5 ways singing helps humanity

Professor Jane Davidson, Head, Faculty Research Centre; Chair, Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Initiative, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne

We all know that singing is fun – just think back to the last time you belted out a rock tune on a family road trip, or sang along with friends, and strangers, at the pub or a music festival.

There’s also the spiritual experience of singing hymns at church, or an Indigenous sacred ceremony, or in perfect harmony in a mass choir.

Singing is fun, and brings people together. Photo: Getty Images

But it goes deeper than that.

Our researchers at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Music working through the Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Initiative, the Creative Arts Therapies Research Unit and the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development are seeking to understand the value of singing from cultural, emotional, social, and health perspectives, as well as developing programs to implement its benefits.

Here’s just some of what research has found over the past decade.

The brain benefits of music

1. SINGING CONNECTS US FROM BIRTH

Singing increases oxytocin levels (aiding bonding) and decreases cortisol (lowering stress). It can also rapidly result in feelings of connection and flow – improving our mood, strengthening sense of identity and helping out long and short-term memory.

For many of us, singing plays a key role from birth. In fact caregivers and infants use melody, harmony, pitch, timbre and tempo to bond and provide comfort in a mutually beneficial interaction.

Singing with a slow-paced, medium pitch inflection using a soft timbre – lullabies typically use this type of vocalisation – can gently connect with and pacify infants, while the cooing responses of the infant can equally engage and soothe the caregiver.

The mutual benefits of this bonding through song can persist throughout life.

Lullabies can pacify infants, while the cooing responses of the infant have a similar effect on the caregiver. Photo: Getty Images

2. SINGING CONNECTS US TO OUR CULTURE

Singing contributes to the development of our thinking and language and, in turn, to our cultural identity, as well as general quality of life and opportunity.

Children as young as five have been shown to already know dozens of songs, connecting them to cultural knowledge about ritual significance, social etiquette, facts about life and lifestyle, skills like counting, techniques for making and doing things, and so on.

Indigenous ceremonial performance opening up intercultural dialogue

Sometimes the only way this information is shared and understood is through song.

The core elements of songs include repetitive melody and rhythmic structures which work with the words to produce powerfully mnemonic effects that can re-enforce knowledge, support memory and capture history.

Songs connect us to our culture, and the stories within songs can help shape our identity and build meaning within society. Important First Nations work at the University has found that singing and songs not only foster community knowledge, but can revitalise it, acting to strengthen political agency, pride and resilience.

This shows how vital it is to repatriate songs lost to communities.

Core elements of songs include repetitive melody and rhythmic structures. Photo: Supplied

3. SINGING MAKES US HAPPY, EVEN IN LOCK-DOWN

During the first waves of COVID-19 across 2020, singing was both popular and successful in passing time and connecting with others. Online ‘choirs’ brought joy to millions, even though these activities were principally asynchronous and required extra effort to record and multitrack to generate the choral effect.

Womin Jeka: A choir with the desire to inspire

Our research found positive mental wellbeing impacts for participants and the popularity of Couch Choir, the lockdown version of the now globally popular Pub Choir, is testament to this.

And you don’t even have to sing to get some benefit from singing. We found that songs feature strongly in emotional regulation, even when passively engaging through listening.

4. SINGING CAN IMPROVE OUR PHYSICAL HEALTH

Our music therapy researchers have shown that singing has multiple benefits in managing degenerative conditions like Parkinson’s Disease, where volume of voice and mood improved after an intensive, researcher-designed singing program.

For people with dementia, and their carers, singing can improve lucidity, focus and enjoyment.

Singing can improve lucidity, focus and enjoyment for dementia sufferers and their carers. Photo: Getty Images

A recent landmark clinical trial by our researchers, published in the Lancet, found that recreational choir singing decreased depression and dementia symptoms, particularly among those people with more severe dementia.

The behavioural aspects like group social dynamics, an emphasis on fun and less of a focus on the individual are likely to feed into the positive outcomes for those with dementia.

5. SINGING UNITES PEOPLE

The arts and Australia’s mental wellbeing

Singing can enhance feelings of empathy and build intercultural social cohesion, vital in the complex area of intercultural relations and community resilience.

In one project, our researchers collaborated with adults in a multicultural workplace to explore how a workplace choir could strengthen culture, identity, and positive emotions. The team did this by focusing on lullabies – reconnecting participants to some of those earliest musical bonds.

The study generated strong social bonding, providing a platform for cohesion and understanding while mantaining the expression of distinctive identities that are understood and valued across cultural, linguistic and religious differences.

Singing has also helped people manage trauma, grief and loss including illness and disaster, providing emotional sharing, catharsis and resilience.

Without a doubt, singing can helps us to maximise our social and emotional potential. Photo: Supplied

Our researchers continue to collaborate with communities to develop knowledge and programs to use singing for people of all ages and backgrounds, in community and specialised medical settings to support their diverse needs throughout their lives.

All of this tells us that without a doubt, singing can help us to maximise our social and emotional potential.

So, whether it’s in the shower, the car or on stage, on your own or with a group, try bursting into song and see how you feel afterwards. The evidence suggests it’ll be good.

This article was first published on Pursuit. Read the original article.

