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The global cerebral network allows music “ to do to us what it does.” While the same music can cause different emotions, the basic emotion of happy and sad songs can, nevertheless, be understood by most people. Consequently, the individual experience of music and its common effect on the human brain is a challenging subject for research. Various activities such as hearing, processing, and performing music provide us with different pictures of cerebral centers in PET. In comparison to these simple acts of experiencing music, the interaction and the therapeutic relationship between the patient and the therapist in Music Therapy (MT) provide us with an additional element in need of investigation. In the course of a pilot study, these problems were approached and reduced to the simple observation of pattern alteration in the brains of four individuals with Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome (UWS) during MT. Each patient had three PET investigations: (i) during a resting state, (ii) during the first exposure to MT, and (iii) during the last exposure to MT. Two patients in the MT group received MT for 5 weeks between the 2nd and the 3rd PET (three times a week), while two other patients in the control group had no MT in between. Tracer uptake was measured in the frontal, hippocampal, and cerebellar region of the brain. With certain differences in these three observed brain areas, the tracer uptake in the MT group was higher (34%) than in the control group after 5 weeks. The preliminary results suggest that MT activates the three brain regions described above. In this article, we present our approach to the neuroscience of MT and discuss the impact of our hypothesis on music therapy practice, neurological rehabilitation of individuals in UWS and additional neuroscientific research.

In this posturographic study, whole-body postural control was impaired in more than 75% of patients with idiopathic cervical dystonia (ICD) before local injections with botulinum toxin type A (BTX-A) and the impairment was independent of the direction of the torticollis. Six weeks after therapy with BTX-A, the number of pathological posturographic parameters had decreased by almost 30%, and the improvement reached statistical significance for sway path, sway area and anteroposterior sway during stance on foam with eyes closed. From a pathophysiological point of view, this improvement may be explained – at least in part – by a reduction of abnormal proprioceptive input from the neck. Accordingly, it seems possible that neck proprioceptive input plays a role in whole-body postural control in ICD patients, even though previous studies suggested that the neck input is relatively ignored in these patients.

Interdisciplinary research into the underlying neural processes of music therapy (MT) and subjective experiences of patients and therapists are largely lacking. The aim of the current study was to assess the feasibility of newly developed procedures (including electroencephalography/electrocardiography hyperscanning, synchronous audio–video monitoring, and qualitative interviews) to study the personal experiences and neuronal dynamics of moments of interest during MT with stroke survivors. The feasibility of our mobile setup and procedures as well as their clinical implementation in a rehabilitation centre and an acute hospital ward were tested with four phase C patients. Protocols and interviews were used for the documentation and analysis of the feasibility. Recruiting patients for MT sessions was feasible, although data collection on three consecutive weeks was not always possible due to organisational constraints, especially in the hospital with acute ward routines. Research procedures were successfully implemented, and according to interviews, none of the patients reported any burden, tiredness, or increased stress due to the research procedures, which lasted approx. 3 h (ranging from 135 min to 209 min) for each patient. Implementing the research procedures in a rehabilitation unit with stroke patients was feasible, and only small adaptations were made for further research.

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