The Implications Of Music Therapy

Music Therapy (which is using music in a therapeutic relationship to address cognitive, emotional, physical, and social needs of individuals) (1) has drastically changed in the past 15 year. These changes were brought about because of new insight from research into music and brain functions. Scientist have found that music and its counterparts are a highly structured auditory language that involves complex perception, cognition, and motor control in the brain.
Thus, it can be effective to use in retraining and re-educating the injured brain. Music Therapist and Physicians are using music now in rehabilitation in ways that are supported by evidence and supported by an understanding of the mechanisms of music and brain function.
Rapid developments

In the 20th century, its formal use came to be, during World War I and II musicians started to play music in hospitals to raise the moral of the people. These people had notable physical and emotional responses to music, which led the doctors and nurses to hire more musicians. (1) In its early stages of this therapy music was used to promote the well-being of the individuals, create a positive outlook on what had happened, to foster emotional expression and support, express what they were feeling, build personal relationships, interact socially, and support other forms of learning. Even though these people got better, there was not enough evidence that these people were healed by music.
Early music therapy was built upon very narrow concepts, and many in health care, including insurers, viewed it as merely an accessory to good therapy. Many years had passed, and it was extremely hard to collect scientific evidence that music therapy was working because no one knew the direct effects music were having on the brain.
Evidence

Scientists used it as a model to study how a musician’s brain enables the advanced and complicated motor skills necessary to perform a musical work, how the brain processes verbal versus nonverbal communication, and how it processes complex time information.
After years of such research, two findings stand out as particularly important for using music in rehabilitation. First, music learning changes the brain. And second, the brain areas activated by music are not unique to music, these areas of the brain that process music also processes other functions.
An example of the first finding, that music learning changes the brain, is research clearly showing that through such learning, auditory and motor areas in the brain grow larger and interact more efficiently. After novice pianists have just a few weeks of training, for example, the areas in their brain serving hand control become larger and more connected. It quickly became clear that music can drive plasticity in the human brain, shaping it through training and learning.