxation in the body.

Research has demonstrated that we entrained to sounds outside of us and rhythms. The word entrainment is from physics originally, and in this context it means is that we synchronize with external rhythms in music.

Doctor at Beth Israel: We wanted to study whether or not music therapy would impact on quality of life, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation. The challenge of having chronic lung disease very much has to do with breathing and breathing correctly and training people to breathe as well as possible. When engaged in that effort one can see better oxygen levels, less shortness of breath.

Ronit Azoulay: During the relaxation the heart rate when down back to around 84-85  is what I had noticed when I was playing. And now after the session it’s back at around 90.

Doctor at Beth Israel: We’ve engaged with 20 patients as a pilot study. And the first observations are that [inaudible] rates do go down. Oxygen levels we have to look more closely at. It’s data accruing.  Hopefully it will have some positive outcome.

Ronit Azoulay: Music therapy is a field that is continuing to grow.  The research in the feld is getting more and more sophisticated and understanding how music—does it influence quality of life? Does it influence breathing? Does it influence heart and breathing rhythms as well? So it’s continuing to grow.

Concetta Tomaino, D.A., MT-BC, LCAT: One of the reasons, and one of the exciting reasons, why music therapy has so much promise for people with neurological conditions is that music accesses the networks in the brain in a complementary faction (fashion) or differently than the function that a person has lost. And what I mean by that is we can stimulate the timing mechanisms, we can stimulate word finding ability, we can stimulate recognition memory, even short-term memory function through using music in a specific way that makes available to these patients function in the brain that’s still there but maybe they can’t get at independently because of the inhibition that has taken place due to their brain injury.

So music is an enriched sensory stimulus that allows for, I believe, the disinhibition of some of the inhibited function that has been lost in these individuals. And by stimulating these complementary or parallel networks, we see this type of ability come back.

Oliver Sacks: Although personally music has been very important to me from before I can remember. As a physician it only hit me really in the 1960s, and that was when I found myself at a hospital in the Bronx seeing the frozen post-encephalitic patients whom I later wrote about in Awakenings. These were people with very profound Parkinsonism, so profound that sometimes they would stay absolutely motionless for hours on end and could not initiate any movement or speech or indeed thought, although one learned that later, but so much so, “What’s going on with these people?” “Are they there?” “Is there anyone at home?” And it was originally the nurses and people who knew of these patients well who said they could be transformed by music. If there’s music, these people could dance, they could sing, they could talk, they can do things, they can think, they can become almost normal while music is there.

And then I saw this for myself, and I was stupefied. I don’t know what term to use. And 40 years later I find it astounding and it needs to be seen as someone for whom music—someone for whom movement is unimaginable suddenly able to move. But it strictly goes with the music, and when the music stop, they stop. So music therapy for these Parkinsonian patients was my first experience as a physician, and I wondered what sort of music was involved or any music could do so. It didn’t have to be familiar music or loved music. It doesn’t sometimes have to be a conscious attention to the music. But obviously the rhythm and the beat and pulse of music was very important. And this would spontaneously and almost automatically I think allow people to move. So the good music had a strong rhythm, not overwhelming but a strong rhythm. But obviously I think if people like the music, so much the better.

Interviewer: And what have you found out about or what do you believe is going on in the brain that creates this effect?

Oliver Sacks: Well, this reminds me of the way in which all of us want to keep time and tap time, and how children spontaneously start to dance or keep time to music they hear or imagine. And that seems to be a very strong human attribute to have motor responses, movements synchronized with the pulse of music, the sounds.  And uniquely in the human brain, at least uniquely among mammals, one finds connections between the auditory parts of the brain and what’s called the dorsal pre-motor cortex, some of the motor parts. And it seems to be this conjunction of auditory and motor, which is so crucial for all of us in responding to music, but especially if you have something like Parkinson’s. So I think that’s one of the very important thing whether the shape of the melody and the life of the music. Kant the philosopher called the music the quickening art. And music seems inherently alive and to give a feeling of life and emotion and ongoing, and of a journey, a sort of trajectory. And I suspect important all of these could be important as well. It’s just not the rhythm.  Everything in music carries one along.

Also read Concetta Tomain’s article, “How Music Can Reach the Silent Brain.”

2) Synchronization
An introduction to synchronization with neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel and a look at a bird moving to music:

3) Syncopation
An introduction to syncopation with musician Bobby McFerrin and scientist Daniel Levitin: