Has Your 'Someday' Arrived Yet??

If you're still waiting for the perfect time to live your life more fully, maybe you need to read my August Voicegram, all about 'doing it NOW', rather than 'doing it Someday'.

This month's Voicegram has a special tribute to Composer Jeff Day, also.

 Beth Lawrence's August Voicegram

http://conta.cc/Pulz9c

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Music and Alzheimer's Research

Music may help Alzheimer's disease

The early symptoms of Alzheimer's--memory loss, forgetfulness--are so similar to those of natural aging that the disease is often diagnosed too late for effective treatment.  Now an MIT team has created music software to help diagnose the disease much sooner.  Users compose songs and then play a Concentration-like game that involves recalling excerpts of melody pairs and other memory tasks.  You can track your own results and watch for signs of more serious cognitive decline.  "If Alzheimer's can be detected early, medication and mental exercises have a better chance of stabilizing memory loss or at least slowing down the progression," says one of the software's creators, Adam Boulanger, Ph.D.  The software is currently in clinical trials, but researchers hope to release a commercial version to the public within the year.

From AARP: The Magazine, August/September 2012  http://aarp.org/magazine

Music Relaxation

Music promotes relaxation

Music can promote relaxation of tense muscles, enabling you to easily release some of the tension you carry from a stressful day (or week).

It can help you get ‘into the zone’ when practicing yoga, self hypnosis or guided imagery, can help you feel energized when exercising, help dissolve the stress when you’re soaking in the tub, and be a helpful part of many other stress relief activities.  It can take an effective stress reliever and make it even more effective!

Music can help your brain get into a meditative state, which carries wonderful stress relief benefits with it.   For those who find meditation intimidating, music can be an easier alternative.

Excerpted from http://stress.about.com/od/tensiontamers/a/musicrelaxation.htm

Benefits of Music

Music is therapeutic

Music can be used to bring a more positive state of mind, helping to keep depression and anxiety at bay. This can help prevent the stress response from wreaking havoc on the body, and can help keep creativity and optimism levels higher, bringing many other benefits.

Music has also been found to bring many other benefits, such as lowering blood pressure (which can also reduce the risk of stroke and other health problems over time), boost immunity, ease muscle tension, and more. With so many benefits and such profound physical effects, it’s no surprise that so many are seeing music as an important tool to help the body in staying (or becoming) healthy.

With all these benefits that music can carry, it's no surprise that music therapy is growing in popularity. Many hospitals are using music therapists for pain management and other uses. Music therapists help with several other issues as well, including stress. 

Excerpted from http://stress.about.com/od/tensiontamers/a/music_therapy.htm

Music As Therapy

Music can counteract stress

Research has shown that music with a strong beat can stimulate brainwaves to resonate in sync with the beat, with faster beats bringing sharper concentration and more alert thinking, and a slower tempo promoting a calm, meditative state.  Also, research has found that the change in brainwave activity levels that music can bring can also enable the brain to shift speeds more easily on its own as needed, which means that music can bring lasting benefits to your state of mind, even after you’ve stopped listening.

With alterations in brainwaves comes changes in other bodily functions. Those governed by the autonomic nervous system, such as breathing and heart rate can also be altered by the changes music can bring. This can mean slower breathing, slower heart rate, and an activation of the relaxation response, among other things. This is why music and music therapy can help counteract or prevent the damaging effects of chronic stress, greatly promoting not only relaxation, but health.

Excerpted from http://stress.about.com/od/tensiontamers/a/music_therapy.htm

 

 

Music Therapy Promotes Health

Music Therapy Affects the Body and Mind

Research has shown that music has a profound effect on your body and psyche. In fact, there’s a growing field of health care known as music therapy, which uses music to heal. Those who practice music therapy are finding a benefit in using music to help cancer patients, children with ADD, and others, and even hospitals are beginning to use music and music therapy to help with pain management, to help ward off depression, to promote movement, to calm patients, to ease muscle tension, and for many other benefits that music and music therapy can bring. This is not surprising, as music affects the body and mind in many powerful ways. 

Excerpted from http://stress.about.com/od/tensiontamers/a/music_therapy.htm

Singing: The Key to a Long Life

King's Singers a capella group

This is an excerpt from an interesting article from Brian Eno:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97320958

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

A few years ago a friend and I realized that we both loved singing but didn't do much of it. So we started a weekly a capella group with just four members. After a year we started inviting other people to join. We didn't insist on musical experience — in fact some of our members had never sung before. Now the group has ballooned to around 15 or 20 people.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor. A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing.

Well, there are physiological benefits, obviously: You use your lungs in a way that you probably don't for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly. And there are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call "civilizational benefits." When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.

Why Singing Is Good for Your Health

Harmony singing is good for health

Looking for a fun way to get and stay healthy?

Try singing on a regular basis.

But not any old singing will do. The kind of singing that will provide you with significant health benefits has to come from deep inside your chest, even from your abdomen.

If you've ever been in a choir, you've probably been told that the proper way to sing is from your belly.

The idea is to use your diaphragm - the large muscle that separates your chest and abdominal cavities - to push air out through your vocal cords.

Using your diaphragm to sing is a good way to promote a healthy lymphatic system, which in turn promotes a healthy immune system.

If you want to start singing for health and have some fun with it, I highly recommend that you learn how to sing in harmony with another person or group of people. Singing in harmony with others is easily one of my favorite things to do.