Banner: Getty Images

Growing Grey Gratefully

Not only does music add colour to life, new research has shown that playing and actively engaging with music can also significantly increase the amount of grey matter in our brains, the area of our noggins where our valuable neurons are stored.

Establishing a practice of regular music making has the potential to alter the process of normal, age-related brain shrinkage in healthy older adults, arresting the gradual cognitive decline associated with atrophy Establishing a practice of regular music making has the potential to alter the process of normal, age-related brain shrinkage in healthy older adults, arresting the gradual cognitive decline associated with atrophy, the cause of diminished working memory and other core executive functions as we grow older.

These findings are the result of a randomised controlled trial by a Swiss-based research team who spent six months tracking 132 retired adults between the ages of 62 and 78 years (Marie, Damien, et al., 2023.).

Participants were selected for inclusion in the study on the basis they had taken music lessons for no longer than six months at any previous point in their lives. This precluded any existing brain plasticity linked to earlier musical learning from affecting the outcomes of the study. They were then randomised into two groups: a treatment group and a control group.

Participants in the treatment group were enrolled into a one year course of weekly, hour-long piano lessons and were also required to do half an hour of homework each day. Participants in the control group were set hour-long music awareness tasks intended to help them identify instruments being played in the context of many different musical styles and were also required to do half an hour of homework each day.

The good news is that both groups returned data showing an increase in cognitive functioning and a robust amount of new grey matter leading to improved tonal working memory after just six months; amazing, eh? Click here to read a review of the findings or, for a more in-depth analysis, the original research paper can be accessed here.

Feeling motivated to start building your own grey matter? A full list of the Victorian singing and instrumental groups listed on the CMVic website is available here: https://cmvic.org.au. And maybe begin knitting bigger beanies for yourself and your music making pals to accomodate those growing brains with this how to guide. Enjoy!

Review by Deb Carveth, Copy Editor for Community Music Victoria. Feature photo by David Matos on Unsplash

Reference

Marie, Damien, et al. “Music interventions in 132 healthy older adults enhance cerebellar grey matter and auditory working memory, despite general brain atrophy.” Neuroimage: Reports 3.2 (2023): 100166.

Rocks ‘n’ Stroll along the Elwood Singing Walking Trail

Along a well-known part of Melbourne’s Bayside, a new Singing Walking Trail is fine tuning walkers into their environment through a series of songs telling stories that incite fresh knowledge and new perspectives of its familiar landscape.

Back during the murky depths of the 2020  lockdown, plans for the Elwood Singing Walking Trail were conceived and hatched by local choir leader and project facilitator, Jeannie Marsh. Originally intended to lift the spirits of Jeannie’s Elwood Community Choir at a time when singers were isolated from each other, a key focus of the project is connection, a cornerstone of all Jeanie’s work, and this spirit has flowed outwards from the choir, to the broader community of Elwood. 

“It was planned to be something that was accessible to anyone, irrespective of their situation whether they were living alone, home-schooling or whatever, to help combat feelings of loneliness and isolation, an activity to connect people more closely to their environment by sharing knowledge and stories of the local area using music and songs to keep everyone together and healthy in all ways.” 

With an initial grant from the City of Port Phillip, Jeannie and the choir embarked on a research and development plan in late 2020/early 2021. “We came up with these 12 songs and a little route with 12 stops around Elwood starting at the Neighbourhood Learning Centre where we rehearse, then going along the canal to the beach and ending back at the King of Tonga Bar which is across the road from where we rehearse, for a drink.” The resulting ‘self-guided musical stroll’ was officially launched and gifted to the fortunate community of Elwood through the hard work and dedication of the choir and Jeannie, in October 2022.

The stroll takes in 12 sites along a 6.8km stretch around Elwood, telling an oral history through songs celebrating a wonderfully broad range of local topics from weavers to water rats; music halls to middens; sourdough to ‘spotties’; migration and many more to delight and enlighten listeners of all ages. 

The trail also shines a light on the historical relevance of the place now called Elwood, back when it was an area of plentiful sustenance for First Nations people, long, long before it became the Bay as we know it today.  Before the waters came pounding through the Heads to transform the woodlands and wetland swamp into Port Phillip Bay, or ‘Nerm’ – the name given to the bay by First Nations people, as told to European settlers – Elwood was a site where kangaroos played, and eels and shellfish could be plentifully sourced. Jeannie has woven this history into a song called Nerm which can be listened to at song site 8 to encourage us to think beyond the immediacy of what we see when we look out towards the bay, and to reflect upon its legacy and the need to treat it with respect and care.

A soft launch for the ESWT was held in May 2021 and a second grant, combined with $6k raised by the choir at an auction, was then used for phase two of the project: compiling sing-along resources, marketing and promotional material to spread the word and promote the route. Jeannie recalls being struck by such a clear demonstration of passion and support for the project: “We have a number of visual artists within the group as well as a sculptor who all donated work; Rebecca Barnard came and sang for us; Tracy Harvey was the auctioneer and the choir members and their families were all very generous, it was really lovely.” 

