International Association for Music & Medicine

IAMM With You: In Conversation With Nuria Escude & Rafael Ramirez-Melendez
2021-10-30 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
Music is known to have the power to induce strong emotions. In this talk we will assess, based on Electroencephalography (EEG) data, the emotional response of terminally ill cancer patients to a music therapy intervention in a randomized controlled trial. A sample of 40 participants from the palliative care unit in the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona was randomly assigned to two groups of 20. The first group [experimental group (EG)] participated in a session of music therapy (MT), and the second group [control group (CG)] was provided with company. Based on our previous work on EEG-based emotion detection, instantaneous emotional indicators in the form of a coordinate in the arousal-valence plane were extracted from the participants’ EEG data. The emotional indicators were analyzed in order to quantify (1) the overall emotional effect of MT on the patients compared to controls, and (2) the relative effect of the different MT techniques applied during each session. EEG data analysis showed a significant increase in valence (p = 0.0004) and arousal (p = 0.003) during the MT session in the EG. No significant changes were found in the CG. Artificial intelligence techniques were applied to build computational predictive models of music therapy outcomes before the session took place.

About our Guests
Dr. Rafael Ramirez (Prof, PhD) is a Tenured Associate Professor and Leader of the Music and Machine Learning Lab at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He is Lecturer and Research Coordinator in the Master in Music Therapy, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona. He obtained his BSc in Mathematics form the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and his MSc and PhD in Artificial Intelligence and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bristol, UK. He studied Classical Violin and Guitar at the National School of Music in Mexico, and since then he has played with different music groups in Europe, America and Asia. For five years, Rafael was a Lecturer in National University of Singapore. His research interests include music technology, music therapy, artificial intelligence, and their application to health and well-being. In particular, he has conducted research on the impact of music and music therapy in autism, emotional disorders, palliative care, cerebral palsy, stroke, and parkinson decease. He has published more than 120 research articles in peer-reviewed international Journals and Conferences, and acted as guest-editor of several special issues focused on music and artificial intelligence.
Núria Escudé (BA, Mth) is a lecturer and Director of the Music Therapy Program at the University of Barcelona since 2002. She is a psychologist and qualified piano teacher. She is also director and Music Therapist at the Catalan Institute of Music Therapy, where she has worked with children with special needs for the last 15 years in collaboration with the Barenboim Said Fundation. Member of the Board of the Directors of the International Association for Music & Medicine. Nuria is working and researching music therapy in NICU (University Hospital Terrassa), and RBL (Rhythm, Breath, & Lullaby), and works in the Oncology and Paliative Care Units in UPS Hospital Esperanza, Barcelona, and also works in the Hospital San Juan de Dios, Barcelona, with patients affected with Alzheimer’s disease.

This event will be hosted by Dr. Josep Planas Domingo, member of IAMM’s Board of Directors.

Please note that IAMM members do not need to register and will automatically receive a Zoom link for this event. For questions email sgracida@iammonline.com.
Join IAMM here.

IAMM With You: In Conversation With Jennifer Buchanan
2021-10-19 13:00 - 14:00
Like many music therapists, Jennifer started with a huge mission. She wanted to help people in their pursuit of optimum health. But after running her private practice for twenty years, even with thousands of clients and loyal staff, she felt burned out and not sure if her private practice would make it. Rather than quit, Buchanan went on an intense quest to prove her private practice’s viability and identify the key components of sustainable healthcare practices. She would need everything she learned a decade later to make it through the pandemic and on to the post-covid world.

About the Guest
Founder of JB Music Therapy private practice in 1991….now almost 30 years later we have a team of 18 certified music therapists. Author of two award-winning books, ‘Wellness Incorporated’ and ‘Tune In’ with a new book as of October 10 that features the Power of a Playlist. Jennifer is regularly invited to speak at healthcare, and wellness focused conferences and rounds out her career with an Executive MBA – currently using these skills as the Executive Director of the Canadian Associaton of Music Therapists.
This event will be hosted by Aksana Kavaliova-Moussi, MTA, member of Music and Medicine’s Editorial Board.

