The Sound Health Network is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the University of California, San Francisco, in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and Renée Fleming.
Our mission is to promote research and public awareness about the impact of music on health and wellness. Visit our website here.
SHN Monthly Newsletter
October 2021
Music during the Covid Pandemic: What Worked

SHN in the News: PBS NewsHour

A recent PBS NewsHour segment highlighted the work that SHN Founding Advisor Renée Fleming created with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and classical tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussein: A "drone ensemble" that employs drone music, with steady, rhythmic vibrations. This segment also touches upon the healing applications of such music and features SHN Co-Director Dr. Charles Limb. While the healing powers of music have been well documented in many cultures, he pointed out that it's only recently that modern scientific and medical communities have been able to gather more rigorous data: "Suddenly these things that were simply left to speculation, into theory, we now have measurements on it, we have data, we have the ability to actually observe the human brain doing these remarkable music and artistic tasks."

You can watch the full segment below.
In Conversation
Featuring Musicians On Call
A young man in a blue shirt holds a guitar and sings to a woman who is laying in a hospital bed and either laughing or singing along.
When Michael Solomon helped organize a Wynton Marsalis concert at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 1999, he didn’t know he’d be launching a non-profit that would help one million patients over two decades. Neither did his friend Vivek J. Tiwary, who attended that concert, and went on to co-found their non-profit. Both were there because they’d recently lost loved ones to cancer: Michael’s fiancée, and Vivek’s mother.

As patients were wheeled into the recreation area with beds and IV poles, one of the nurses commented that it was a shame the patients who were too sick to leave their rooms would be missing out. So Michael and Vivek quickly organized follow-up visits, this time with musicians performing bedside. The impact was immediately noticeable: Tapping feet, growing smiles, nodding heads.

And thus, Musicians On Call (MOC) came into being. They now have bedside performance programs in over two dozen cities across the country. They’ve expanded the program to include a “Music Pharmacy,” equipping hospitals with tablets, Bose headphones and unlimited Amazon music streaming so patients can queue up their favorite tunes any time. Another program, Project Playback, gives patients the chance to write original music with a MOC volunteer. They record the songs in the hospital, and then celebrate their CD release with a party for family and friends.
A smiling young woman with a long brown ponytail holds a guitar in her lap while a small laughing boy, probably around age 4, sits gleefully at the edge of his hospital bed, wearing a blue hospital gown.
Musicians On Call is filling an aesthetic gap in hospital care: As one paper points out, hospitals are “one of the few places in society where there is an absence of music.” Numerous studies have shown the positive impact that music, both taped and live, can have on hospital patients: lowered blood pressure in coronary patients, reduced stress in low birthweight infants, reduced post-operative pain, and ameliorated anxiety and fatigue in cancer patients.
In 2020, of course, everything changed. Soon after it became clear how virulent COVID-19 was, hospitals went into lockdown. Patients became even more isolated with volunteer and visitor restrictions, and caregivers faced long hours and heightened stress. MOC had already begun virtual beside visits in 2013, but with the start of the pandemic, they shifted all of their resources into those virtual visits, growing from six programs a month to thirty (and growing), reaching over 150,000 people virtually in 2020.
MOC’s virtual programs evolved over the pandemic: Now, they include one-on-one visits with a patient and their favorite recording artist, performances for quarantined COVID-19 patients, and musical visits connecting patients in hospitals with family members outside. “Everyone can relate to the stress, monotony, and discomfort of being in the hospital or being with a loved one who is,” MOC wrote to us in an email. “Patients are facing some of the scariest times of their lives, and for a few moments the music can bring them peace and comfort in their situation.”

Research Spotlight: Music during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Of note: Frontiers in Psychology has a special issue titled "Social Convergence in Times of Spatial Distancing: The Role of Music During the COVID-19 Pandemic." We aren't able to highlight all of the worthwhile articles featured in this issue, so make sure to follow the link above to see all of them.