Audio engineer James Hodson who had worked with Jeannie on a number of other projects came on board as the choir’s ‘fantastic’ audio guy, “you couldn’t do a project like this without somebody like James.” James is a multi-instrumentalist and when it came to songs such as Carry On, the 1931 song by Jack O’Hagan located at song site 3, James got in there and did an arrangement like a 1930s dance band playing all of the instruments himself. Carry On was written to raise people’s spirits during the Depression and, 90 years later, it has come back into its own to tell the story of Elwood’s music hall history.

Each of the 12 song sites is marked out by an illustration by local illustrator Consuelo Fernandez-Ortiz, and is accompanied by a QR code for access to information on the area, as well as links to a YouTube clip of the song and resources for singers such as sheet music and words to each song. “People can do the trail at any time because it’s self-guided. You can do the whole thing in one day and stop off somewhere for lunch, or find a site that you like, sit there as often as you like and listen to it seventeen times!” 

In reflecting on the journey of the Elwood Singing Walking Trail to date, Jeannie has clearly enjoyed its collaborative nature and bringing it into being. “It’s been a really enjoyable project and while it’s been multi-layered, it has been so harmonious and that’s just a joy to have a team of people who’ve shared artistic vision, community goals and everyone has given 110%.” 

To continue building momentum and awareness of the existence of the fabulous Elwood Singing Walking Trail, Jeannie is currently running Sunday Strolls around a part of it, once a month. “We do four song sites at a time and it runs for an hour and a half from 10:30 am until 12 noon on a Sunday morning. Elwood has some great shops and local businesses, we have loads of indigenous history and art deco history all along the beach, there are a lot of layers which will become clear or you can just ignore all that, have some fun listening to some songs, singing some songs and doing some dancing! ” 

The next Sunday Stroll will be held on Sunday 16th April, leaving from the Elwood Pier. The Sunday Stroll is free, just turn up with your mobile phone to access the music, all set to sing and wearing comfortable shoes; dancing optional!

For a sneak preview of songs and Song sites: https://www.esnlc.com.au/elwood-singing-walking-trail-song-sites-map-and-songs

Written by Deb Carveth, Community Music Victoria Copy Editor, with Jeannie Marsh; thanks Jeannie!
Main photo: ESWT Sunday Stroll 150123 singing at sign. Credit JEANNIE MARSH

Sharing Food & Music Makes Sunraysia Shine

Music and food make great mates, their charismatic combination creates the perfect context for friendships to flourish and where there’s one you will invariably find the other. From Vocal Noshes to music camps and choirs, there is nothing like a spot of music-making to work up an appetite and a gathering of like minded people chatting over a plateful of food after a session of singing or playing is a beautiful thing.

As Community Music Victoria is all about using music to facilitate connections and develop community networks we were very excited to learn from our Growing Community Music Murray Mallee team about what the good folks from Food Next Door Coop and Out of the Box Sunraysia are doing. Work that feels aligned with the values of our own organisation, and to hear about how everybody’s paths came to cross at the end of November.

Food Next Door Coop is a social enterprise scheme connecting newly arrived migrants with existing land owners who have soil space to share, and with vacant or under-utilised farmland in regional and rural areas of Victoria’s North West. It is a model that fosters inclusivity and generates the sharing of ideas in a literal cross-pollination of knowledge and culture, uniting people from diverse backgrounds with members of their new communities and providing them access to land and a way for them to support themselves on arrival in their new country, using farming practices from back home. Creating an avenue to a sustainable source of income and independence helps people to settle  and strengthens community cohesion, while working the land in this way increases the number of small scale farms using sustainable practices beneficial to soil regeneration. The outcome is high quality, organic produce and a healthier landscape, both literally and figuratively, from the grass roots up.

Beats and birthday cake at Out of the Box’s fifth birthday.
Photo credits: Out of the Box Sunraysia

Out of the Box offers local delivery of produce grown in the Sunraysia area using regenerative, organic farming practices and works closely with the Food Next Door Coop as a distribution outlet for their land sharing scheme. Bringing together customers, farmers, volunteers, and landholders, the onus is on keeping food miles down – everything is grown within a 150 kilometre radius of the city – and the boxes are sold on a subscription basis with a lucky dip of produce each week using prices set by the growers. It’s a beautiful way to develop and sustain the community, feeding the people of the township and enriching local community connections by bringing people together and strengthening the network, much in the same way as the community music groups listed on the CMVic database.

And, like music, food grown and shared within the community is not only nurturing, bringing people together at the source, it has a flow on effect. Events like farmers markets create avenues for the sharing and development of ideas and values and offer a springboard for friendships and tighter, healthier, more connected communities. They also provide wonderful performance spaces and opportunities for community choirs and music groups to share their work and spread the joy.

Drumming with Catherine Threlfall. Photo credit: Out of the Box Sunraysia

On November 26th 2022, Out of the Box Sunraysia celebrated its fifth birthday with an extravaganza of music, food and wine that was provided, made and shared by members of the community, including the CMVic Growing Community Music family. Catherine Threlfall led a drumming circle with people of all ages joining in and playing an assortment of percussion including djembes, triangles, and tambourines; there was a band with ukulele and fiddle players and dancing from the Barkindji Dancers, all accompanied by a sumptuous community feast made, of course, from locally sourced foods: Merbein Mushrooms and lentils, beetroot sourdough and even an orange almond birthday cake made with beautiful fresh navel oranges from the region. 