Please note that IAMM members do not need to register and will automatically receive a Zoom link for this event. For questions email sgracida@iammonline.com.
Join IAMM here.

IAMM With You: In Conversation With Sebastian Hachmeyer
2021-09-29 11:00 - 12:00
In a recent article about musical healing in the Bolivian Andes (Hachmeyer 2019), Sebastian Hachmeyer focused on performative and kinaesthetic aspects of collective flute music and dance as part of a place-based bodily understanding of healing in the Andes. He argued that health and sickness, but also music and dance, can be very different things depending on ontological perspective.
In this conversation, he wishes to turn to sound as a source of healing in the Andes. He will discuss sound within three spheres: Sound as Energy, Sound in Environment, and Sounds of (Dis)Harmony.
About the Guest
Sebastian Hachmeyer is a Post-Doc Researcher at Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany. He received his PhD in Music and Geography from Royal Holloway University of London. Sebastian is a human ecologist, environmental geographer, and ethnomusicologist specialised in ecomusicology. Besides climate change, materiality of music/musical instruments, and questions of sustainability, his research in Bolivia further addresses issues surrounding musical healing and the relationship to place and the spiritual environment of the Andes.

This event will be hosted by Samuel Gracida, MA, MT, IAMM Chair of Communications and Outreach, Operating Director at Sam’s Fans, and leader in diverse projects regarding music therapy in Germany, Mexico, and Internationally.

Please note that IAMM members do not need to register and will automatically receive a Zoom link for this event. For questions email sgracida@iammonline.com.
Join IAMM here.

IAMM With You: In Conversation With Siva Kumar
2021-09-21 10:00 - 11:00
Every person has the potential to heal themselves by discovering and abiding in the Spiritual dimension. Music is perhaps the most easily accessible route to reach this destination. That’s why, a strong role for music in all religious and spiritual traditions across various cultures throughout the ages could be discerned. However, an awareness regarding the mechanism of its working is very important to sustain the gains. Like a map being perused before the actual visit, the role of music in the scheme of things needs to be understood well. In Eastern philosophy, especially Indian, being perhaps among the oldest asserts the individual mind as the centre of the universe. Once this background canvas is experientially established, the individual personality and the world revealed through the mind get realized as separate un-entangled entities.
To reiterate, the revealing non-localized intelligence, which is the essence of oneself, is thereafter known as something not entangled in the enormous and confusing visible panaroma. This clarity affords real and absolute freedom that enables healing to happen at all levels. Music is perhaps the most easiest and endearing means for the mind to become lucid enough to experience and abide in this dimension. In this presentation, an attempt shall be made to decipher a few relevant verses of scriptural instructions enunciated by someone universally acknowledged as the greatest sage of the 20th century, Ramana Maharishi, whom the father of psychoanalysis Carl Jung glorified as the “whitest spot in the white space”. Come, let’s explore this dimension together!

About the Guest
Siva Kumar currently, is associated with the Research Department at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kerala, South India, the institution inspired by globally acclaimed spiritual leader Mata Amritanandamayi Devi. He is a post-graduate with M.Phil degree in life sciences and worked in the biopharmaceutical and medical diagnostics industry for over two decades earlier including heading the organization’s corporate training institution as well. He has been disseminating the teachings of Ramana Maharishi for the past several years. He cherishes teaching Indian philosophical thoughts to post-graduate students of Clinical Psychology and value education classes to undergraduates at the healthcare campus of this leading university. He firmly believes that humanity has no option but to evolve to the higher spiritual consciousness in order to establish genuine peace in a world where expanding competitive cultural and religious boundaries cause friction.

This event will be hosted by Maria Montserrat Gimeno Domènech, EdD., LCAT, MT-BC, a member of IAMM’s Board of Directors.

Please note that IAMM members do not need to register and will automatically receive a Zoom link for this event. For questions email sgracida@iammonline.com.
Join IAMM here.

