Over a rather short period of time, music can sometimes bring out various emotions in us, feelings or memories. If it has made the popularity of artists through the centuries, music is also used as a complementary therapy in many medical fields such as the treatment of pain, memory loss related to dementia, interaction disorders in autism etc.... This therapeutic action can be linked to its type of use requiring a framework such as repeating rhythms to work on memory, using music as a human interaction in socialization disorders, or more passively by listening to music alone as in pain management, especially in acute (surgery, dentistry ...).Neuroscience, on a cerebral level, and psychiatry, on a clinical level, have studied the emotional impact of music.

 

From a cerebral point of view, studies suggest an involvement of the limbic system and the amygdala, the emotional zones. Schematically, music can intervene by modifying neuronal activity in extremely varied areas of the brain such as the hippocampus (for encoding memories), the right ventral striatum (connected to the pallidum towards the limbic system and including the nuceus accumbens, involved in the reward and addiction circuit), the auditory cortex (temporal, processing sounds), motor areas (Koelsch 2014).

 

More relevant, as far as we’re concerned, are the clinical studies on music and its emotional impact. There are an impressive number of studies on the management of anxiety and/or pain around surgery (more or less invasive) or dental care (Corbijn van Willenswaard, Lynn et al. 2017, Jayakar and Alter 2017, Meghani, Tracy et al. 2017, Rossetti, Chadha et al. 2017, Bradt and Teague 2018, Garcia-Perdomo, Montealegre Cardona et al. 2018, Kuhlmann, de Rooij et al. 2018, Walker and Mc- Naughton 2018, Ainscough, Wind- sor et al. 2019, Chuang, Chen et al. 2019). This work always shows a positive effect, sometimes moderate, but always in line with so called complementary therapies (www.cumic.net). In depression, there are fewer studies, and in particular there are very few studies focusing on anxiety and/or depressive symptoms outside of medical situations. The study of the literature shows that the choice of music is always that of playlists, sometimes chosen by the patient, but never sounds. Of course, there is a great variation in the types of music that can act on a particular individual, making it difficult to generalize.

 

One of the aspects opened up by the neurosciences is the existence of waves of specific frequencies at the cerebral level. These low frequency waves, in particular alpha, beta and gamma waves related to different states of awakening (at least at the most vigilant) are modulated by the psychological state but also by certain pathologies (such as epilepsy). They can be measured, and it has been observed that musical listening activities (but also relaxation or mindfulness) can act on these waves. Of course, this is also the case with music (Daly, Malik and al. 2014, Fernandez-Soto, Martinez-Rodrigo and al, 2018, Koelsch 2018), where the studies use the most common musical pieces, so it is difficult to know precisely what sound can produce what effect.

 

We are studying the clinical effect of sound characteristics (duration, intensity, timbre, pitch, but also timbre transformation, pitch associations, pitch transitions) in the context of sound textures produced by Moooon with singular specificities in terms of density, matter, contrasts, and sound evolutions. Five of these sound environments with different characteristics and specificities are studied.