 Goedemorgen allemaal. De kracht van muziek zit hem vooral in de stilte, omdat we vandaag een Engelse Sprekersgroep hebben, wil de remainder of this presentation be in English. I have to apologize for my American deflection in the pronunciation of this beautiful language and also to massacre it occasionally. But if you talk about music, the essential part of music is also the moments that there is no music, the breaks, the pauses, the rhythm. So we're going to talk about that rhythm, the over rhythm of this symposium for which I welcome you very much is four presentations. So we have four presentations about the various components of music and how it relates to society at a global level, at a national level, but also to individuals like music has all kinds of functions, right? It has a function of experiential music. It has the function of regulating emotion. It has the function of expressing emotion, all kinds of things. We're going to talk about this this morning around these four presentations of experts in the field. Before we start, I'd like to congratulate or sort of congratulate Valdi Hanser, who is sort of like the pivotal person around which this symposium is organized, and he will defend his dissertation, this dissertation at around 1.30 this afternoon. But in the morning we have a more general symposium around this organized by his mentor, Professor Wingerhuts, a dear colleague of mine who I know since I did not have gray hair and had lots of hair, lots of hair until here, but that has been when I was an active musician at the time. All right, so how is this going to work? So these four presenters are going to talk about the various aspects of music and I will introduce them each time. I'll warn the presenters this desk can move a bit, so be careful with that. There's some water for you. The each presenter has about 20 minutes to present. There's some time to ask questions. There will be no break in the middle, so we keep on going like the, what's yours? Mateus Pachon, not as long as that, but about about two hours we'll keep on going. And then at the end there will be some coffee for you to sort of catch up again to get ready for the dissertation presentation of Valdi Hanser, right? So without further ado, I will start to introduce the first presenter. I don't think I introduced myself. My name is Rio Coppets, an irrelevant note and it doesn't matter much, but then at least you know who's talking to you. That's always interesting for the people who want to complain later on. And anyway, so the first presenter is about this. Sometimes you hear a piece of music and you think like, what is this? Why do I have to listen to this? And it creates a form of, if you will, disgust or some other form of unpleasant emotion. For those of you who are in the brain, your insula will be acutely activated with all kinds of visceral responses to that. Other types of music have like a more approach behavior, like you like it. It makes you engage in love or other forms of approach behaviors that will not further be gone into detail now. So the first presenter of the four today comes from the United Kingdom. Originally he comes from the United States, somewhere in New York State. But now he's at Kent University in the United Kingdom. He presents some work in collaboration with his graduate student, Heather Rolfie. And the first presentation will go into any tomorrow aspects of music. And he will talk about this in more detail himself. So I'd like to give the floor to Mr. Dr. Roger Jiner Solaro. Please. Thank you, Willem. So where's my presentation? Ah, here it is. Great. All right. Thank you all. Hello, Tilburg. Very glad to be here. Very grateful to Add and Willem for inviting me and to present really some work that is credited to my former PhD student who is now a lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University in Wales, Heather Rolf. And these are basically four studies from her thesis that talk about moral disgust as a response to music. So we're going to start off unfortunately in a very negative sense and talk about the negative responses people have to music. But if you look at the history of music, you'll find that actually moral disgust is quite a common response to music that you don't like. So let me just go through a little bit, a very brief outline of the theory that we started this work with coming from social psychology research. Now, disgust and anger are often spoken of in the same sentence. I say, I'm disgusted and I'm angry. But there is somewhat of a consensus. There's always a debate about this, but there's somewhat of a consensus that disgust and anger in moral situations respond to slightly different things. So the kind of when you feel one of these emotions towards something you think is immoral that someone has done. When you feel more disgust than anger, then the conventional wisdom from about 20 years of research is that you're talking about violations of norms that are called various things, divinity or purity norms. We in our research have called them bodily norms. These are violations of norms in and of themselves about what kind of sex is okay to have, what kind of foods especially meat is all right to eat and other things that are considered sacred. Whereas when you feel more anger than disgust, the consensus goes that you're talking about things that actually hurt other people. So the prototypical more disgust than anger is, let's say somebody is committing a sex act that you think is gross or morally disgusting immoral such as consensual incest, but they're not actually hurting anyone. They're using contraception. There's no genetic consequences whatsoever. A brother and a sister. There's no exploitation that's consensual. And yet people still feel this moral disgust because it's just something that's basically wrong even though you can argue all you like. It's not actually hurting people. So this is the situation that we arrived at when Heather started out studying moral disgust towards music. And what we're going to show you is that in the realm of music, there's a little bit of a basis to challenge this conventional wisdom. So let me explain with a short history of moral disgust felt towards music. Of course, I could make this a long history. We could talk about, for example, disgust towards modern music, the riot that happened at the Rites of Spring premiere from Stravinsky. But just a few touchstones in sort of modern pop music. A lot of disgust was felt towards acts that were considered overly sexual in the 1950s, like Elvis Presley, was sometimes referred to as a disgusting musician band from towns and so on. In the 1980s, some of you who are old enough may remember this, that there was a controversy about heavy metal and rap music and the lyrics that led to, if you can recognize this guy from the 80s, you're probably from my generation. This is Dee Snyder, from Twisted Sister, testifying in the American Congress. And then more recently within Living Memory, at least, there was a song called Blurred Lines. I don't know if it was a hit over here. But because of its video and the lyrics, it was criticized for sexism in some British universities, went so far as to ban it from their social event. You can see here that there's a little tweet. Robin Fix, a disgusting sleazebag. And then you can see over here some people are protesting. There are no blurred lines, fuck Robin Thicke. There's a lot of disgust, a lot of controversy with music, mostly about the lyrical messages, I have to say, but also sometimes about the moves, as you can see with Elvis. And you can, for example, go on the internet and you can find people discussing what disgusting music is. En these, maybe the, oh, you can probably read this. But so on Quora, somebody put the question, what is the most disgusting genre of music? And I think this is a good introduction to what we found in our research. Because over here pop and rap is more disgusting than other music. They compare it to heavy metal, which this person is a defender of heavy metal. En these are songs about serious topics. Rap is about sex, drugs and murder. So that's why it's disgusting. Rap takes the cake in terms of corruption. It is unhealthy. The fan base is toxic. Down here you have someone. White power music is disgusting. Racist music is disgusting. And I don't know if anyone from Sweden is in the house. But here we have dance band from Sweden. It's the worst and most meaningless music you ever heard. It makes you hate music. Ok, so here maybe you have moral disgust about the message within the music, be it about crime and drugs, or be it about racism. But then you have a little bit of a picture of aesthetic disgust with the person who is offended by the dance band music. So we have two basic questions about these kinds of expressions of disgust. First of all, how much is it moral and how much is it aesthetic? Right? Now moral, basically the difference is that morality has to do with how you think people should behave. Whereas aesthetics can be only personal, although some people might moralize aesthetics and say you should only like a certain kind of music. And if you like this other kind of music, there's something wrong with you. So it's a little bit tricky, but I think moralization is taking the stance that this music is bad for everyone. And it's objectively wrong. And we have to distinguish this from just having, using the word disgust to express extreme dislike for the music style. So the question is to what extent, as we see here with these extreme heavy metal musicians from Norway, do you just think it's a ridiculous style and you don't like it? Do you think actually this is corrupting people morally? And so if we do accept that this disgust expression is a moral expression, does disgust versus anger respond to the content of the music? Recall that the psychology research up until then associates disgust with things like self-sexuality or self-pollution using drugs, but you might imagine from that research that then if you hear music that's about violence, it would make you angry because when you hear about real life violence, it makes people angry because of the harm to people when you hear about real life sexual transgressions that don't harm people, disgust is the prevalent response. However, there's another perspective and we've in our lab have done some research on this, which is that when you're talking about expressions of immorality, rather than the actual acts of immorality, an overriding concern is to what extent does this corrupt the moral character of people. And from this point of view, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about sex, drugs