Imagine a music therapist and their patient wearing EEG caps. Imagine them working together and coming to a moment when the therapy was “working”. Imagine seeing the EEG signal suddenly change for the patient, and then seeing the same change in the therapist just afterwards.

We know that music listening and playing can change our mood. Sometimes it cheers us up, sometimes it makes it safe to feel sombre emotions, but did you ever wonder why? Now we know.

This is a brilliant article worth a full read, but here are some highlights for you from one of BBBs favourite researchers Professor Sarah Wilson from the University of Melbourne.

Music therapy and music learning are having a profound impact on the life and rehabilitation of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease. It is important to understand the difference between music therapy and music learning because sometimes they either look very similar, or one leads seamlessly into the other.

It has been widely publicised that the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the U.S. has just awarded the Sound Health Initiative $20 million over the next 5 years to look into the health and learning benefits of music and music learning.

Imagine having a singing group at your work. Imagine starting the day with a song with your colleagues. What would your work culture feel like and how would you feel about going to work?

This study shows for the first time a causal role of dopamine in musical pleasure and motivation: enjoying a piece of music, deriving pleasure from it, wanting to listen to it again, being willing to spend money for it, strongly depend on the dopamine released in our synapses.

Possibly! This heavy duty article highlights the recent research which has found that music listening and performance has been found to influence how genes behave or regulate themselves. The first few sentences set the scene and we have done a translation for you.

Prof Schellenberg compared 114 articles about music training and brain development and then analysed the titles and abstracts for the inference of causational (one action causes another) findings and correlational (a connection between two things) findings.

Periodically the research community completes a systematic review, sometimes known as a literature review, of a given area of research.

Do you have similar musical tastes to your friends? How about your work colleagues? Do you think musical tastes tell us anything else about a person? This study thinks it might when it compared musical taste with political leaning.

Here is one hell of a tricky question – if your musical potential, meaning your likelihood of being successful at learning music (whatever that really means) could be measured, would you want to know?