The Research

"While the parents [sing…] the familiar sound of their chosen lullaby also brings peace, comfort, and connection with their baby and with each other. Evidence suggests that such meaningful moments are key for enhancing infant neurodevelopment and can also strengthen the parent–infant relationship."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11120361/

"Joint attention and turn-taking are necessary for social interaction and occur naturally in the context of music-making [...]. The increased attention and enjoyment that is observed when autistic people are presented with musical stimuli [...] provides a strong rationale for implementing music therapy [with autistic individuals]."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12888-024-06086-3

"Playing an instrument such as piano [...] helps to improve manual skills. [...] It engages integration of auditory, visual, and somatosensory information and motor coordination. Playing music also incorporates the entertaining and joyful component [...] in addition to the drive for mastering a musical instrument."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9514322/

"The music therapy treatment plan seems to be feasible and well accepted by adolescents. The results of analyses indicate improvements regarding depressive symptoms, positive coping with difficult emotions and health-related quality of life in included patients."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197455621001192

"The findings suggest that music therapy, particularly receptive methods or combinations of receptive and active approaches, offers effective, flexible, and scalable interventions for reducing anxiety symptoms, offering psychological benefits that enhance patient autonomy and quality of life."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(25)00225-1/fulltext

"The music therapist can promote awareness of the connection between music and emotions. [...] The complex communicative channel that a music therapist can develop with the client may help to reframe the narrowed focus [on cravings] onto alternative opportunities of reward processing."

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/13/2/259

"Receptive music therapy helped reduce obsessive symptoms with comorbid anxiety and depression. [...] Receptive music therapy was beneficial in easing the seriousness of both obsessive and compulsive symptoms. Furthermore, improvisational music therapy might also alleviate symptoms in OCD patients."

https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/15966

"Daily [music therapy] interventions as brief as 15 min [...] yielded significant improvements in PTSD. [...] Studies found significant improvements in PTSD symptoms after some form of music intervention, underscoring the potential for music to be an impactful treatment for traumatic stress."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950004424000075

"[Music therapy] is an efficient rehabilitative tool to ameliorate cognitive and behavioral symptoms after TBI, as well as to induce neural plasticity changes. [...] It seems plausible that [music therapy] may have provided an enriched environment to slow down the brain volume loss reported in TBI."

https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nyas.14800

"Music therapy can effectively ameliorate the repetition ability of patients with aphasia after stroke. It can also improve the cognitive ability of patients."

https://journals.lww.com/nohe/fulltext/2024/26210/effects_of_music_therapy_on_aphasia_and_cognition.11.aspx

"This analysis reveals that the use of music therapy thus far has provided a nearly unanimous positive effect on cancer patients, with the potential to provide both physical and psychosocial benefits."

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6694/14/18/4416

"Despite severe memory problems, patients with [dementia] can remember music, and music can facilitate recall of episodic memories. [...] This can help [dementia] patients to preserve their sense of personal identity."

https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nyas.14864