Click here to watch a beautiful clip of the afternoons activities and listen to a moving speech made by Grant Hyam who runs Out of the Box in which he explains what being a part of it has brought to his life.

So if you are beginning the new year full of intentions to live well, joining a community music group or choir is a wonderful way to tick this box straight off the bat. A list of singing and music making opportunities can be accessed for free on the CMVic website. And if you are fortunate enough to live within coo-ee of Sunraysia and the Mallee, exploring the delicious work of the Out of the Box and Food Next Door Coop communities may support the turning over of any new leaves and lead to fresh growth and exciting opportunities as we take on 2023, together. 

‘Off the Chai’ Photo credit: Out of the Box Sunraysia

‘A Shared Affair’ Photo credit: Out of the Box Sunraysia

Written by Deb Carveth, CMVic Copy Editor, in collaboration with Kylie Livingstone, CMVic Growing Community Music Local Catalyst for Mildura, Sunraysia, Mallee

Video Credit: Luke Gange, Gange Productions. Photo Credits: Out of the Box Sunraysia.

All Directions Choir Summons Songs and Stories from the Deep

All Directions Community Choir has written 5 original songs from scratch as part of an original composition project called Songs and Stories from the Deep, facilitated by choir director, Cath Rutten. 

All Directions Community Choir sits within the Boroondara Community Outreach Program (BCO), a mental health ministry run by the Kew Uniting Church to support people with either disability or mental health challenges, or who are experiencing social isolation. The project received funding from Boroondara City Council through the grants program and the Rotary Club of Balwyn and was run by Cath as a series of workshops using water as a metaphor for living, with the group ‘writing from the heart about their experiences of life; the struggles as well as their sense of joy and adventure’.

“We began playing around with words and emotions as a group and there seemed to be a lot of congruence between the way we describe our feelings and water. We spoke of tears, and drowning or being lifted up and held by the waves of emotion, waves of joy, a congruence between the descriptive words of water and the descriptive words for emotion.”

Cath is a musician who loves working at the intersection of arts and health. In addition to running a singing studio at home, she also teaches inclusive singing practice, and has run a number of community projects including 52 Flash Mobs in 52 Weeks to promote the benefits of arts participation to the community. 

“My belief is that we are inherently artistic and musical as humans and for it to be professionalised so that we think we can’t do it unless we’re fantastic is detrimental to us as people.”

Members of the choir were interested in writing songs that talked about their lived experiences but also about the experience of being human. “All too often members from this community feel categorised by whatever challenges they face and really a lot of the challenges will be very familiar. Many people are facing challenges around secure housing, family and home to a lesser or greater extent, there are so many universal stories in there.”

The group met weekly for six sessions to continue writing and drawing on all of the water metaphors and included non-choir members of the BCO community. The process was encouraged along with inspirational visuals of water, and then Cath took the poems and turned their ideas into songs. Cath describes it as a wonderful journey to have shared. 

Artwork by Leah Ferguson and Belinda Wickens

“Being in a room and playing with lots of people and using words as part of that play, there’s just so much that comes out of it. In a way when you’ve got lots of creative people together, the work seems to do itself, it’s fantastic.”

Cath created the music and worked out the song arrangements so that the material used by the writing group could be learned by the choir. Everything was going swimmingly and according to plan. The choir began learning their songs at the end of 2019 with the view to recording the tracks for wider distribution in early 2020. But of course, like most things from that poor ill-fated year, it all had to stop and be mothballed. Cath says, “during COVID like so many other choirs we went online but a lot of the community did not feel comfortable in that space and numbers dropped to around 10 or 12. At the start, before everyone grew tired, I would sometimes ring people and have a sing on the phone with them as a way to remain connected and to check in and we kept going but with a skeleton crew.”

It took a while once lockdown lifted for All Directions Community Choir to regain its collective confidence about being out and about and to find momentum once more. At the beginning of 2022, the choir began working with a wonderful producer, Cameron Mackenzie, and Songs and Stories from the Deep was finally back on track. “Cameron came into the church and worked with the choir in the space and made the recordings over five or six weeks. It was a really lovely, enjoyable process.”

The CD launch of ‘Songs and Stories from the Deep recently took place, in mid-October. “It was wonderful, we all had such a lovely time with a beautiful big crowd and Boroondara Councillor, Nick Stavrou, came and opened it for us; it was such a warm, loving event.” In keeping with the community spirit of the song writing project, the beautiful promotional artwork accompanying the project was contributed by Cath’s daughter, Leah Ferguson, and the graphic design was done by Belinda Wickens.

Cath crackles with conviction and sparkles as she speaks of the community in which she works and her fondness for the project and the people it has involved, as well as for those who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make it all happen:

“Natalie who is a Reverend of Kew Uniting Church and the Coordinator of BCO does an enormous amount of work. She organises food relief and there are volunteers to come in and cook for people who can’t cook for themselves so that there are freezers full of food, and she does a lot of work for people behind the scenes. The program offers Tai Chi, and as well as the choir, a ukulele group runs on Tuesday mornings; there’s a band that meets and rehearses too and because Natalie’s really committed to finding skilled professionals to work with the choir and the band, there is always a need for funding. I’d love to plug the fact that the songs are for sale as a CD on bandcamp, it’s not very much and people can look up Boroondara Community Outreach if they would like to make a donation, which will go towards the activities that Natalie runs.” 