When Spain entered lockdown in March 2020, its residents were largely confined to their homes. This study analyzed how people in Spain used music during the lockdown. Results indicate an improvement in perceptions of the value of music for personal and social wellbeing, with significant variations according to age and feelings of vulnerability.

The intensity of the pandemic in Italy, in particular Northern Italy, had a significant impact on the physical and mental wellbeing of frontline healthcare workers. For this study, COVID-19 responders were given remote receptive music therapy (MT) over a 5-week period, and an immediate significant variation in their emotional status was observed. Results suggest that remote MT intervention for emergency situations is effective.

Who could forget those powerful videos of Italians playing violins, guitars, harps, and oboes, or singing opera, from their balconies in the depths of the lockdown? This short article theorizes as to why we may have turned to music to handle the stress of the pandemic, framed within discussions of aesthetic appreciation and cognitive dissonance reduction.

As the pandemic continues to disrupt our lives, families are reinventing daily rituals. This study explored how parents with young children used recorded music in their everyday lives during the pandemic. In this study, the authors provided resources for mothers to strategically craft the home sonic environment for their young children, then collected episodes about the children's engagement using a new data collection tool.

This study employed a cross-sectional survey to investigate the transition of Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT) services from in-person to telehealth settings. It discusses which NMT techniques are transferrable, and what potential benefits and challenges there might be in such a transition.

To combat the pandemic, local governments used a variety of tools—the Quebec government solicited the assistance of local music artists to help communicate public health recommendations (this video is one example from their #TousContreUn campaign). This paper discusses how music can be used as an effective public health tool, and why it can be so powerful.

This conceptual analysis article uses a trans-historical comparison of musical activities in 1576 Milan during an outbreak of the plague, and 2020 COVID lockdowns. It describes how music fulfills “mood regulation” and “social cohesion” functions in times of pandemics and social isolation, and suggests a framework for understanding the role of music in times of medical disaster.
Related Conferences and Events

October 14 - October 17, 2021

October 16 - 17, 2021

Session 4: October 29, 2021

Call for papers - submission deadline: October 15, 2021
Conference: April 7 - 9, 2022
Job Opportunities

Research Engineer/Neuroscientist Technician, LIVELab, McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind

Postdoctoral Positions, LIVELab, McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind

Graduate Trainee Opening, MAPLE (Music, Acoustics, Perception and LEarning) lab at McMaster University

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dortmund Systematic Musicology Lab, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany. Deadline: October 18, 2021.

PhD candidate, Dortmund Systematic Musicology Lab, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany. Deadline: October 18, 2021.

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College. Strongest consideration given to materials submitted by October 8, 2021.



Assistant Professor of Music, Brandeis University


Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, Irvine

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Neuroscience, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Funding Opportunities

Did you miss our webinar on applying for NIH and NEA grants? You can find the slides and webinar presentation with Q&A here.

NEA Creative Creative Forces Community Engagement Grants will fund arts engagement programming for military and veteran populations and family members, providing opportunities for creative expression and strengthening resilience.

NEA Research Labs funds transdisciplinary research teams grounded in the social and behavioral sciences, yielding empirical insights about the arts for the benefit of arts and non-arts sectors alike.

Over the next five years, Creative Forces®: National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Military Healing Arts Network intends to provide $2.5 million in new research funding.

NEA Research Grants in the Arts funds research studies that investigate the value and/or impact of the arts, either as individual components of the U.S. arts ecology or as they interact with each other and/or with other domains of American life.

This funding opportunity is intended to: (1) increase our understanding of how music affects the brain when it is used therapeutically and/or (2) use that knowledge to better develop evidence-based music interventions to enhance health or treat specific diseases and disorders.

This funding opportunity is intended to: (1) increase our understanding of how music affects the brain when it is used therapeutically and/or (2) use that knowledge to better develop evidence-based music interventions to enhance health or treat specific diseases and disorders.

The purpose of this FOA is to promote innovative research on music and health with an emphasis on developing music interventions aimed at understanding their mechanisms of action and clinical applications for the treatment of many diseases, disorders, and conditions.