Welcome to IAMM With You - Fall Edition!
2021-09-06 12:00 - 13:00
For our first session in this series, we will look back at the wonderful events we hosted in the previous season of IAMM With You: In Conversation. Additionally, we will give you a preview of what is coming up for the Fall Edition of IAMM With You.

More information about IAMM With You:
Leading scholars, researchers, educators, therapists, musicians, practitioners, and other visionaries offer their expertise in various specialties through an online interview or concert/presentation and open discussion. In the first 30 minutes, they present their current work, its development, and perspectives on the future of music and medicine/health, then respond to questions and comments for another 30 minutes.
These experts will also provide reading lists, playlists, websites, or audio/video files for future reference and investigation. Explore the full schedule here.
This event is free and open to the public. Simply register below!

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IAMM Book Club - Experiencing Race as a Music Therapist
2021-08-23 12:00 - 13:00
Join us for this talk with Susan Hadley, PhD, MT-BC on August 23rd at 12noon Eastern Daylight Time.
Experiencing Race as a Music Therapist: Personal Narratives is a compilation of critically engaging narratives that grew out of conversations with 17 music therapists living in different parts of the world, from various racial groups, about their experiences of their racialized identities in the therapy setting. The music therapists describe the raced and cultural contexts in which they were born and describe the racial demographics of the places they have lived at various times in their lives. The countries in which the individual music therapists spent their formative years include Australia, Canada, Iran, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, with many of them also having traveled to other countries.
The music therapists discussed their specific experiences of their racialized identities when they were studying music therapy and how they experienced their racialized identities in their professional lives. Many of them also described the differences they were aware of in terms of how they experienced themselves as raced or how they experienced the therapeutic relationship when they were working with people of their own race compared with working with people who were from a different race. From these narratives, we can see that our life experiences shape how we understand ourselves and others, our assumptions and biases, and the effort with which we form relationships with different groups of people. The music therapists in this book have shared their experiences in the hope that we can learn how to sit in our discomfort, without judgment, lowering our defenses, in order to learn more about ourselves and others, so that we can deepen our understandings and our relationships across racialized lines.
Susan Hadley, PhD, MT-BC, is professor of music therapy at Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania. She is the co-author, editor, or co-editor of several books including Sociocultural Identities in Music Therapy (2021), Our Black Sons Matter: Mothers Talk about their Fears, Sorrows, and Hopes ​(2016), Experiencing Race as a Music Therapist (2013), Therapeutic Uses of Rap and Hip Hop (2012), Feminist Perspectives in Music Therapy (2006), Narrative Identities: Psychologists Engaged in Self-Construction (2005) and Psychodynamic Music Therapy: Case Studies (Barcelona, 2003). She is currently co-editing a book on Colonialism and Music Therapy. She has published numerous scholarly articles, chapters and reviews,serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and is co-editor-in-chief of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy and Qualitative Inquiries in Music Therapy.

Past Events:

IAMM Book Club - Scales to Scalpels
2021-08-09 12:00 - 13:00
Join us for this talk with Dr. Lisa Wong on August 9th at 12noon Eastern Daylight Time.
In Scales to Scalpels, Dr. Lisa Wong chronicles how the music acumen of physicians affects the way they administer healing and, in turn, how their medical work affects their music. The book attempts to answer the question, “How does practicing the art of music transform the art of practicing medicine”?
Dr. Wong tells the story of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble of talented Boston-area physicians, med students and health-care professionals. The orchestra’s musicians inspire the reader to learn more about doctors who practice the healing arts of music and medicine and the fascinating interplay between medicine and music. Scales to Scalpels is available on amazon.com.
Dr. Lisa Wong is a pediatrician, musician, and author dedicated to the healing arts of music and medicine. She is a violinist, violist and pianist who has worked at Milton Pediatric Associates since 1986 and is also an Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School, where she is the Associate Co-Director of the Arts and Humanities Initiative.
Dr. Wong will be joined by Dr. Psyche Loui, music neuroscientist and Director of the MIND (Music Imaging and Neural Dynamics) lab at Northeastern University for a lively discussion on the challenges and changes in the field during the current pandemic. Dr. Loui is also Chair of the IAMM Task Force on Music & Neuroscience.
This event is a member benefit and no additional registration is required. All active members will receive the Zoom link via email.