Something Cath notices repeatedly through her work is how quickly the health benefits of making music together occur and how obvious the effects are:

“It happens as soon as you start, being in a space together with people and singing or making music, our physical and mental health improves immediately and our beautiful souls respond!”

Songs from the Songs and Stories from the Deep are available on bandcamp, and while it is possible to enjoy them without purchase, all money raised from sales of the digital album will go to support the fantastic work done by BCO: 

Click here for a link to the songs: https://alldirectionscommunitychoir.bandcamp.com/album/songs-and-stories-from-the-deep
Click here for more information about BCO https://www.bcokew.org/

Written by Deb Carveth, Copy Editor for Community Music Victoria, in collaboration with Cath Rutten; thank you Cath!

Feature image: Detail of the artwork for Songs and Stories from the Deep, created by Leah Ferguson and Belinda Wickens

Mothers Use the Benefits of Song to Promote Infant Development

A program led by Professor Shannon de l’Etoile from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music aims to help at-risk mothers engage with their babies through singing, to support and promote development of emotional and self-regulation in the infants.

Professor Shannon de l’Etoile knows the impact of a mother’s lullaby.

Early in her career, de l’Etoile witnessed that when disadvantaged mothers were encouraged to sing to their babies, the positive responses they received were amazing. She quickly realised that music was a powerful way to help mothers learn to connect with their infants and to build a relationship with their new child.

This realisation led to de l’Etoile beginning her extensive research into a practice called infant-directed singing, which helps babies learn to regulate their emotions, and allows them to later navigate socialisation, school, and the professional world:

“If a mother can sing in a way that captures the infant’s attention, it can help them tap into those brain structures that they need to develop for self-regulation,” said de l’Etoile, a board-certified music therapist and associate dean of graduate studies at the University of Miami Frost School of Music.

Yet, while singing to infants is something most mothers do naturally—without even realising the benefits—for those in difficult circumstances, infant-directed singing may not be as instinctive, de l’Etoile observed. She has noticed that mothers impacted by depression, domestic violence, or substance exposure may need encouragement and guidance to provide this unique form of caregiving. Read the full article by Megan Ondrizek.

Source: University of Miami

Feature Photo by Anastasia Zhenina on Unsplash

Sweet new series of Celtic Jam sessions for Young Adults with diverse learning needs & disabilities

Every Thursday evening in Box Hill, Judy Oleinikov and Katy Addis host an open jam Celtic music session for young adults aged between 15 and 25. Offered by Quasitrad Music Melbourne, the sessions are open to players of all abilities and to anyone with and without lived experience of diverse learning needs, and or disabilities. The sessions are free, funded by the Keys of Life Foundation, a charity that supports students with disabilities and or diverse learning needs to flourish through music making. The sessions offer opportunities for the development of techniques and life skills intended to enable young people to develop their aural music-making practice, while connecting up with each other socially.

“If you know the basic repertoire, the patterns and chord sequences, you can actually join in a jam session pretty much anywhere in the world where Celtic music is played.” 

The idea for the sessions was conceived by Katy Addis, a member of the Melbourne Scottish Fiddle Club. Both Katy and her husband are musicians and Katy was fully appreciative of the inclusive and particularly welcoming characteristics of Celtic music making; the way you can walk into a session in Melbourne, Ireland or New York and be likely to hear the same tunes. Katy reflected that if you know the basic repertoire, the patterns and chord sequences, you can actually join in a jam session pretty much anywhere in the world where Celtic music is played. 

As Judy says, “there’s a skill in learning by ear so that you can pick up tunes that other people are playing.  Katy has a son who is autistic who is now in his 20s who plays in a regular Celtic Jam session which I run in Box Hill on Wednesdays. He’s a key player, he’s the one who keeps us together and he is superb. The Celtic Jam sessions are a really good social outlet for him too and provide an opportunity to enjoy the social aspect of participatory music making.”

Again, it was Katy who having seen the positive effects of this music making experience on her son, realised it had huge potential for other autistic young adults who may be experiencing learning difficulties and who may not have finished school, making them at greater risk of social isolation. After successfully applying for funding to help turn her vision into a reality, Katy approached Judy. The pilot phase of the Welcome Sessions began at the end of May and while the sessions are open to players of pretty much any instrument, as it happens everyone so far plays keys.

“This has been really good for starting up. We have a group of keyboards in a circle and have been trying waltzes, ¾ timing is something they have not all tried before but it’s a lot of fun and it isn’t uncommon for autistic kids to have perfect pitch. Keyboards are also great for working separately if we choose to take this approach, or we can all play chords or melody. One thing that has been a challenge has been all starting at the same point and playing in time together as they’re used to doing their own thing and also accepting that if you make a mistake you have to keep going!”  There’s a life lesson to be learned there somewhere too.

“A couple of the kids have made recordings of the tunes which has been great and allowed everyone to familiarise themselves with the tunes that we’ll be learning in our Welcome Sessions. This means everyone actually has the chance to listen to the tunes before they then go and learn them. In that way, the tunes are in their heads which is the key to helping them learn.”   

