This past Friday I attended a retreat for oncology patients in Exeter, Rhode Island. I was there as a therapist offering treatments with tuning forks and craniosacral therapy. For the closing of the retreat I did a sound journey in the woods by a fire. What a setting! All the women that I spoke to during the course of the day expressed feelings of gratitude, empowerment and deeper connection to themselves and the people around them. Here are some pictures of the beautiful spot under the pines where I did the sound journey as the shadows grew long at the end of the day. It doesn't get much better than this! Some women sat by the fire, others lay down on rugs and blankets.
As I wrote in my last blog entry, I had just learned the night before that Dr. Mitchell Gaynor had recently been found dead in the woods near his home in New York. He did so much for the field of sound medicine, bringing it to the forefront as a complementary therapy, introducing it to all of his patients, as a means of boosting the immune system and helping patients to quickly drop into a natural state of deep peace. It was very powerful and poignant for me to have the opportunity to dedicate the sound journey to him at a time when I was still feeling raw from the news.
A couple of years ago I gave a patient with very advanced cancer a treatment
with tuning forks. She was a beautiful bright spirit who was in a lot of
pain with tumors throughout most of her internal organs. She had fought
for a long time and knew she did not have a lot of time left. She was still willing and eager to try anything that might give her some relief. I gave her a
treatment with tuning forks, never touching her body. After the session
she told me her pain was not relieved but that she had experienced deep peace which was a great gift for her as it was something that she no longer had.
Dr. Gaynor was right. There is no other modality that can bring a person to a state of peace as quickly as sound. It doesn't have to be long, complicated or dramatic. It can be as simple as one tone from a Himalayan singing bowl or the sound of two tuning forks tapped on the knees and held up close to the ears, vibrating the temporal bones and sending the frequency directly into the nervous system in a matter of seconds. (Dr. John Beaulieu's Body Tunerswith the frequency of 256hz and 384hz (C & G) are ideal for this.) Sound is simple, effective and can also such a pleasant form of medicine, so natural that we often don't even consciously notice its effect right away.
Dr. John Beaulieu's sound studio in Stone Ridge, NY
One of my oncology patients at the Women & Infants Integrative Care program sent me this article tonight. She is actually going to be participating in this program. It is so exciting that western medical establishments are finally waking up to the power and potential of sound and music therapy.
Sloan Kettering and Pandora Music Genome architect to ‘prescribe’ music for cancer patients
by Mark Sullivan
Pandora’s chief musicologist Nolan Gasser has made a career of tailor-fitting streams of music to listeners’ tastes. Now, Gasser is taking the body of knowledge he gained as the architect of Pandora’s Music Genome Project and focusing it on helping ease the suffering of cancer patients. The Music Genome Project was about breaking down and categorizing
hundreds of music characteristics (or “genes”), then delivering streams
full of songs containing the genes that people like. That same matching
algorithm, along with some hard science from music therapy research,
Gasser believes, can be used to “prescribe” music that will ease some of
cancer’s more unpleasant symptoms.
Gasser, an acclaimed pianist and composer in his own right, is now
working with members of the Integrative Medicine Department at New York
City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the first phases of
such a therapy, and hopes the project will receive sufficient grant
money to bring these ideas to fruition. Sloan Kettering has long been a
pioneer in the field of music therapy and has an active Music Therapy department.
Healing music on ESPN
Gasser’s music therapy work was featured last week in an ESPN Films special called “Breaking Music Down to Its Genes,”
in which he takes viewers through “The Wellness Suite,” his composition
designed to contain the right traits to soothe and inspire cancer
patients.
You might wonder why ESPN would produce a show about playing music
for cancer patients. The point of ESPN Films’ digital shorts series The Collectors
is to “profile passionate people scrounging for information to save the
world’s bees or find the formula for funny,” as the network put it.Producer
Jamie Schutz proposed Gasser as a subject based on his music data work
with Pandora, but when he learned what he was doing with music therapy
at Sloan Kettering, he thought that would be a perfect focus for the
film.
The music in “The Wellness Suite” uses a number of musical techniques
that music therapy research has shown to help relieve fatigue, pain,
anxiety, and nausea in cancer patients. “The slow, heartbeat-paced tempo, consonant harmony, lyrical and
sustained melody, occasional bursts of rhythmic energy, the use of
strings, and so forth,” Gasser said, have been shown in the research
literature to create positive therapeutic effects. Longer pieces of music that have “a slow, unravelling, and narrative”
quality also have been shown to captivate listeners and ease pain.
“The Wellness Suite,” Gasser said, is “an extended work that puts all
these things together.” In the ESPN special, the piece is performed in
front of three cancer patients. Their responses to the music tell the
story (see video above). “I came up with a melody that for me spoke of healing,” Gasser said.
Accounting for taste
“The Wellness Suite” acts as a sort of pilot for the wider body of
work Gasser hopes to do with Sloan Kettering. He hopes to find existing
music, and create new music, that brings to bear both the therapeutic
musical styles used in the suite and the personal musical tastes of the
individual cancer patients at Sloan and elsewhere. For instance, the research shows that long, sustained drones with
shifting harmonies above have the capacity for healing. “So if the
patient likes jazz, we might go out and recommend modal pieces by Miles
Davis or Charles Mingus that have those qualities,” Gasser said.
Sloan Kettering and Gasser hope to develop a repertoire of music for
different types of patients (with different musical tastes), then
conduct scientifically rigorous testing to find out if patients who
undergo this approach to music therapy really fare better than patients
who receive different approaches, or no music therapy at all.
Above: Pandora’s Nolan Gasser
Image Credit: FiveThirtyEight
Evidence exists that music can help ease discomfort, but very little
has been done to affect this by linking specific musical traits to
personal taste. “Hopefully the results of our research will show that by
integrating musical features with personal taste, we can better move
the needle on treating the ailments of cancer treatment,” Gasser said. He says patients will also be given some instructions on how to listen to music so that they can get the maximum benefit.
The first round of testing at Sloan Kettering will focus on using
music to relieve symptoms like pain and nausea. But later tests may try
to determine if music can accomplish even more in some patients, tapping
the body’s innate healing powers. “It would be nice to explore grander prospects like increasing
general metabolism in the fight against cancer,” Gasser said. “The
prospect that a sustained musical therapy could help in the act of
healing or even reduce the spread of cancer is pretty ambitious, but it
certainly can’t hurt.”
Gasser says there’s every reason for optimism. “We are musical beings; music is part of our very identity,” he said. “We all have the capacity for music to have a positive effect on our well-being.”
Gasser is working on a new book called Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste that documents his work at Pandora and his 20-plus years exploring the nature of musical taste.
