Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
Department of Music, The Faculty of Humanities, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.
PLoS One. 2019 Mar 7;14(3):e0213247. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213247. eCollection 2019.
Music making, in the form of free improvisations, is a common technique in music therapy, used to express one's feelings or ideas in the non-verbal language of music. In the broader sense, arts therapies, and music therapy in particular, are used to induce therapeutic and psychosocial effects, and to help mitigate symptoms in serious and chronic diseases. They are also used to empower the wellbeing and quality of life for both healthy individuals and patients. However, much research is still required to understand how music-based and arts-based approaches work, and to eventually enhance their effectivity. The clinical setting employing the arts constitutes a rich dynamic environment of occurrences that is difficult to capture, being driven by complex, simultaneous, and interwoven behavioral processes. Our computational paradigm is designed to allow substantial barriers in the arts-based fields to be overcome by enabling the rigorous and quantitative tracking, analyzing and documenting of the underlying dynamic processes. Here we expand the method for the music modality and apply it in a proof of principle experimentation to study expressive behavioral effects of diverse musical improvisation tasks on individuals and collectives. We have obtained statistically significant results that include empirical expressive patterns of feelings, as well as proficiency, gender and age behavioral differences, which point to variation factors of these categorized collectives in music making. Our results also suggest that males are more exploratory than females (e.g., they exhibit a larger range of octaves and intensity) and that the older people express musical characterized negativity more than younger ones (e.g., exhibiting larger note clusters and more chromatic transitions). We discuss implications of these findings to music therapy, such as behavioral diversity causality in treatment, as well as future scientific and clinical applications of the methodology.
音乐创作，以自由即兴的形式，是音乐治疗中常用的一种技术，用于用音乐的非语言形式表达自己的感受或想法。从更广泛的意义上说，艺术疗法，特别是音乐疗法，用于诱导治疗和心理社会效应，并帮助减轻严重和慢性疾病的症状。它们也用于增强健康个体和患者的幸福感和生活质量。然而，仍需要大量研究来了解基于音乐和基于艺术的方法是如何工作的，并最终提高其有效性。采用艺术的临床环境构成了一个丰富的动态事件环境，这些事件很难捕捉，因为它们是由复杂、同时和相互交织的行为过程驱动的。我们的计算范例旨在克服基于艺术领域的重大障碍，通过实现对基础动态过程的严格和定量跟踪、分析和记录。在这里，我们扩展了音乐模态的方法，并将其应用于原理验证实验中，以研究不同音乐即兴任务对个体和集体的表达性行为效应。我们已经获得了具有统计学意义的结果，包括情感、熟练程度、性别和年龄行为差异的经验表达模式，这些结果指向了这些分类集体在音乐创作中的变化因素。我们的结果还表明，男性比女性更具探索性（例如，他们表现出更大的音域和强度范围），并且老年人比年轻人更能表达音乐特征的消极性（例如，表现出更大的音符群和更多的半音过渡）。我们讨论了这些发现对音乐治疗的意义，例如治疗中的行为多样性因果关系，以及该方法的未来科学和临床应用。