The sessions are open to a broad age range and while the blurb says 15-25, Judy points out that actually they’re open to anyone from high school age upwards; she also has plans to get a bit of a band together and find public playing opportunities at events such as farmers markets. 

“It really is just a chance to use music as a tool for a social outlet, coming together and having a  group to meet with once a week, especially for young people who, once they’ve finished school, might not feel there is much happening around them, hence the name, ‘Welcome Sessions’. ”

Welcome Sessions are open to players of all abilities, with and without diverse learning needs and disabilities (photo supplied)

If anyone would like to support the program, Judy suggests donating directly to Keys of Life which also offers training to music teachers and therapists of students with diverse learning needs and disabilities. “Any teacher who might be working with a child or with children who doesn’t fit the mainstream mould might benefit from exploring what Keys of Life has to offer.”

“As Welcome Sessions are a new thing and people aren’t too sure what to expect yet, our work at this point is all about reaching people. We’ll put up some videos that will hopefully break a bit of ice, but being an innovative program it takes a bit of courage for kids to come along and we’re hoping to break that ice further a bit and expand it.”

The sessions will continue to run every Thursday night from 7:30pm – 9:00pm throughout the school term. To find out more for yourself or somebody you know or if you are planning to pop along and try a Welcome Session for yourself one Thursday, contact Judy: judy.quasitrad@icloud.com and make the world of the Celtic jamming your musical oyster.

Article by Deb Carveth, CMVic Copy Editor, in conversation with Judy Oleinikov.

Feature photo by Elijah M. Henderson on Unsplash; photo a Celtic Jam Session supplied

Squeezing out the Zest! The Music Makers adding flavour to the Murray Mallee

“We are quite isolated in terms of where we sit within Victoria. Given that we are a really diverse community, we punch well above our weight in terms of the people we have involved in performing arts and community music and I feel that we’re really just under the radar.” So says Kylie Livingston, Community Music Victoria’s Local Catalyst for Mildura, Sunraysia and the Mallee, an exciting role created through the Growing Community Music Project (GCM) to support and nurture a network of community music-making practitioners and participants, living in this north-westerly corner of Victoria.

It’s a region well known for its fruit and wine, a number of annual music and arts festivals, and its picturesque location along the banks of the mighty Murray River.  Kylie is keen to contribute to the riches of the existing cultural framework by championing the role of community music and is collaborating with other like-minded people to create inclusive and participatory music making opportunities that further support the health and wellbeing of this Victorian community. 

Kylie’s hope is that her role will support the evolution of a self-sustaining network for Sunraysia, Mildura, and the Mallee that is inclusive, eclectic, and open

For the past three years, Kylie has been president of the committee for Electric Light Theatre, an amateur inclusive theatre company for youth based in Mildura. Each year, ELT stages a Variety Show, a celebration of music and performance art involving up to 100 kids from a broad range of backgrounds.  As an experienced facilitator who loves connecting people, Kylie has been quick to get the ball rolling since joining the Community Music Victoria (CMVic) team six months ago, creating events and workshops that support community music leaders to develop their skills, re-energise and reactivate their practice and, in doing so, draw more people into a network of local music-makers. 

”Over the last couple of years, I think community groups have really struggled and floundered and might not feel they have the skills or the energy to support themselves, or to continue and flourish, and that networking aspect is really important. The feedback we are receiving is that people are unsure where to go to find out about what’s on.  Everyone is relying on Facebook and that’s a bit hit and miss.  Even though people may have numerous informal contacts, connecting and networking for the benefit and support of everyone can feel really hard.”

To overcome the seemingly false sense of security fed us all by Facebook, Kylie is encouraging people to utilise the What’s On Mildura website as an alternative, free and consistent approach to marketing local community music-making events and opportunities in the area.

Kylie’s hope is that her role will support the evolution of a self-sustaining network for Sunraysia, Mildura and the Mallee that is inclusive, eclectic and open, and which continues to grow after CMVic’s immediate involvement in the region ends; a network where people feel stronger together, sharing and fostering a culture of inclusion that acknowledges and meets individual needs so that everyone can feel safe and welcome to participate without barriers or judgement.

“This is a very multicultural community, we have a big number of First Nations people and refugees from various regions and over the last ten years the area has become far more ethnically diverse, however we don’t tend to see that diversity represented in our audiences and participants.” 

Kylie is supported in her role by a dedicated local action team of community music activists who each take time out of their busy lives to act as consultants for GCM. “There’s lively conversation at 7:30am on a Monday morning each month”, Kylie laughs. This early bird time slot is a testimony to the conviction and passion shared by the group who willingly swap breakfast for brainstorming.  

“We’ve got a music therapist who is very involved in community music, a person who also works in disability, a music teacher in a primary school, a community place maker who is a First Nations woman which is great, and a member of Mildura Strings, who is really fantastic also.  As well as this core group, I’ve spent lots of time having discussions with community music leaders and participants around the region. This means that we’ve been able to hit the ground running as we have contacts through our connections back into the community, who are also advocates for GCM and CMVic.”

An excellent example of this took place on a chilly, clear Saturday, back in the middle of June. In collaboration with Mildura Rural City Council, Mildura Riverfront, and members of the local action group, Kylie facilitated ‘Winter Solstice’, a midwinter celebration for the community with opportunities to enjoy music and art along the riverfront in Mildura. 