or violence, all of these things in a song rather than in real life would go to corrupt a person's moral character. You might say, well, this violent music doesn't actually harm anyone. Often the artists, including Tupac Shakur, who you see here in a violent stance, would say that this is just, you know, we're just presenting, we're just telling it how it is, we're just keeping it real. But the answer to that is even if you're keeping it real, the fact that you normalize and you present this violence as something normal goes to corrupting character. It may not be an act of violence, but is facilitating and making it easier for people to go out and actually commit violence. So I'm going to tell you very quickly about four studies that Heather conducted under my supervision and studies one and two started with the emotion words. And half the people we asked what makes you disgusted about music. Can you think of an example of music that makes you disgusted? And the other half we asked, can you think of an example of music that makes you angry? We wanted to see what kinds of music they came up with and what the differences between the reasons for being disgusted and angry were. But then in studies three and four, we reversed in a sense the direction of inquiry. We started with the traits of music that the first two studies identified. Let's see if we give people these traits, do they respond with more disgust than anger when these are traits associated with moral disgust, for example. So these studies in a sense are symmetrical with each other and within each pair there are kind of replications of each other with slightly different samples and settings. Okay. So in study one again, this was an online sample. We had about 90 people who were recruited from the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. And Heather and a friend of hers coded these responses according to what kind of reasons people came up with. So I'm going to show you first the reasons in the disgust versus anger condition. You can see that if you go down the left line, I've divided them into concerns that are non-moral in blue and then in red we have the concerns that are considered to be about moral issues. So aesthetics, I just don't like the music, was a fairly high picked reason, but you notice it was disgust and anger as prompts. It showed up pretty much the same for both of these. Intrusiveness, the music is annoying, was also about the same for disgust and anger. This music is associated with negative personal experiences I have. It brings bad memories also also about equal and personal emotion regulation was also kind of about equal, very low though. But going with the more popular moral reasons, there was a tendency, a lot of people when they were asked what disgust you, they mentioned the objectionable moral content and we have a subtype analysis on the next slide, but you'll see that for disgust and statistically this was significantly higher at 59% than the 26% of people who came up with morally objectionable music when asked what kind of music makes you angry, which is remarkable I think. And also the fact that group harm, another reason to morally object to music also showed this significant difference more so with disgust and anger. So already we see that disgust is distinctive in that it responds to moral content, but what about the specific kinds of things mentioned in the music? And we see here that actually both harm and purity content, that is both violence, which harms people and swearing and drug use, which is more of, which only harms yourself. These were seen as elicitors of disgust more so than anger. Then we had some very, not very often mentioned moral concerns such as materialism and so forth, but the main ones were violence, bad language and drug use and these overwhelmingly were elicited for moral disgust as opposed to anger. Now study two, we switched to undergraduate students in the UK. We find very much the same results. Again, disgust more so than anger elicits morally objectionable content and group harm. But now we see a little bit the reverse where anger more than disgust elicits negative personal experience. So people mostly are responding to music that makes them angry because it's associated with other people or bad experiences. And also many of these students say they listen to angry music to regulate their own emotions, to blow off steam in a way. And again, when we look at the specific kind of moral concerns that show up more in disgust than anger, again, it's about sexuality now. This pops up with students and you can think probably because this was done around 2016, 17, that the memory of the blurred line song was still in many of these students' minds or something that was sexist or presented women in a degrading way. But again, violence in language more than disgust. There's no difference between violence and some of these more purity concerns. Okay, so now moving to the third study. Here we start from the kind of reasons that we found in the first two studies and we see if presenting these reasons can elicit more disgust than anger in the case of moral activities. So we have two moral conditions. We have two moral questions. Activities you believe are morally wrong and it's a sign that the listener is of a bad moral character. But then we have three non-moral reasons. We have it's aesthetically unpleasant. It's a bad example of a type of music. We found sometimes that people said I'm disgusted by for example heavy metal music that's gone pop or new metal that mixes in rap. And the people who are real heavy metal fans for example seem to really be offended by these. So we brought this in as one question. Finally again, in the students they had more anger primarily towards negative experience music that was associated with the bad time. So we included that and each student answered the same questions for each of these five prompts about these kinds of disliked music. So going to the results. First of all, does moral immoral content provoke more disgust than anger? Yes it does. You can see there's a statistical test but you can see also that the disgust bar is higher than the anger bar and also we found more disgust than anger for aesthetic objections. But we didn't find a significant result for bad example and negative experiences was almost the same showing that disgust doesn't really prevail when people are talking about their own negative experiences. And also recall that I said that one of the hallmarks of moralization is that you're not content to tolerate the music but you want to actually take action. You want to ban it from the radio. You want to destroy the CDs and erase the files. And the standard finding in research on people's actual behavior is that when people feel moral anger they want to attack. When they feel moral disgust they want to avoid or maybe talk about it with other people instead of actually confronting the people who are doing the immoral act. And so we thought maybe this would be the same kind of finding that because the music isn't actually causing anger but disgust that people would want to avoid music. So we had these different kinds of behaviors hostile approach and avoidance. We also asked about people's personal moral contagion concerns because one element of disgust is that it's contagious and you might be afraid of being seen as less moral if you're associated with that music. But we got a surprise when we looked at the action tendencies because even though these two moral reasons moralization and moral character had been shown to be higher in disgust than anger we go back and see the moral character were higher in disgust than anger immoral content higher in disgust than anger at the same time if you look at the approach actions the actions that were saying I want to destroy the song I want to ban it I want to you know aggress against the content we find that moralization moral character reasons have higher levels of wanting to erase the music and destroy the music than the other kinds of objection to the music whereas avoidance was pretty much the same for all of these and then also moral these moral reasons were associated with moral contagions I'm concerned that people could associate this music with me so I want to stay away from the music so it seems that both approach and avoidance actions are queued by this moral immorality of music that's associated with disgust and in study four we had questions that were compressed some of the moral just into into morally wrong we didn't ask about moral character and we added a social reason because people you don't like listen to it and once again we found that disgust for immoral content was the prevailing emotion en voor persoonlijke experiences we eigenlijk vonden dat wanneer het niet betekend was het was in de andere richting voor negatieve ervaring er was een beetje meer angst dan disgust uitgebreid maar op een gegeven moment we vonden dat meer zo dan de andere redenen voor niet-likend muziek de immoral content leidt voor meer bezoeken om de muziek te banen om de muziek te veranderen wat is interessant je niet usually associatie deze met disgust maar om het allemaal op te rappen hoe kunnen we dit paradox uitleggen dat muziek dat je ziet als immoral zoiets een emotioneel disgust responsie en een hostale responsie en dit ik denk is waar we kunnen denken over de nieuwe manier van verstandigd morale disgust als responsie voor een bad karakter in mensen wanneer het naar muziek komt niemand is eigenlijk gehandeld door de muziek maar er is een verandering dat muziek de morale environment kon corrupten en in de lange term veranderen door mensen veranderen hun morale standaard en dit is waarom beide drugs sexualiteit en violence allemaal creët deze verandering over muziek en we moeten niet voorzichtig zijn dat mensen die disgust op muziek ook willen veranderen het ik ga je een foto van een examen in de United States in de 1960s dit was langs John Lennon zei de betels zijn groter dan Jesus nu en dit cause een lot van controversies je kan imaginen van religieuze en dit church organiseren een verandering van betels rekord dus ze waren morale disgust en ik denk de verandering voor psychologen die emoties als je meestal psychologen in de emotie wat is de actie veranderen met disgust ze zullen zeggen natuurlijk de voordeling get away met iets maar er is een ander actie dat is veranderd met disgust dat ik niet denk dat is zo goed studyerd of appreciatied en dat is om te aan te aan te het en je kan die mensen die die de betels veranderen disgust veranderen niet necessarisch veranderen iemand maar ze waren te veranderen om religieuze hun verandering was te veranderen