Aaron Colverson is a postdoctoral fellow at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and is affiliate faculty at the UF Center for Arts in Medicine. He earned his BM from Berklee College of Music and his MM and Ph.D. from the University of Florida. He is teaching "Neuro-ethnomusicology for Aging Brain Health" with us this winter.
First things first: What is neuro-ethnomusicology?
I hope that all those syllables don't make the course feel unapproachable. I’ve been a little worried about that. The goal of the course is to be fun, engaging and revelatory in terms of what music does to people and what music means to people. It offers a practical understanding of music as an incredible human art form that’s appreciated and loved around the world, and the role it can play in brain behavior and health.
The neuro component relates to neuropsychology, which refers to the measurement of brain-behavior relationships. Ethnomusicology refers to the cultural anthropology of music.
My research includes scanning modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging, and ways in which we might use science to further inform the musical experiences of people across cultures, particularly for people as they're transitioning into lives with dementia.
You’re a musician and a scientist. What came first? A love of music or a love of science?
This is personal work for me. I've been playing the violin for more than 30 years. I started off very Western-European, classically trained, and still engage with those musics regularly. I’ve also trained at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and so jazz and improvisation have been huge parts of my musical training, too.
Second, I’ve always been interested in physical fitness and in maintaining a healthy body and mind. I’ve long been fascinated by Buddhism and Hinduism and the mind-body connection.
A third and very personal component here is that my father passed away from complications with frontotemporal dementia in 2016 and that's been a huge motivator behind my integrated view of music and health. He used music on a daily basis to help identify with the world as he continued to transition into life with dementia.
So all of these things together inform my view on music and health.
My dad had dementia. Music was a source of great comfort to him, too.
We all know that music affects our emotions, and emotions are very much physiologically based. To individuals living with dementia, recognizable, familiar music helps with symptom management of anxiety, agitation, depression, and other issues an individual might face. There are just a plethora of examples of it.
Do different types of music impact people differently or do people from certain cultures respond to certain kinds of music?
Interestingly, we tend to build our identities around the music that we engage with when we’re younger. That’s maybe one of the reasons why music from one's past is so profound. A really interesting thing that I learned somewhat recently is that the music we gravitate to most is linked to when people are in their teenage and post-adolescent years. That suggests that there may be a hormonal element there, sort of like when people are becoming more engaged with social interaction, not just from an identity-based perspective, but also from a relationship-building perspective.
Does familiar and unfamiliar music effect neuroplasticity the same way?
No. We tax our brains to pay attention to stuff that we're not familiar with. This is somewhat the basis for learning, more broadly, and the basis for neuroplasticity. It's a natural response to exposure to new content. The brain’s associations with things that are familiar help to make meaning or sense of unfamiliar content. So if you listen to music that you're not familiar with — say, for example, Central or South American accordion music — your brain works a little harder, in a good way. That’s a part of brain health and healthy brain aging we’ll discuss.
I'm hoping that the course will encourage people to try and listen and pay attention to music that they might not have otherwise thought to pay attention to.
Can you talk a bit about the classroom experience? What can members expect?
Well, there’s going to be quite a bit of experiential learning through music-making or engagement with music listening. Plus there’ll be some lecture, some group discussion.
I’ll explain some of the neuroscience behind what we’re experiencing in the class. But it’s going to be approachable. Not some didactic presentation or anything.
Will the music making be with instruments?
We’ll make music with our hands, with our voices, with our feet. I want to show that you don't need to have a piano or a violin or a flute to create music — that you literally have all the implements you possibly need to make musical sound and to do it in a group.
We’ll actually have a whole session on rhythmic music. Rhythm is very effective for symptom management for Parkinson's disease, for example, which has symptoms that include things like gait, gait abnormalities, postural stability. There's been some really cool work in the brain to show some of the mechanisms that are associated with how the brain processes regular rhythmic sound in the context of Parkinson's disease. There are myriad examples. I find it so fascinating.
Final question: What is musicking? You write about it in your course description.
Musicking refers to any level of engagement that a person puts into some sort of musical event or musical performance. As you can imagine, that spans an immense gamut of possibilities. For example, many people make music in small ensembles and they play for fun. That same idea could also occur on a concert stage where an audience claps at certain appropriate moments and engages with the music from this kind of fourth wall. Importantly, it can also be people behind the stage who are making that production occur — the lighting people, the sound people, the ushers who put you to your seats. Humans doing music and engaging with music. That’s what musicking is.