Arts Integration Research Grant Proposal (2021)

Resonant Healing

A recent Student Life survey of 217 Dartmouth students concluded that, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, rates of depression and anxiety have soared. National trends show a 400% rise in demand for mental health access over the same period, with demand far exceeding availability of mental health resources. How can the arts address this gap in community care?

Abstract

Medical student and musician Sage Palmedo seeks to join forces with fellow Dartmouth community members in the creation of an ongoing immersive healing sound installation series within the Hopkins Center for the Arts and DHMC. Resonant Healing is an opportunity to bridge the gap between Dartmouth’s medical and arts communities through experiential research, demonstrating the power of sound to nurture our collective health.

Project Narrative

The influence of music on human wellbeing has long been intuitively understood, but the medical applications of sound have only recently caught the attention of Western academia. Within the last two decades, listening to music has been shown to have significant impacts on the human heartbeat (1), and on observed biomarkers of stress (2) which in turn affect susceptibility to disease (3,4). Dartmouth’s own Professor Michael Casey—the advisor for this project—is working at the forefront of therapeutic auditory neuroscience, publishing recent papers that demonstrate specific musical components attributable to brain and heart wellbeing (5,6,7).

Despite this progress, the integration of arts into medicine is still in its infancy—with fields like clinical music therapy, sound healing, medical sound design, and auditory neuroscience disconnected and ranging in their intuitive nature. Influenced by a synthesis of these disciplines, I seek to connect the arts and medical communities at Dartmouth and inspire the medical field to appreciate the role of sound in human health. Through experiential research, in collaboration with faculty, students, and visiting artists, I will create Resonant Healing: an immersive sound installation intended to foster wellbeing.

The integration of the arts with other academic areas at the heart of this project. While public discourse around health has typically been reserved for scientific fields, Resonant Healing will be an attempt to bring an arts-driven perspective forward in the act of healing, joining a dialogue that is currently dominated by analytical disciplines. The curated sonic experience will be guided by an intention to heal, and it will be informed by a scientific understanding of the interaction between music and human physiology. It feels important to note that abstract knowledge about auditory neuroscience cannot be equated with the actual experience of deep listening. Resonant Healing will be co-created through recruitment of student musicians and designers to compose various elements of an ideal listening atmosphere. I envision engagement with faculty from any department—several Geisel professors have already expressed their enthusiasm for such a crossover project—as well as visiting artists at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. The combination of the healing endeavor and the artistic endeavor is what will unite these various collaborators across disciplines. This immersive sonic installation will serve as a communal space to nurture the health of mind, body, and spirit. A finished iteration will be presented at the Music and Medicine in Cross-Cultural Perspective symposium in April 2022 and, if supported, will lead to further installations at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center; I envision this conversation around music, sound, healing, and wellbeing to extend into the long term.

Resonant Healing will be informed by both my own & Professor Casey’s background in musical composition, acoustic neuroscience research, and work in the intersection of sound and healthcare. Professor Casey will be a vital advisor as he is a leader in the academic intersection of music and medicine, intimately connected with the neural mechanisms by which sound produces therapeutic effects on human consciousness. I have experience in this realm as well; before attending medical school, I was a Researcher and Sound Designer at Sen Sound, a startup working to improve the sound environment in hospitals. While hospitals are presumably intended to be spaces of healing, the sonic atmosphere is often dissonant and disturbing—which creates stress in patients and clinicians alike, counterproductive to the goal of medicine (8, 9). I have interviewed nurses, patients, physicians, and clinical specialists in the iterative design of ambient soundscapes and new medical device alarms. While most of these healthcare workers expressed grievances about their sound environment, we found that radically changing medical device sounds wasn’t possible yet either, as clinicians’ behavioral expectations are built on the current paradigm of listening for a harsh beep among a cacophony of devices. What if we could design a space apart from this paradigm—a sonic experience that is solely devoted to nurturing humanity? This is a question Resonant Healing seeks to address.