op de de muziek seen en veranderen de de betels rekord dus ik denk dat we moeten studyeren deze soort verandering meer omdat het zoals natuurlijk belangrijk social implications en met dat ik zal eind en bedankt heel veel dus blijf hier please dus dus als je je vragen voor dokter de dan dan over voor roger ik kan zeggen roger wij zeggen ja ja dan please doe zo als niet ik heb wat suggesties dus dus dus geen vragen van de audience maar op omdat het het is daar dus dus dus we kunnen niet te zien of of je je alweer wanneer je over de vraag ik heb deze theme voor elk presenter want we altijd geven de applaus in een beetje van een je jouw jouw jouw jouw jouw gewone manier dus we gaan geven elke presenter een klap ritme applaus dus voor roger ik heb deze dus je klapt met mij oké daar daar we gaan dit daar we gaan dankjewel dus denk over een ander van voor voor de volgende lectuur dus dankjewel geen meer vragen oh go ahead go ahead oh we moeten je mijn telefoon anders mensen wordt me genoemd roger dankjewel voor de presentatie dat was echt cool I'm just wondering like is there any any follow-up research planned and I'm also wondering does like disgust relate to any particular people like personality or yeah and if you find that with the music as well I'm working with another phd student right now it's not necessarily about music but it's about personality and what kind of personality traits create this moral disgust at a bad character and we find actually that in psychology there's a set of personality traits called the dark triad which are narcissism sadism and machiavelianism of using other people as means to an end and we find that when you present these even if they're not harming anyone when somebody expresses narcissism their view is having a bad moral character and they're seen with more disgust than anger but if you add the fact that the narcissism actually is harming somebody then you get the anger going up as well so that's maybe an answer to the question of what kind of people and I think sometimes in the music studies as well we would get these negative responses to artists who you feel are maybe they're setting a bad example they're narcissistic so I think we even saw a little bit of that sometimes people would object to individual musical artists and say they're so full of themselves or they don't have a good lifestyle I think those are examples of bad moral character and so the new understanding now is that moral disgust is a response to other people's bad character regardless of whether it harms people or not I think thank you I have a question this is older work by Dorf Silman about personal ads and music preference and he said oh I'm Jenny by the way and I like heavy metal and the boys didn't like Jenny because she liked heavy metal but if she liked classical music she was more popular and with the boys it was the other way around so it was 30 years ago and I don't know there hasn't been much replication and I'm very about the methodology and everything but do you think it's dangerous to reveal a music preference in a personal ad? I think how did they interpret that was that about gender roles because heavy metal is a more masculine kind of music and classical is maybe seen as more feminine perhaps would be my first guess as to why that's happening but yeah it can be dangerous it can be controversial and people I think we see people moralize the genres of music as well and some genres are controversial but even if you are normal that's also controversial some people don't like normal music if you like pop music you know if you like I don't know Michael Buble or whatever some people might say oh that's so normie that's so you know just come on you have to be extreme and I think the safest thing to be is actually eclectic I like all kinds of music that seems to be maybe the the top of the aesthetic pyramid but of course if you say oh that that includes country music then people say what you like country music so it's a little bit dangerous you have to be eclectic in the right way I don't know that's just my impression of the topic oh we have a question over there I can hear okay sorry the question is whether you also look at the the impact of the group or the media in this respect so people might have their individual discussed or anger but it can also be stimulate created if the group or society reacts we have a very interesting case right now we have a band gold band and they were awarded a prize recently but also recently the singer sniffed cocaine on stage and now we don't know what to think about it some people react quite in some people in the media they react quite strongly but it might also influence what individual people think because they might not have made up their mind yet so is there also research that also looks at the societal broader context well it's not part of my research but it is I mean there are people who study media effects and I think that's what you're referring to we just study individuals we don't care where their attitudes come from in our psychology studies because psychology is about the individual mind but maybe if you look in sociology there is a literature on moral panics and I think some of the examples I presented with Elvis Presley with blurred lines I mean panic is a judgmental word right some people like say moral anxiety music definitely provokes these kinds of I think what's going on is that people are trying to regulate the culture I think they want to say is this a good environment to raise children in is this a good environment a cultural environment in general and so when some kinds of subcultures or music and you know the first the first studies of moral panic were in response to youth subcultures in England the teddy boys in the 1950s the mods and the rockers in the 1960s that were involved with drugs sex violence you name it and the concern there was that the youth are growing up like this and they're going to grow up to be bad adults when actually most of them grew up to be just boring adults like the rest of us so in a way there was this judgment of moral panic but yeah definitely things like somebody publicly using hard drugs on stage creates this I think some people say well you can do what he wants but other people say what kind of example is this setting what kind of a moral environment are we looking at and I think that's kind of the takeaway message of my music but I don't study media in particular but I think that is a good application because obviously we hear about music from the media we don't have to experience this personally and then when people see something on on the media they can come together there's more communication than ever there's the internet there are user groups people sort of create on twitter in particular you can create these outrage mobs in an instance and focus on someone for 48 uur as the as the focus of outrage en so I think yeah definitely definitely it would be good to look at the media role in this thanks were you done thank you very much well this is if you think about the morality of music you got to think about for example the lyrics of some songs for example bodek yellow dat starts met like a little bitch you can fuck with me en het goes downhill from there right or for the Dutch people here in the audience de song if you listen have never listened to it it's horizon expanding what it does and I think this is by partly why you didn't talk about this but the brain structures associated with disgust are very closely connected with the brain structures connected with the sexual response we're now going to go to a different basic emotions we had anger and disgust right those are two basic emotions another important one is sadness and the next speaker Dr. Annemiek van den Toll name sounds suspiciously Dutch but she is located in the United Kingdom as well so the UK representation is excellent today here she is from Lincoln University she's there a lecturer in psychology and she's going to talk to about us about the strange ideas like why do people listen to sad music Annemiek, de floor is yours so hi everyone I'm Annemiek van den Toll thank you out for inviting me here so yesterday I practiced this presentation I went a little bit over time so I need my phone here so give me a sign if I'm talking too much so yeah Annemiek van den Toll is my name I'm a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Lincoln I'm going to talk about sad music and the paradox of sad music making people happier sometimes and I'm also going to discuss like why people like to listen to sad music and give you a few more other facts about sad music so that's my presentation so the first question that I usually get when I say that I study sad music is what is sad music so I put that here on a slide they did a lot of research in which musicians were asked to play some music that sounded sad and then the people like the audience was asked or the participants were asked like what emotion is this musician trying to portray and people do very well in recognizing what emotions musicians try to portray in their music they also looked at what musical traits you typically find in sad music and music that is perceived to supposed to sound sad so put them on the slide as well you might not know what all of them mean but if you're not a musician usually it has minor chords usually the instruments that make the music are acoustic the tempos are slower sound levels are lower there's a lower pitch and the pitch range is more narrow it's less of a vivid melody the timbres are dull and dark and then I learned as well that recent music however has a few more major chords in so the more recent sad music has more major chords than it traditionally had and is a little bit more complex so that's great to learn that there's more depth in the recent sad music so some percentages so they did studies trying to find out how many people like sad music and the majority of people apparently don't like it only 40 percent of people like to listen to sad music and there's another statistic that only 25 percent of people like to feel sad as a result of listening to sad music so it's not a very common phenomena so a little bit about me I'm actually Dutch I studied in Tilburg the professor was my undergraduate and master thesis supervisor and got me interested in music and emotion we did two projects on music and emotion and what I found out was that there isn't really a lot of literature that was like many years ago on music and emotion so once I graduated or probably even before I graduated I contacted a professor in Ireland who was also a music therapist he was quite famous and I talked with her would you