Waking up to a beautiful, sunny morning following days of clouds and rain, Kylie took the opportunity to maximise the good weather feels of the day with one final push of publicity to everyone out enjoying the sunshine. It paid off and Kylie estimates that somewhere between 500 and 700 people attended the Winter Solstice, later that evening.

“We wanted it to be as inclusive as possible. There were a lot of people working together to make the night a success, including volunteers from the community and local organisations. There was a Drum Circle with Catherine Threlfall, and a mix of groups from the community. Sunraysed Voices performed and we also had Sunraysia Irish Dancers and a mix of buskers and professionals. There was Art with Missy who ran craft activities with the kids, there were fire twirlers and a smoking ceremony at the beginning which got everything started, including a big campfire. It was great to see so many age groups represented and probably different demographics as well.” 

Over the course of the evening the Lions Club cooked up 400 sausages and the chef from the Sunraysia Mallee Ethnic Communities Council’s food relief program ladled out 500 serves of soup!

Kylie says, “the fact we got that many people along on such a dark winter’s night shows that there is a real interest and need for participatory music and activity in our community. There was a real sense of community and connection.”

To stay informed about forthcoming events and networking opportunities for music-makers in Mildura, Sunraysia and the Mallee, join the Murray Mallee Music Makers Facebook Page or drop a line to Kylie at CMVic and say hello!

Article by Deb Carveth, CMVic Copy Editor, with Kylie Livingston, CMVic Local Catalyst for Mildura, Sunraysia and the Mallee; photo credits: Mildura Rural City Council and Mildura Riverfront. A big thanks to everyone!

GCM in Mildura, Sunraysia, Mallee is supported by the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust and the Department of Social Services Information Linkages and Capacity Social and Community Participation Stream.

Speech or Song? Identifying How the Brain Perceives Music

New research explores the different ways in which the brain distinguishes between music and speech.

Source: Cognitive Neuroscience Society Press Release

Most neuroscientists who study music have something in common: they play a musical instrument, in many cases from a young age. Their drive to understand how the brain perceives and is shaped by music springs from a deep love of music.

This passion has translated to a wealth of discoveries about music in the brain, including recent work that identifies the ways in which the brain distinguishes between music and speech. 

“Over the past two decades, many excellent studies have shown similar mechanisms between speech and music across many levels,” says Andrew Chang of New York University, a lifelong violinist.

“However, a fundamental question, often overlooked, is what makes the brain treat music and speech signals differently, and why do humans need two distinct auditory signals.”

New work, enabled in part by computational advances, is pointing toward differences in pitch and rhythm as key factors that enable people starting in infancy to distinguish speech from music, as well as how the predictive capabilities of the brain underlie both speech and music perception. 

Exploring acoustical perception in infants

From a young age, cognitive neuroscientist Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden of University of Toronto, Mississauga, has been singing and playing the cello, which have helped to shape her research career.

“I remember sitting in the middle of the cello section and we were playing some particularly beautiful music – one where the whole cello section had the melody,” she says, “and I remember having this emotional response and wondering ‘how is it possible that I can have such a strong emotional response from the vibrations of my strings traveling to my ear? That seems wild!’” 

That experience started der Nederlanden on a long journey of wanting to understand how the brain processes music and speech in early development. Specifically, she and colleagues are investigating whether babies, who are learning about communicative sounds through experience, even know the difference between speech and song. 

“These are seemingly simple questions that actually have a lot of theoretical importance for how we learn to communicate,” she says.

“We know that from age 4, children can and readily do explicitly differentiate between music and language. Although that seems pretty obvious there has been little to no data asking children to make these sorts of distinctions.” 

At a recent Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) meeting, der Nederlanden presented on new data collected right before and during the COVID-19 pandemic about the acoustic features that shape music and language during development. In one experiment, 4-month-old infants heard speech and song, both in a sing-songy infant-directed manner and in a monotone speaking voice, while recording electrical brain activity with electroencephalogram (EEG). 

“This work novelly suggests that infants are better at tracking infant-directed utterances when they’re spoken compared to sung, and this is different from what we see in adults who are better at neural tracking sung compared to spoken utterances,” she says.

They also found that pitch and rhythm each affected brain activity for speech compared to song, for example, finding that exaggerated pitch was related to better neural tracking of infant-directed speech – identifying the lack of “pitch stability” as an important acoustic feature for guiding attention in babies. 

While the exaggerated, unstable pitch contours of infant-directed speech, has been well-established as a feature infants love, this new research shows it also helps to signal whether someone is hearing speech or song.

Pitch stability is a feature, der Nederlanden says, that “might signal to a listener ‘oh this sounds like someone singing,’” and the lack of pitch stability can conversely signal to infants that they are hearing speech rather than playing with sounds in song.

In an online experiment, der Nederlanden and colleagues asked kids and adults to qualitatively describe how music and language are different. “This gave me a rich dataset that tells me a lot about how people think music and language differ acoustically and also in terms of how the functional roles of music and language differ in our everyday lives,” she explains.

“For the acoustic differences, kids and adults described features like tempo, pitch, rhythm as important features for differentiating speech and song.”

