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For me, it is very fascinating how built-in feature it is for humans, to find, detect and feel the rhythm! It is also interesting, how therapeutic the rhythm can be, from a music therapeutic perspective. The rhythm and synchronization also brings people together (for example applause as a communal phenomenon).

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I find it very interesting that in music it's often the rhythm that makes people feel things. At least for me, there is always some part of a song that feels especially good, because of an interesting or just plainly good rhythmic structure. Also rhythm brings comfort and makes it easy to feel like you're a part of something because the base of it is usually repetitive and easy to move to so it brings pleasure when you could see that a beat was coming and could react to it like you knew what you were doing. Maybe that's part of why people find music to be an easy way to heal and feel like they belong?

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It’s interesting to think that music has been considered a uniquely human phenomenon but beat recognition or some sort of rhythm acknowledgement is present in other animals as well (i.e. the seal bobbing her head in time to an external beat) and yet beat or rhythm is such an integral part of music that sometimes just a rhythm is considered music by itself.

Wonder if at somepoint the definition of music requires a readjustment since it’s not unheard of even plants making music at this point!

https://news.ucsc.edu/2013/04/sea-lion-beat.html

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I was also focusing on how musical rhythm affects PD patients and how and which kind of rhythm they find pleasurable. It's an area of study I find easy to apply to use in music therapy: impact of rhythm on patients with Parkinson’s Disease could further be deepened by doing research on how drumming affects the very same patients.

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I read up on therapeutic benefits of drumming on Parkinson's disease patients. Not only did it help rehabilitate these patients, but drumming therapy also helped restore movement to a paralysed individual so she was able to dance again. You can read more about it here: https://remo.com/experience/post/drumming-and-parkinsons-disease/ I could not unfortunately find any research about a decreased risk of developing Parkinsons for drummers. There was actually evidence against this, Niall Power a professional big-time touring drummer was diagnosed with Parkinson's at 50 years of age. This of course could be an anomaly and perhaps he was strongly genetically predisposed to developing it anyway but it would be interesting if research were to be carried out on this topic

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I thought about this concept of entrainment in relation to chamber music; isn't this what it's all about with all the tempo and dynamic changes happening when rehearsing and on stage? Some ideas are of course discussed beforehand, but some changes just happen, also tempo and pulse related, and it could be quite hard to tell who leads and who follows when something is done differently seemingly simultaneously. Often these mutual decisions are partly a result of experience in playing together, but sometimes it's just that the people make excellent expectations about other players and those expectations are rewarded.

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The concept of entrainment (and lack of it) made me think about the physiology and cardiology. I think medical condition of arrhythmia is one example of disturbance in the most vital of our rhythms. The reasons for arrhythmia are myriad and there would be possibilities for research in how outside rhythmic elements affect, cause or cure arrhythmia.

Medical treatments or cures involve medication and turning the phase of pulse by stopping and restarting heart. The final solution is a pacemaker. Could this be done in a more sophisticated way in the future? Can we "correct" the irregularities in pulse without these kind of devices?

One very well-timed article for the topic was regarding an instragram post from a Finnish pop singer Anna Abreu. Posted yesterday (14.10.2020), she writes about how her song "Lusikat" has the same tempo (100-120 bpm) as used to resuscitate a person, therefore "saving lives". I am not sure about the song saving lives. The connection is obvious. Heres the link to the stara.fi article from today (15.10.2020). Unfortunately available only in Finnish: https://www.stara.fi/2020/10/15/anna-abreulta-tarkea-somepaivitys-lusikat-voi-pelastaa-ihmishenkia/

First Aid courses still teach resuscitation to the rhythm of Beegees' song "Staying Alive". According to a story, the song was recorded using the drummer's heart beat as a metronome.

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Article discussed rhythmic entrainment as an emotion induction principle. Four ways of listening was introduced and explained how they might contribute subjective feelings. Levels were perceptual, autonomic physiological, motor and social entrainments. Entrainment means that two physiological or biological components has synchronized and it induces interactivity. This observation has its roots in Christian Huygens clock example where the clock eventually end up moving synchronously with each other. That phenomena can be seen also in other phenomena’s which has periodicity. That phenomena requires vibration in physiological processes and resonance stops when the pulse transmitting process stops.

Article introduced ideas of how external rhythm of the music interacts with internal body rhythm and that induces emotional affects like for example while smiling we may feel amusement. Rhythmical repetition cause expectations and release dopamine. In neurological sense entrainment of the spike of neural populations in the basotelar amyglada has crucial structure in emotion processing and hippocampal theta-rhythms might mediate emotional memory formation.

Perception needs integration of sensory information and top-down influences. According to article newborns already have skills to detect regularities. Article also suggests rhythm affects in brain activity without motor movements. Higher tempo can be seen as higher arousal. Dynamic stable slow tempo lowers heartrate and blood pressure. There was example about mother’s heartbeat which cause pleasantness for baby. Also about motor entrainment there was mention that synchronized moving with other people affects many brain areas and can induce different kinds of propocial interpersonal dispositions and affects. These examples supports the questions about different entrainment levels interact with each other. Conclusion is that every levels has affects to our sybjective emotional component and one can trigger others.

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I'm thinking about other lecture few years back where we though about popular music and why many famous songs is around 120bpm. For that conclusion was basic human "beat" and so on motor entrainment

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I have studied low frequency treatment in vibroakustic therapy. They are using pulsation in this treatment. Pulsation means changing decibels of frequency in a given time. This gives pulse or rhythm to frequency treatment. They have found similar effects from this pulse than what they have found in this study (Rhythmic entrainment as a musical affect induction mechanism); fast pulse refresh and slow pulse relax.

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It is very interesting how rhythmic entrainment can be applied in therapy and what all should be considered when planning the interventions. The article briefly discussed the studies with Parkinson patients and rhythmic auditory stimulation during the daily walking exercises, and I also read some more about the effectiveness of music in brain rehabilitation (https://www.duodecimlehti.fi/duo11845). I also read about how the preferred musical tempo (approximately) is at 120-130 (at the middle of the average gait cadence), and how it was suggested that improvement could be maximized with interactive cueing system that adapts to the patients’ gait parameters (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641247/). This article also discussed virtual reality technology and how this could be used to simulate real-world experience.

In addition to many benefits there can be some negative effects that relate to listening the music while walking exercises: in one study they found out that the patients’ ability to cross obstacles declined (https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.jyu.fi/docview/746009668). In another study (https://www.hindawi.com/journals/pd/2010/483530/) the music used was selected based on patient’s preferences and it was also matched to their cadence. Here it was concluded that musical intervention can actually provide dual task training. It is interesting to think about multitasking – what can and what cannot be done at the same time? And how do conditions such as Parkinson’s change the situation. Where is the line between beneficial and disturbance, when using music? And it can be sometimes both at the same time?

It is impressive how much is already known, but how many questions there still are – and as there is so much complexity involved, how careful we need to be when making assumptions or conclusions.