like to do a PhD with me would you like to do more research with me finding out more about sad music why do people listen to it if it makes them sad and seek a very enthusiastic let me do a PhD with her like one of the first things that she told me is like yeah it makes sense that people like to listen to sad music when they're feeling sad when I work with depressed patients it doesn't make sense to expose them to or to listen happy music with them to make them happier I always start off listening to some more sad sounding music to connect with them first before we move on to that and she also showed me a couple of papers we had a lot of discussion I found out that patients who were recently diagnosed with cancer like in a paper that they like listening to sad music to grieve to do something with their emotions of sadness because they didn't want to burden their environment with their sadness they wanted to appear strong but then they could turn to the music and like do something with their emotions there there were also papers about adolescents listening to sad music to cope with their problems but there wasn't really a good paper yet on why people in general like broadly theoretically like to listen to sad music when feeling sad so yeah we took that up on our self we didn't define sad music for the participants just whatever the participants found yeah sad music themself we started this off by writing an open ended questionnaire en sending out emails putting on messages on facebook and I don't think we have twitter yet but like asking anyone who actually liked to listen to sad music when feeling sad to participate in our survey we said basically five questions why did you like to listen to sad music did it actually like for what psychological reason did you like to listen to sad music did it actually work like what you were trying to achieve like why this specific sad music were you in a yeah give us some information on the situation that you were in and is there anything else that you think we missed that you about the topic of listening to sad music when feeling sad that you think is important for us to know so we ended up with 65 participants doing this survey before we started looking into what they said so here is a summary of the reasons of the different reasons that we found them reflecting on in their responses so we said this like based on what all these participants said the following psychological reasons for listening to sad music have been mentioned by our participants the first one is sadness and experiencing effect that's what we called it and it was one of the most important reasons most commonly mentioned it people liked to listen to sad music because they wanted to be in touch with the sadness they already had they wanted to express it get over it intensify it but they wanted to do something with that sad emotion while they were listening to the music and they found the music to be very effective for that then the second one for the second one I need to reflect on the situations they reported as well so when people feel sad they've often yes sadness can often be caused by a feeling of loss so a commonly participant said they listen to sad music after a breakup there were some examples of loss as well like a loss of a loved one and there was some loss of a situation like nostalgia like back in the days I used to hang out with these people but I don't see them that often anymore so people wanted to bring that whatever they had lost back a little bit and retrieve memories of loved ones or people that they felt close to with music that somehow represented them so that we got memories and social and then surprisingly a lot of people actually said I wanted to feel better so I listened to sad music when feeling sad because I wanted to feel to feel better and that's quite an interesting one so we looked well at least it inspired me it got me really interested so I looked really close at the examples of what people gave there and a lot of the people who wanted to feel better either described that something needed to happen when they were listening to the music so they needed to come to some realization like reorganize their thoughts like many people have reflected on ups and downs being like common in people's lives and like listening to this music with this singer going through the same thing kind of like reassure them and make them feel better others like just said like I just just really like this music it's distracting me and although it's sad it just keeps things off my mind yeah so that's the other two common themes that happened in our data like rephrasing and organizing your father simply wanting to be distracted some people also mentioned that they were more able to accept any sadness or the situation if they listened to the music or after they had listened to it and the last maybe not as commonly exactly described as a friend but there seemed some friendlike characteristics hidden in the music en here is one of my favorite quotes by a 33 year old female like she was really loving listening to music so I'll read it out I felt befriended by the music by this I mean that if you were to pretend to music or the lyrics was a real person with his lyrics of understanding friendship comfort and confidence then surely the song would be your best friend your soulmate music is personified or music personified is your soulmate your trusted secret friend who can emphasize with you and this lady like she wrote a lot in her in her response she was at that moment she had a fiance and he lived on the like somewhere else on the planet they were far away from each other she said that she missed him terribly she would make CDs with songs for him that represented her feelings for him and that she could connect with so that he could listen to them then again and like understand her feelings more so that's why she listened to some sad music when feeling sad so there was a lot in this response so yeah her like making these CDs that she had a connection with that brings me to the next topic and like kind of like what surprised me at that moment being a young academic in music psychology I thought like a lot of people would select music because they simply find it beautiful like why listen to any music like why else would you listen to music or what other music would you listen to like I thought like high aesthetic value would be the most important reason for listening to the music yet my participants they kept on going on so they did mention like I listened to the music because it was beautiful but my participants kept on going on about identifying with the content of the lyrics or the mood of the of the music and there was also a lot of like yeah reflection on the memories they had attached to the to the music and then a few participants said like if I listened to that music that gives me like a feeling of hopes that it gives me some direction of what I want to do what I should do next so that's something else we found out about sad music it's a lot about connecting with the music yeah so once I had finished that project like one question still remained for me and my supervisor like how is it possible so many people feel feel feel better like if you listen to sad music aren't you supposed to to to feel sadder so we looked at our data we looked at psychology literature in general reflected on like how people regulate their emotions and we theorized yeah the sad music might help people to feel distracted from their own sadness like if you if you ever read my paper that there's like there was also like one participant who went through something really bad like a family member died or maybe even two and she said it was so so I was so so sad I could not bear any any happy music so it needed to be sad music but I needed to be distracted and that made me feel better and less worse so that's the distraction another thing that we thought was yeah this this reflection on your thoughts this cognitive reappraisal as we psychologists call it and like in mindfulness they call it common humanity just the like the realization that life isn't just all like happiness but there's ups and downs this is normal like that realization can like be comforting I said that was another reason why we felt people might feel better and then the other one quite straightforward like they just really find this music beautiful and they like it very much and that makes them happy so ask me not to bore you guys with too many statistics so I will be short here so basically what I wanted to know is is like how do all these things correlate to each other so we did a follow-up study for which I wrote a questionnaire with items that reflected all these different reasons for listening to the music and all the different reasons for selecting the music and then I run them through a statistical a couple of statistical analysis just to find out like what relates most to feeling better so basically in lane non psychology academic language those people who feel happier like who score these items on feeling happier as a reason for listening to music like are they also the same people that say they often they listen for rephrasing their file or to be distracted and are they also the same people who said that listening or they select the music because it was so beautiful and yeah basically I'm not going to bore you too much with the statistics but yeah basically we found that what we thought was verified in the data so people feel happier or happier and if they want to feel happier they select the music to reflect on their thoughts to distract them from their thoughts en they select music that they find more beautiful rather than that they focus on on other elements so yeah what else besides my own research what else does other research say so there's neurological evidence nowadays that beautiful music even when it is sad and it's supposed to make us feel sad can be very rewarding and can make people feel happier so the areas for reward in our brain like are basically active when we hear beautiful sad music so there's quite a few studies now that show that there is like theorizing about sad emotions being like like when you listen to the music and you feel sad that's a different type of sadness than like more everyday life sadness so normally in everyday life like when you feel sad something has happened like a loss and in yeah if you feel sad as a result of listening to sad music then the sadness doesn't have to be relevant or threatening of require you to do any action you can just feel sad there's no personal relevance and that brings me to empathy people who are more empathetic like who enjoy having more