In my two months at the Geisel School of Medicine, I have spoken with several students and faculty who are hungry for a shift in the way we understand patient care. The separation between Psychiatry and other specialties, between the fields of Medicine and Public Health, and between the concepts of “health” and “wellbeing,” are borne out of structural and historical forces that don’t seem to make much sense—especially as we continue to deepen our understanding of mind-body neuroscience (10). The digital age and our continued destruction of the Earth has given rise to a mental health crisis (11), exacerbated by the fear, suffering, and loneliness experienced on a global scale over the past two years. Prioritizing mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing in our communities has arguably never been as pressing of an issue as it is today; luckily, we have countless individuals here who hold an intent to heal. Resonant Healing aims to draw from this collective intent and nurture our societal need for healing—assuring each listener they are loved, they are held, they are whole.

References

1. Kume, S., Nishimura Y., Mizuno, K., Sakimoto, N., Hori, H., Tamura, Y., Yamato, M., Mitsuhashi, R., Akiba, K., Koizumi, J-i., Watanabe, Y. and Kataoka, Y. (2017) Music Improves Subjective Feelings Leading to Cardiac Autonomic Nervous Modulation: A Pilot Study. Frontiers in Neuroscience. 11:108. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2017.00108

2. Wong, M. M., Tahir, T., Wong, M. M., Baron, A., Finnerty, R. Biomarkers of Stress in Music Interventions: A Systematic Review. Journal of Music Therapy. 2021 Aug 24;58(3):241-277. doi: 10.1093/jmt/thab003. PMID: 33822108.

3. Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., McGuire, L., Robles, T. F., Glaser, R. Emotions, morbidity, and mortality: new perspectives from psychoneuroimmunology. Annual Review of Psychology. 2002;53:83-107. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135217. PMID: 11752480.

4. Koelsch, S., Boehlig, A., Hohenadel, M. et al. The impact of acute stress on hormones and cytokines and how their recovery is affected by music-evoked positive mood. Sci Rep 6, 23008 (2016). doi: 10.1038/srep23008

5. Quon, Robert J., Grace A. Leslie, Edward J. Camp, Stephen Meisenhelter, Sarah A. Steimel, Yinchen Song, Alan B. Ettinger, Krzysztof A. Bujarski, Michael A. Casey, and Barbara C. Jobst. "40‐Hz auditory stimulation for intracranial interictal activity: A pilot study." Acta Neurologica Scandinavica (2021).

6. Quon, R. J., Casey, M. A., Camp, E. J., Meisenhelter, S., Steimel, S. A., Song, & Jobst, B. C. (2021). Musical components important for the Mozart K448 effect in epilepsy. Nature: Scientific Reports, 11(1), 1-13.

7. Chew, E., Loui, P. Leslie, G., Palmer, C., Berger, J., Large, E., Bernardi, F., Hanser, S., Thayer, J., Casey, M., Lambiase, P. How Music Can Literally Heal the Heart, Scientific American, Sep. 18, 2021.

8. Cho, O. M., Kim, H., Lee, Y. W., Cho, I. (2016). Clinical Alarms in Intensive Care Units: Perceived Obstacles of Alarm Management and Alarm Fatigue in Nurses. Healthcare Informatics Research, 2016;22(1):46-53. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4258/hir.2016.22.1.46

9. Watson, J., Kinstler, A., Vidonish, W. P. 3rd, Wagner, M., Lin, L., Davis, K. G., Kotowski, S. E., Daraiseh, N. M. Impact of Noise on Nurses in Pediatric Intensive Care Units. American Journal of Critical Care. 2015 Sep;24(5):377-84. doi: 10.4037/ajcc2015260. PMID: 26330430.

10. Schmidt, L., Braun, E. K., Wager, T. D., & Shohamy, D. (2014). Mind matters: placebo enhances reward learning in Parkinson's disease. Nature neuroscience, 17(12), 1793-1797. PMID: 25326691

11. Clayton S. Climate Change and Mental Health. Current Environmental Health Reports. 2021 Mar;8(1):1-6. doi: 10.1007/s40572-020-00303-3. Epub 2021 Jan 2. PMID: 33389625.