In future work, der Nederlanden hopes to move toward more naturalistic settings, including using mobile EEG to test music and language processing outside of the lab.

“I think the girl sitting in the orchestra pit, geeking out about music and emotion, would be pretty excited to find out that she’s still asking questions about music and finding results that could have answered her questions from over 20 years ago!”

Identifying the predictive code of music

Guilhem Marion of Ecole Normale Supérieure has two passions that drive his research: music and computer science. He has combined those interests to create novel computational models of music that are helping researchers understand how the brain perceives music through “predictive coding,” similar to how people predict patterns in language.

“Predictive coding theory explains how the brain tries to predict the next note while listening to music, which is exactly what computational models of music do for generating new music,” he explains. Marion is using those models to better understand how culture affects music perception, by pulling in knowledge based on individual environments and knowledge. 

In new work conducted with Giovanni Di Liberto and colleagues, Marion recorded EEG activity of 21 professional musicians who were listening to or imagining in their minds four Bach choral pieces. In one study, they were able to identify the amount of surprise for each note, using a computational model based on a large database of Western music. This surprise was a “cultural marker of music processing,” Marion says, showing how closely the notes were predicted based on a person’s native musical environment. 

“Our study showed for the first time the average EEG response to imagined musical notes and showed that they were correlated with the musical surprise computed using a statistical model of music,” Marion says. “This work has broad implications in music cognition but more generally in cognitive neuroscience, as they will enlighten the way the human brain learns new language or other structures that will later shape its perception of the world.”

“These findings are the basis for the potential applications in clinical and child development domains, such as whether music can be used as an alternative form of verbal communication for individuals with aphasia, and how music facilitates infants learning speech.” -Andrew Chang

Chang says that such computational-based work is enabling a new type of music cognition study that balances good experimental control with ecological validity, something challenging for the complexity involved in music and speech sounds. “You often either make the sounds unnatural if everything is well controlled for your experimental purpose or preserve their natural properties of speech or music, but it then becomes difficult to fairly compare the sounds between experimental conditions,” he explains. “Marion and Di Liberto’s groundbreaking approach enables researchers to investigate, and even isolate, the neural activities while listening to a continuous natural speech or music recording.

Chang, who has been playing violin since he was 8-years old, is excited to see the progress that has been made in music cognition studies just in the last decade. “When I started my PhD in 2013, only a few labs in the world were focusing on music,” he says. “But now there are many excellent junior and even well-established senior researchers from other fields, such as speech, around the globe starting to get involved or even devoted to music cognitive neuroscience research.”

Understanding the relationship between music and language “can help us explore the fundamental questions of human cognition, such as why humans need music and speech, and how humans communicate and interact with each other via these forms,” Chang says. “Also, these findings are the basis for the potential applications in clinical and child development domains, such as whether music can be used as an alternative form of verbal communication for individuals with aphasia, and how music facilitates infants learning speech.”

Author: Lisa M.P. Munoz
Source: Cognitive Neuroscience Society Press Release
Contact: Lisa M.P. Munoz – Cognitive Neuroscience Society Public Information Officer, Cognitive Neuroscience Society
cns.publicaffairs[@]gmail.com

Reproduced on the CMVic Blog with kind permission from Lisa M.P. Munoz
Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

Original research: The results were presented at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. The symposium “From Acoustics to Music or Speech: Their (Dis)Similar Perceptual Mechanisms” took place at 1:30pmPT on Tuesday, April 26, as part of the CNS 2022 annual meeting from April 23-26, 2022.

CNS is committed to the development of mind and brain research aimed at investigating the psychological, computational, and neuroscientific bases of cognition. Since its founding in 1994, the Society has been dedicated to bringing its 2,000 members worldwide the latest research to facilitate public, professional, and scientific discourse.

Singing in the Brain

Summary: Researchers have identified a population of neurons in the auditory cortex that responds to singing, but not any other type of music.

For the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a population of neurons in the human brain that lights up when we hear singing, but not other types of music.

These neurons, found in the auditory cortex, appear to respond to the specific combination of voice and music, but not to either regular speech or instrumental music. Exactly what they are doing is unknown and will require more work to uncover, the researchers say.

“The work provides evidence for relatively fine-grained segregation of function within the auditory cortex, in a way that aligns with an intuitive distinction within music,” says Sam Norman-Haignere, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

“There’s one population of neurons that responds to singing, and then very nearby is another population of neurons that responds broadly to lots of music.”

Norman-Haignere

The work builds on a 2015 study in which the same research team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify a population of neurons in the brain’s auditory cortex that responds specifically to music. In the new work, the researchers used recordings of electrical activity taken at the surface of the brain, which gave them much more precise information than fMRI.

“There’s one population of neurons that responds to singing, and then very nearby is another population of neurons that responds broadly to lots of music. At the scale of fMRI, they’re so close that you can’t disentangle them, but with intracranial recordings, we get additional resolution, and that’s what we believe allowed us to pick them apart,” says Norman-Haignere.

Read the full article by Anne Trafton, here

**A big thank you to Kass Mulvany for sharing this with us all!
Featured image by Rhendi Rukmana via unsplash.com

Singing in the Brain

For the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a population of neurons in the human brain that light up when you hear singing, but not other types of music. Credit: MIT