empathy who care more about others when they when they have trouble they are also more likely to to enjoy sad music so there's a correlation with empathy and sad music similarly like those people who are open to experience a psychology term but it basically means that they are just like a bit more emotionally adventurous they like more ups and downs they also like more yeah sad music more get more enjoyment out of it en those who are more likely to to get lost in the moments and then also one more thing that might or might not be interesting to you but that but i yeah but we found out that if you hear music commonly in a in a in a situation that is generally positive like when you are around your friends or in the pub like if it's like somehow coupled to something else that is positive then you start liking it more because it drops off on on on each other so positive associations are like robbing off on on the sad music so if you commonly go to a pub where they like sad music you will end up liking sad music yourself more yeah don't know how much time i have i don't know oh there so um yeah sad music listening is however also like liking sad music is is as i already as you might have already picked up like also related to to being sad at that moment it's therefore also related to having higher depression and higher rumination so one thing that you might might wonder like is it really that that good to to like sad music and and i en i always imagine like actually have a have a friend currently that has a has a grandson that is is listening to a lot of sad music and really worried about it and as you wanted to talk with me about this and like what what what i had to explain to her is yeah it's it's sad music listening can indeed indicate that there is a mental health issue but it is as i see it it's a core correlation it's an association it's not the sad music that probably is causing the the mental health issues the mental health issues make him attracted to to the the sad music and he might actually get something out of it he might also not it doesn't work for every everyone yet neuroscientists have have have evidence now that listening to music in general can repair some of the diminished experience of pleasure associated with various mood disorders and another thing i want to express or to reflect on their studies showing that if you ask people to write about their trauma a couple of times they will have better health outcomes at the end of the study there's also like studies showing that before like like in in a mental hospital for example before people recover they often start opening up a lot more like like doing something with your emotions is is is healthier suppression is the worst and um ja sad music can provide you with solace and acceptance of negative situations and acceptance can reduce physiological symptoms of anxiety and stress the take home message so listening to music can be pleasurable and can be a healthy way to cope yet it may not be for everyone yeah it's just a case case case to case basis if like if it's yourself try it and if you aren't enjoying it then just leave it if it has a negative effect on you then don't do it if it works for you yeah that's basically it yeah so it might or might not be for you so and a quick thank you so that's Delaney that was my PhD supervisor a music therapist um my husband helped me with the last paper co-authored it i've had a lot of well endless discussion with Valdi about music in the last couple of years and also with yeah professor finger hoed like who started all this madness off and helped me gather some data yeah that's basically it all right let's hear it for Annamik with a special applause the blue rhythm let's do it thank you very much this is great so well if you talk about sad music right let's first at least get some questions for the speaker are there any questions and again just start talking then we will get the microphone to you many many many thanks this is very very thought provoking and just a comment I think what the famous most consider the most saddest piece in music history is the rain drop prelude by Chopin and it's actually in C sharp major but it's considered one of the saddest pieces I think it's a more a personal thing I don't think there is per se sad music it's a it's a personal experience it was all happening in our brains what we consider as sad but it's also a topic in music history and I think it's an important one and also the I was only reflecting when you're saying that recently discovered that more recent sad music was major but it's actually some old music it's quite sad too well let me respond to this because it's actually if you think this more on a music theory part like if you play it for example C sharp we'll make a simple C chord right C E E G there's a normal major chord makes you happy if you change the base from a C to an A that happy chord becomes a minor chord minor 7 chord but details and so the context of constellation of three notes makes it minor or major but if it makes you feel happy or sad has to do with the underlying bass right so that's part of the part of the issue involved and that's the cool thing I do actually have it as well cool go ahead I think it's not just it's like a combination of these traits that make it sound sad so it doesn't have to have all the traits like that's basically it so probably it was slower softer or yeah like that's probably what's going on yeah yeah Valdi you had something also with the funeral tunes right with major and minor yeah he is on the slide there you go okay yeah thank you first of all that was a nice presentation but my I have a small series of questions which are linked to each other so like first question was related to the research you conducted my question was that the research which in which you ask people like the volunteer students that what were their feelings in respect to the sad music my question is did you make them listen like or was the research included only one music one particular type of music and did all the people present there were they sad or were they happy or were they neutral because a person's state of mind also determined what they are feeling particularly related to a particular music yeah so yeah thank you for that question so is normally I present this as a two hour lecture so I have to throw out some details so maybe some confusion happened there so I asked people in an open-ended questionnaire why they sometimes want to listen to sad music when feeling sad I did not define what sad music was so it was whatever they themselves like considered sad music yeah so it was an open-ended questionnaire they just saw a couple of questions and could write down and it was so it was a writing exercise and I asked them to specifically focus on listening to sad music when they are feeling sad en reflect on like tell us what their reasons were for doing so and if they got anything out of it like something psychological so I hope that answers your question so it wasn't in a lab or anything like that yeah thank you very much we have to really move on because there are so many interesting things to talk about today for example thank you thank you Anamik so if you have for example the blues which goes to minor and major chords which is very interesting thank you for supporting the slides I also would like to acknowledge the people from Studium Generale who set up this conference together with Altvinger Hoets so this is very excellent so changing between major and minor also gives you sort of like a power to handle adversities so if you look at blues songs or listen to Nina Simone all these tunes very powerful to get a broader context on music we are now going to have a presentation from Germany from Dr. Gunther Kreuth I'll just massacre the English language and keep the German language undisturbed for this evening except for thanking you very much for your time to come here and we're very curious to hear if you maybe also cover in addition to anxiety the more positive emotions in your lecture thank you very much yeah thank you thank you very much for coming and for the invite excellent host many many thanks I've entitled my talk some answer questions I mean as researchers we don't want to get jobless we want more research to be done so there were always questions that remain unanswered and also I see a lot of young people they are just very exciting so my stance is not can we afford music psychology research it's more a question can we afford to ignore music psychology research because I think it more and more people realize it does something contribute to our society to understanding the culture and culture is now in a very difficult situation in this multiple crisis and we think we can politicians think we can sacrifice it and I don't think it's a good idea to sacrifice culture so I would like to take you back a little bit into the history of music and emotion and there isn't much until the year around 2000 when until then it was more or less marginalized the seminal book on music psychology until the 2000 was Leonard Myers music and meaning in the motion of 1956 and he was a music theorist and his theory was emotional was elicited when something unexpected happened in the music and then I investigated general theories of emotion at that time in the 50s it was exactly that that emotion theorist thought emotion arose with some sort of surprise something unexpected something unusual disrupting the pattern and this picture began to change as the neuroscience approach to and other and various approaches to psychology of emotion emerged there was very influential work by Joseph Ledoux doing both animal models studying the fear system and the Damasius who studied personality and emotion doing the Phineas gauge work the case work it's very exciting reason I invite you to go back to that literature because it's where it's all started from the neuroscience of emotion that we have today and there was one piece of work where John Suboda disputed with Leonard Meyer by saying because it was a common more was a common wisdom or almost a dogma that physiological responses to music were random so you cannot predict from a musical structure the emotional response and John Suboda said oh I'm going to challenge that and he sent out a letter to a musician and say well give me scores of places where you have particular feelings in the moment of a piece so he asked musicians because they could read scores en they could tell about their physical response and if you have a shiver or if you have tears it's you cannot be go wrong there are the tears running and it's you cannot be mistaken about that