Past Events:

IAMM Book Club - Music As Care
2021-07-19 12:00 - 13:00 | Online
We invite you to our second IAMM Book Club meeting on July 19th at 12 noon (EDT) for an engaging discussion with authors Sarah Hoover and Moisès Fernández Via discussing Hoover’s newly-released “Music as Care: Artistry in the Hospital Environment,” a book providing an overview of professional musicians working within the healthcare system. This volume considers the interactions within the clinical environment between artist and patient, exploring how musical careers and artistic practices can develop safely and effectively through work in a hospital setting.
This event is a member benefit. Please consider joining IAMM here.

Past Events:

IAMM Book Club - Sing You Home
2021-07-13 12:00 - 13:00 | Online
Join our first IAMM Book Club meeting on July 13th at 12pm EDT for a conversation with Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-seven novels. 5 of Jodi’s books have been made into movies including “My Sister’s Keeper” starring Cameron Dias. She was also featured on The Ellen DeGeneres Show for her book “Sing You Home.” She has won many awards and recognitions including the Sarah Josepha Hale award.
This event will be free and open to the public, please register here.

IAMM With You: In Conversation with Isabel Tan, Kenneth Lam, and Calvin Eng
2021-06-29 09:00 - 10:30 | Online
How might we envision the day when music is at the forefront of holistic health care? In this conversation, we will introduce The Association for Music Therapy Singapore, and St Luke’s Hospital, and our common vision to not only make music therapy services accessible, but to further explore how music and the arts may play a vital role in improving Healthcare, Quality of Life, Well-Being, and Society.

Isabel Tan, RMT, graduated from the University of Queensland with a Masters of Music Therapy in 2014 and has worked as a private practitioner, clinical educator towards interns and guest lecturer in HELP University in Malaysia. She is currently pioneering the Music Therapy department in St Luke’s Hospital in Singapore and continues to expand the music therapy services in the hospital through inpatient and outpatient work, education and training.
Kenneth is currently the Deputy Director of Operations and Rehabilitation at St Luke’s Hospital. Beginning as a physiotherapist in the late 1990s, Kenneth has worked collaboratively with numerous medical and allied health professionals, and has developed a keen insight into collaborative work in rehabilitation.
Calvin Eng, MT-BC, is a board certified music therapist, with a Bachelor of Music in Music Therapy, from Berklee College of Music. Upon returning to Singapore in 2017, he has been working in the special education setting, serving individuals with neuro-developmental disorders, and multiple disabilities. Calvin is President of the Association for Music Therapy Singapore (AMTS), leading the association in its efforts to raise awareness of music therapy in Singapore.

Host: Samuel Gracida, MA, MT, IAMM’s Chair of Communications and Outreach Committee

Please note that IAMM members do not need to register and will automatically receive a Zoom link for this event. For questions email sgracida@iammonline.com.
Join IAMM here.
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In Conversation With: Xijing Chen, Mingming Liu, and Qian Liu
2021-06-25 20:00 | Online
In this event, IAMM will be in conversation with Xijing Chen, Mingming Liu, and Qian Liu. As music therapists, educators, and researchers, Prof. Liu and Dr. Chen will engage with Dr. Qian Liu, a medical doctor, about the development and practice of music and medicine in China.

Suggested reading prior to the event is Music Therapy in China, an article written by Jing-Wen Zhang, Tian Gao, and Ming-Ming Liu and published on Vol. 8, No. 1 of IAMM’s Flagship Journal Music and Medicine.
Become a member of IAMM here to have access to our Journal Music and Medicine and participate in this event without additional cost. Join here.
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