Music, Health, and Wellbeing
Raymond MacDonald, Gunter Kreutz, and Laura Mitchell
Abstract
The great saxophonist Charlie Parker once proclaimed ‘if you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn’. This quote has often been used to explain the hedonistic lifestyle of many jazz greats, but it also signals the reciprocal and inextricable relationship between music and wider social, cultural, and psychological variables. This link is complex and multifaceted and is undoubtedly a central component of why music has been implicated as a therapeutic agent in vast swathes of contemporary research studies. Music is always about more than just acoustic events or notes on a page. Music has a ... More
The great saxophonist Charlie Parker once proclaimed ‘if you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn’. This quote has often been used to explain the hedonistic lifestyle of many jazz greats, but it also signals the reciprocal and inextricable relationship between music and wider social, cultural, and psychological variables. This link is complex and multifaceted and is undoubtedly a central component of why music has been implicated as a therapeutic agent in vast swathes of contemporary research studies. Music is always about more than just acoustic events or notes on a page. Music has a universal and timeless potential to influence how we feel. Yet, only recently, have researchers begun to explore and understand the positive effects that music can have on our wellbeing — across a range of cultures and musical genres. This book brings together research from music psychology, therapy, public health, and medicine, to explore the relationship between music, health, and wellbeing. It presents a range of chapters to give an account of recent advances and applications in both clinical and non-clinical practice and research. Some of the questions explored include: what is the nature of the scientific evidence to support the relationship between music, health, and wellbeing? What are the current views from different disciplines on empirical observations and methodological issues concerning the effects of musical interventions on health-related processes? What are the mechanisms which drive these effects and how can they be utilized for building robust theoretical frameworks for future work?
Keywords:
music,
jazz,
musical genres,
music psychology,
therapy,
health,
wellbeing,
musical interventions
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199586974 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199586974.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Raymond MacDonald, editor
Professor of Music Psychology and Improvisation, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Gunter Kreutz, editor
Professor of Systematic Musicology, Department of Music, Carl von Ossietzky University, Germany
Laura Mitchell, editor
Assistant Professor of Psychology, Bishop's University, Canada
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