emotional response about this physiological response so he broke with this narrative that it was all random and unrelated and what he found indeed was there were some statistically supported relationships between musical structures don't bother about the the terms they are unimportant but they could he could associate that with specific responses like tears and shivers and also a cardiovascular responses so he was the first evidence I think that was documented in the empirical literature that there was a relationship I mean the debate is much older the philosophical debate goes back to the late 19th centuries with debates between Huntslake and Haasega and so there was a long time of speculation but now people started to get to onto rational grounds and this is one of the pieces that appears in John Supporter's paper and I've for the matter of time I save you from playing it it's the second movement there's a third movement of Rachmaninov's symphony so it takes the time listen to it it's really an attack on your tear glands or some of you it's just now you're probably conditioned to Hollywood movies whenever there's a dramatic romantic scene or a separation you feel this kind of music it comes to you and so it's exploited so film music is very instructive also about emotional responses to music so let's discuss some of the seminal work Patrick Yuslin and John Supporter thrashed out this volume music and emotion and they were pioneering the field was taking on board various perspectives from biology philosophy music theory and it's really a very inspiring source still today to get some foot on the ground where this is all coming from and these scholars are still active and they have founded large scale facilities like the Brahms in Montreal and in other centers and there's a music in the brain center in in Denmark in Aarhus and now in Finland there is a new center of excellence between Helsinki in the Veskule multi-million funded research conglomerate and sure enough emotion is in this very hard of this of these large scale project so that it has really taken off since then and this is really bad news for the pharmaceutical industry because music gets there where they want to get to with their drugs so if you think sex is overrated drugs are overrated boring good food the health yet is less tasty it is try music try music to get to the midbrain and get a sense of reward and getting high feelings of pleasure and goose bumps because it's almost certain that you can get something out of it unfortunately there is no not like a specific music that that can give you a list this will trigger the emotion no in this study by blood insertor what triggered goose bumps in one person was a control for another person so the second person didn't feel anything so it was a perfect control to to inverse this kind of this distraction or this kind of analysis where you distract response from one person from another to the same physical stimulus so you can tease out where things are happening on the left side do you see where activity is rising in the ventral striatum and some areas of the of the midbrain a orbital for including the orbital frontal cortex and in the right side you see down regulation including parts of the amygdala so you're your fear and a high attention system is down regulated so you're on the cloud of happiness and timelessness when you enjoy goose bumps if the goose bumps are very rare and I was always wondering why would you strive for something things that are so rare and but if you even if you don't have goose bumps and you still feel the pleasure you still have a very very similar response so the goose bumps are just the peaks or the skin orgasms while as the as punkstep has turned them in response to music but below that even if you don't have such strong a word emotional responses or physiological responses the amygdala midbrain is still very sensitive to that and sadly when you have strokes in the wrong part of the brain your feeling for music is gone this is a very rare case but it did happen in a British radio moderator and he used to have strong emotional feelings in response to music but after that stroke he was still processing music as normally his auditory cortex was working in his associated areas of auditory areas were all working fine but he didn't feel anything and now we know why he didn't feel anything because there is also a link between cortical areas and the midbrain that communicate and relay the experience and bring it to your consciousness so if that's that's that can happen and it really it's it took a toll on the quality of life of that man so when we listen to music that's fine and I would never say music listening is passive if you listen to an active mind you read music is listening is passive all the time in many many journals I think it's wrong music listening is a very active but it's the receptive process but and sometimes we feel inclined to sing along so if you go to a rock concert I don't think that people go there in thousands just to stand there and experience the rock music I don't think that will happen they will be cheering they will be moving they will be singing along and having a good time so it's it's a small a relatively small step extending from the receptive failure to the overt and engaging and singing now in Germany we do have called so-called Rudelsing it's a karaoke for everyone in pubs but people show up with with a screen like this and they instead of talking they start singing everybody sings along and the tickets sell out instantly and there are really some virtuosos who can lead a crowd of of self-declared non-singers and self-declared non-musicians and anti-musics and make them sing and change their life for them so it's score singing has been has also been the research has shown that it's there's something in it and a seminal paper published by Clift and Hancox in 2001 Steven Clift is a health educator and Granville Hancox is a choir master and they were singing together in Christchurch's Canterbury University Choir and they asked themselves why are we doing this what do we get out of this so they started asking around why do you sing here do you think it has any benefits for you and they found out to there's a bit to their surprise that the people were very convinced that it was good for them and they believed that it enhanced their moods relaxed them restored the stress and even they thought it improves their lung functions and their immune functions how can you as a singer assume that singing improves your immune functions I mean you cannot self-analyse your your blood or saliva what output of of proteins but I thought well why not do it and just check that and sure enough we found that in a church choir in Frankfurt that when we compared singing and on one occasion and listening to choral music on another occasion with the same group of people said a week apart we learned if people want to sing don't stop them otherwise negative emotions go up because they want to sing and they couldn't sing so their negative feelings were rising but we also noticed that the proteins that are produced in the upper respiratory pathways that are the first line of defense against viral infections and bacteria infections so-called immunoglobulin air it went up in the singing condition but not in the listening condition and cortisol went down and we assumed that somebody married fell asleep in the listening condition who knows there are other studies who also show that there's a cortisol reduction in rehearsal but it goes up in concert situations or it's a differentiated view it's not necessarily bad I mean cortisol is considered a stress hormone but it's also impossible to live without cortisol it's a vital hormone that we have high levels in mourning and slow levels in the evening and it's a very vital hormone for us so it's a bit of reduction to say it's a stress hormone of course it has to do with stress below and in a more recent study I had a chance also to get a lab to analyze oxytocin it's the more tricky and difficult and more controversial and what do we measure actually in this really really tiny dosages of oxytocin but nevertheless in this study it turned out that oxytocin went up in the singing condition but this time I asked the same people not to just to listen but to chat because they use their mouth they have something positive in their minds so they have lots of the singing experience except they do not sing and in the chatting also the positive mood went up negative mood a state level and there was no response on the physiological side also biomarkers didn't respond to that so and now we've turned from listeners to singers and now something completely different music instruments what does the music instruments do for us because let's not forget that they are even more instrumentalist than singers and actually and I looked a little bit into this research and I find it fascinating that we had this topic of befriendedness and social surrogates and I'm sure for many people who also have their blues in their lives a musical instrument is something to lean to and to not only to cheer us up but to live through emotions and also to to rebuild and restore their relationship to the world to the life to their own motivations or whatever so there is some research about and it's not a lot but I think in the pandemic has taught us that musical instruments can be important resources when there is people are separated and it's even advantageous over singing because singing in groups doesn't work very well online there have been various attempts but many choirs have unfortunately being closed and we're not sure whether they will revive again so the pandemic has taken a huge toll and musical instruments but they stay with the person and they are they are very resistant to any pandemic you can practice we can play and we can relate to that and do something musical meaningful so more academic questions what is the role of musical emotions for well-being I mean emotions musical emotions just fine but I always thought well emotion for its own sake just to have it to live through it and wait for it to happen again I think we want more we want to have a balance in our lives we want to have a good well-being we want to be have a good prospects we want to be sure about ourselves about our goals and I think music can support us in various ways in these more general life affairs and especially for younger children and there are so many studies out there now which suggest that in kindergarten music can aid language development speech development and that that also there is this large scale social economic panel study and they found that children who learn to play music instruments from social disadvantaged backgrounds they have a better academic record later on in their education so it does something to young children to help them overcome social economically deprived situations and let's Louis Armstrong was maybe one famous example he had nothing in his life he was listening a radio to only to become one of the most famous jazz musicians through his love for music and but I don't want to take this too far but but it is the social science research sociology research suggests that something in it it's not just an anecdote in in history so what did we learn from the pandemic I think we just start to learn what it does to us we are not through it yet and we it will take time to and yet when you look up at at pop med music and pandemic you'll be surprised there about 300 papers already popping up peer reviewed papers on music and the and what it has to do with the pandemic so it's a lot of work now en I think that's one of the burning questions what what what is happening and how can culture life including music help us to restore the new normal that is as often discussed but there's a trend that we may sacrifice it more than we should through the cultural techniques do not stand for themselves but must be seen as significant parts of individual quality of life and psychological well-being and we have to take this on board to to make sure that it gets the space it needs I'm hearing about the cuts of music education in the Netherlands and the same is happening in many German states too and we tend to pour out the baby with a bath so we the pandemic we've learned or choirs or bad ideas music of songs is bad ideas or should we stop it all together to be better prepared for the next pandemic I think we should do the opposite we should create safe spaces where whatever pandemic comes we can safely play music together and and for our own and for our societal benefit so lastly this is a project that has heavily suffered from the pandemic because once we are ready to go into care homes to run music interventions with people with dementia and depression we had to stop we couldn't go in and we only could start in late 2019 2021 to start with with the interventions and the first results from an Australian cohort dat went a little bit ahead with the same protocol suggests quite impressive findings that it really turns out that group singing is able to improve the quality of life for people living in care homes with depressive symptoms and with at least mild forms of dementia and with the implication that this is the clinical trial is the cluster randomness trials methodologically is a very high high level finding so again it comes down to the question what what do we care homes has a lot of pharmacological interventions neuroleptics are prescribed a lot which are actually making the dementia worse and do not have no positive effects but they're still prescribed a lot so the system so to speak the health system relies heavily on on drugs and pharmacology not surprising the lobbying is very very very good and very efficient but we don't have an equivalent lobbying for cultural techniques which actually have effects in the midbrain that can be as positive and you could talk for hours about mood regulation in dementia using musical strategies there's lots of work out there to to justify a systematic application of music application in elderly care so from the cradle to the grave we need music in our society and that's it thank you all right I'm curious about your rhythm now your rhythm you're gonna get an interesting one two short one long like this yes you just did a five to four rhythm that's very complicated for a complicated talk any questions for Dr. Kreuz very practical question could you show us the slide of Rachmaninov again I want to make a picture so I can play it other questions for Dr. Kreuz my name is Keijdzand Wingerut I was more looking for a suggestion I once was visiting about a year ago a famous professor in Hilfhallenbeek called Art Wingerut and he showed me the Kennedy Center in New York the music of the rising of sting and I'm using this as a last slide in my training I giving all over the world and there's a chorus in it and people are getting very emotion about it and so my advice would be put some music in your presentation like this because that's where the emotion is about thank you Art for giving me this suggestion of the music one last short question your remarks about music and health remind me of something I saw in the newspaper in the weekend that going swimming in cold water apparently is also good for health and this is also not getting much attention because pharmaceutical companies do not gain anything from it but I think as a society where we all are constantly being told that health is getting more and more expensive then there might be a way to say if we can have more music then we can reduce these expenses by preventing health issues and that may be a way for you to get more money for the research exactly Middelhead did have a health economy component to calculate the costs for the singing leaders and the defects on quality of life I think you can calculate for each improvement on an SF12 each point you can assign a number attach a number of euro to that what it saves but it turned out to difficult to compare among the various partners from Turkey to Norway to Netherlands to Germany and UK to the systems and it's but it's still on the agenda and you're exactly right if anything is convincing politics it's and if it's convincing us for changes it's it's that and it's a bit sad that that's the way it works but it seems very rational and logical to go that route which reminds me of the wonderful one of the sad song about it of the wonderful song of Pink Floyd money remember that one that was a very good one we are ready for the last presentation in this series again and the last presentation will be given by Dr. Suzanne van Horen and the Dutch van Horen you can say that's from the city Horen but it can also be Horen is the Dutch word for listening so maybe that has something to do with it she's going to talk about relevant to the last question to the therapeutic implications of music and music therapy probably as well the floor is yours Suzanne thank you for the introduction and also for the invitation to present here my research on music therapy I'm a psychologist I'm not a music therapist but I'm doing research on music therapy among others therapies first of all let me see what this is my first slide and well when we look at mental health care and also our mental functioning then we see that there are a lot of problems at this moment for example Gunter Owery mentioned dementia when we look at dementia in the Netherlands we see that within 20 years we'll be doubling of the number of persons having dementia but also with regard to depression that when you look at a lifetime prevalence of depression then it's about 20 to 25 percent so that's a lot but also when you look at mental illness that are work related illnesses and then you see that a lot of the problems for leaving long term from work it's stress related or it's related to burnout symptoms and also with regard to children and adolescents there are also behavioral problems and when we look at our society well this will lead to high impact and also high cost when you look at the interventions then there is a lot of medication that is used but also verbal therapies and when we look at these methods then you see side effects but also some of these for example medications have contraindications and when you look at all these therapies then a substantial number of individuals do not benefit from these interventions so it is important to look further and perhaps music therapy could be an answer for some of the patients but what is music therapy well music therapy it is therapy and it belongs to the experiential perspective of therapies experiential means dat de experience in de moment dat is heel belangrijk en in music therapy music is applied in a therapeutic way of course but what is also very important in music therapy is that there is a therapeutic relationship a therapeutic processes that are going along en dat the music therapist always is constantly attuned to the behavior of the patient to its needs its benefits and so that is a very important aspect of music therapy and it's different from music interventions such as for example listening only to music or playing music playing the drums for example music therapy is embedded in therapy programs so it has therapeutic goals that are very individual set but it's always embedded in a larger treatment program and often offered in mental health care settings for example well it could be in a private practice but it could also be in a mental health care institution but also in hospitals or for example in forensic care but also in rehabilitation and it's also as possible that music therapy or music therapy approaches are applied as a preventive tool for example in schools primary of secondary schools en what is also important that music therapy is performed by music therapists who is educated on a bachelor or a master degree so in the Netherlands it's an educational program of four years and in other countries in Europe it's always most of the time it's always a bachelor or a master educational program when you want to look for more information on music therapy here there are two Dutch websites so you can look where you here you can also find music therapists for example but when you want to know what music therapy is well I think I can show it with some short examples here is one example this is Michael Taude and he introduced neurological music therapy and that is an approach in music therapy that's used interventions that are based on neurological evidence and here what you can see is this is the neurological music therapy is often applied in refridation so for example for patients with motor disabilities language disabilities attention disabilities and here you see a short video of a person having motor disabilities and difficulty to walk pretty pragmatic destination example here is an example of a daily application well so that usually there is a lot of commentary among Parkinson's support groups because that's what they know so well and this is how this can be very practical help what you see here is that the music therapist is using a rhythm that will help the patient to initiate movements and this is rhythmic auditory stimulation therapy and that is used that rhythm is used as an external stimulus or motivator to initiate movements and research has looked at only rhythm but it has also looked at music and what you see is that the effect with music are larger because of the motivating effect of music another example is the example of saven sound saven sound is a music therapy approach that is used in schools in primary and secondary education and it's developed by a Dutch music therapist Sander van Hoog en it is applied to children and adolescents with a refugee background or having a negative or traumatic experiences and this intervention is applied in classrooms so for a whole group of children and when it's needed when for example behavioral problems when a child experience behavioral problems then it's possible to have individual sessions with the music therapy and the music therapist the aim of this intervention is to strengthen resilience but also to learn coping strategies to better cope with the negative events and also with the behavioral problems or for example attentional problems this method uses a solution-focused approach and is also culture sensitive so that is of course very important when you work with children and adolescents with a refugee background let me see well these are some examples of music therapy there are many more for example music therapy in mental health care but I think you can get a bit of an explanation of that why could music therapy work well when we look at that question then you see in a literature that when you look at the music therapy literature that often it's based on the neurological models and when you look at these models then you can and when you compare it with verbal therapies then you see that the models using a bottom-up approach so in music therapy is it very important to start with the bodily experiences for example and from that to go further to in the end to cognitions verbal therapies start often with the cognitions and then want to for example use exposure or cognitive restructuring but in music therapy the bodily experiences are very important and therefore when you look at models well it also goes along with the other presenters that music therapy when you look at working mechanisms it is approached proposed that arousal regulation is an important one because music can lead to relaxation by targeting the brainstem lowering heart rate hiring heart rate variability the release of nitric oxide leading to the widening of the blood vessels on the other hand music can also activate have the potential to activate persons for example think persons with depression they want to they need to be activated so then for example using a higher tempo over time in music that could be a motivator to activate persons we already talked about emotion regulation that is another working mechanism that is approached for music therapy and Coolge has very interesting papers on the effects of music on emotion and emotion regulation so i would like to recommend to look the papers of Coolge en see how music can stimulate specific brain regions and also to see how for example prefrontal regions can also impact more the internal brain structures let me see a third line of reasoning is that music and music therapy could lead to social processes music can promote social interaction for example think on for example musical improvisation then it's very important to use turn taking and that is also seen for example when we speak to each other that is also very important but in music you have also auditory feedback in the moment and that could lead to also to practice social interaction processes and music could also lead to bonding but also lead to a higher sense of belonging that was also seen for example in our study we did a process evaluation on the safe and sound approach with the refugee children and we saw that they felt that the bonding was better between the children this line of reasoning is also used for example in therapies for autism but also for dementia when we look at the effects of music therapy and the specific studies that investigate the effects of music therapy you see that there is in the last 15 years a lot of going on the increase of randomized controlled trials for example but also single case studies has increased and with regard to children and adolescents we see that we see beneficial effects for example adolescents who committed a crime we see when music therapy is applied that there is a reduction in aggressive incidents a reduction in hyperactivity improvement in attention with regard to autism there was in the Netherlands single case study design we saw that when music therapists used their specific therapy for autism that there was an improvement in social interaction especially more eye contact the children could better cope with changes they take more initiatives and that is very important for such a disorder as autism well the savings sound method I already told you something about it we not only saw an effect on sense of belonging but also we saw that a negative effect decreased with regard to the effects of music therapy for psychopathology and then among adults we see several effects on several psychopathological disorders for example psychotic disorders then when you look also at reviews then you see that patients have less attentional problems and also what you see is that the negative symptoms which is a very difficult to target symptom in psychotic disorders that is also decreased on the depression there is some research review research where it's shown that there are less depressive complaints with regard to addiction it's important that the motivation and the motivation for future treatments is increased and it is possible to use music therapy to increase the motivation with regard to elderly already Gunther already told something about it we also see in the literature effects for trauma and stress related disorder but these effects are less pronounced and for patients with borderline disorder well when we look more from a transdiagnostic perspective then you can look at stress and whether music therapy or music interventions will lead to a reduction of stress because then you could also use it for several kinds of target groups with psychopathology and we did a large review and a meta-analysis with 47 studies and we saw that stress is reduced after music therapy we saw not only on the psychological measures but also on the subjective experience we also performed a review on music interventions so not the therapeutic application of music and when you only look at the music interventions then you see also that there is a reduction of stress but the effect size is a bit lower well the last study I want to mention is a study on music therapy to reduce behavioral problems among patients of persons with dementia it's a Dutch study not an international one and in that study we investigated three groups one group received individual music therapy another group received on an individual based music intervention it was a listening intervention with self-selected music and the third group received other kinds of activities we are now doing the analysis but we see that when we look when we compare these groups well we see that the music therapy but also the music intervention can have a positive effect on quality of life and some of the behavioral problems but we need to do it more properly so this is very preliminary well my main take home message is that music therapy is a valuable intervention to reduce stress psychosocia problems and mental health problems but this is of course very optimistic en I think it's very important to do more research to do more research on several target groups but also to look at more evidence based for the working mechanisms and also look whether there are specific patients characteristics that lead to more beneficial effects so I think we need to go further with this research thank you very much thank you very much this is a exemplary presentation of the excellent research being conducted at the Dutch Open University so thank you very much of course also for her a special type of applause so we're going to do we're talking a bit about social communication so we're going to use the communication in the audience so we start with the right side of the left side of the audience and then the left so the left the right your left that side start with one clap and you guys do two thank you good it's good communication so excellent fair let's have a few questions for Dr Van Oorn what are the effects of music therapy on adults with autism because you touched on children and adolescents with autism but not on adults well for adults um there are not that many studies going on so most of the studies are going are among children and adolescents so unfortunately I can give no comment on that hi thank you for your presentation first your first last slide about dementia reminded me of a story that I heard of a friend of mine who was in a elderly home helping people with dementia where a very particular case took place where she sang a song for an elderly woman who was far into the stage of dementia that triggered some sense of nostalgia for her she had been very unresponsive for a long time and after hearing this live song she just burst out into tears looked up to the skies and yelled to her supposed husband who had passed away for a few years please take me and the double effect of this is she was initially going there to help her but after hearing this her body started shutting down and after a week she had passed away yeah it's it's kind of a heavy sort that I it reminded me of it which well I hear a lot of case examples but not such impressive as what you told just now but well I think that music could have the potential to be that impressive and most of the time also because it gives memories and also the more basic the bodily reactions the arousal regulation so I think that is a very important element when using music therapy thank you for that we have time for one last question and if not then we are at the end of this sort of a series of lectures of four lectures as mentioned at the beginning all good things in life including rhythms are defined not only by the activities but also by the breaks in between so we're now ready for a break please don't forget there's some coffee for you guys the speakers unfortunately have to move on to have a quick lunch before preparation for the impressive defense that we're going to see by Val de Hanser after the break we will see you of those of you who can make it at 1.30 in the auditorium of the university and for now I'd really like to thank you for the excellent patience that you've had for us for your wonderful clapping and looking forward to seeing you again thank you