Whether you get your feet wet with singing in harmony with others or not, do your health a favor and belt out a few tunes on a regular basis. But remember: it has to come from deep within, not just from your throat.

And if you're a bit shy, you can always save your singing for the shower when no one else is home or when you're in the car and have the windows rolled up.

Your immune system will thank you for it.

Excerpted from Dr. Ben Kim: http://drbenkim.com/articles-singing-for-health.htm

Building a Better, Younger Voice



Vocal exercises can create a younger
sounding voice 

Some people want to not only look younger, but sound younger, too. 

An increasing number of older adults are putting more pep into their speaking with voice therapy.  "Research has shown they can sound younger than their chronological age" through proper techniques says Nandhu Radhakrishnan, a University of Missouri specialist in voice science and therapy. 

Vocal exercises improve loudness and strengthen the tone and endurance of muscles that have lost elasticity, says Ellen Markus, a speech pathologist at the Universty of North Carolina Voice Center.

Breathing and vocal exercises twice a day along with relaxation techniques greatly improve raspy voices.

Adapted from AARP Bulletin, July-August 2012, Vol. 53, No. 6

Does Singing Make You Happier? Part 3

Choral singers are happier

Psychological Effects of Singing

Some of the greatest connections between singing and happiness are more mental than physical. They're harder to measure, but just as significant.

Choral singers need to concentrate on their music and technique throughout the singing process, and it's hard to worry about things like work or money or family problems when you're actively concentrating on something else. So choral singers tend to have a built-in "stress-free zone." Learning is also part of the process -- learning new songs, new harmonies, new methods of keeping tempo. Learning has long been known to keep brains active and fend off depression, especially in older people.

The question remains, though -- why choral singing specifically? Concentration and deep breathing can happen in a recording studio, or in the privacy of your own home.

It's because some of the most important ties between singing and happiness are social ones. The support system of being part of a group, and the commitment to that group that gets people out of the house and into the chorus every week -- these are benefits that are specific to group singing. And they seem to be a big component of why choral singers tend to be happier than the rest of us. The feelings of belonging to a group, of being needed by the other members of that group ("We can't do this one without our alto!"), go a long way toward combating the loneliness that often comes along with being human in modern times.

Excerpted from http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/singing-happy2.htm

Does Singing Make You Happy? Part 2

Choral singing makes people happy

Physical Effects of Singing

All types of singing have positive psychological effects. The act of singing releases endorphins, the brain's "feel good" chemicals. Singing in front of a crowd, a la karaoke, naturally builds confidence, which has broad and long-lasting effects on general well-being. But of all types of singing, it's choral singing that seems to have the most dramatic effects on people's lives.

A study published in Australia in 2008 revealed that on average, choral singers rated their satisfaction with life higher than the public -- even when the actual problems faced by those singers were more substantial than those faced by the general public.  A 1998 study found that after nursing-home residents took part in a singing program for a month, there were significant decreases in both anxiety and depression levels.  Another study surveying more than 600 British choral singers found that singing plays a central role in their psychological health.

But why? Could you just start belting out a tune right now in order to make yourself feel happy?

It's possible. Some of the ways in which choral singing makes people happy are physical, and you get them whether you're in a chorus or in a shower -- as long as you're using proper breathing techniques during that shower solo. Singing can have some of the same effects as exercise, like the release of endorphins, which give the singer an overall "lifted" feeling and are associated with stress reduction. It's also an aerobic activity, meaning it gets more oxygen into the blood for better circulation, which tends to promote a good mood. And singing necessitates deep breathing, another anxiety reducer. Deep breathing is a key to meditation and other relaxation techniques, and you can't sing well without it.

Excerpted from http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/singing-happy.htm

Does Singing Make You Happy? Part 1

Singing makes birds and humans happier

In the United States, choral singing is the most popular of all arts-related participatory activities. Across the country, 28.5 million people regularly sing in one of 250,000 chorus groups.  It's a group activity that seems to stand the test of time better than others, and there may be a very good reason why: Singing has some effects that other participatory activities don't.

It has become pretty obvious in the last couple of decades that singing has special draws. Regular people all over the globe are addicted to karaoke singing. And many of those people can't even carry a tune. Bars use it to draw customers on slow nights: People will come if they can sing for a crowd. People will watch others sing for a crowd, too -- "reality" competitions like "American Idol" and "X Factor," two of the most popular shows in the United States and around the world, respectively, are all about singing.

Of course, some of the competitors on those shows can actually sing really well. It's clear why people are drawn to them. But what's the draw for somewhat-less-talented singers to belt out a tune? Why the huge interest in karaoke? Why all the singing in the shower, in the car, in the chorus? Does singing make people happy?

In parts 2 and 3 of this series, we'll find out what effect singing has on mood, outlook and general psychological health. We'll look specifically at choral singing, which is where the most recent and surprising research has been done. Apparently, choral singing, whether with a church, city or private group, really does make people happy.

The physiological effects of singing are fairly well-documented. For those who doubt its power, just look at songbirds: When male songbirds sing to female songbirds, it activates the pleasure center of the male's brain. In fact, scientists have discovered that the effect of singing on the birds' brains is similar to the effect of addictive drugs on human brains.  But there's a caveat. That effect doesn't happen when the birds are singing alone.

As it turns out, singing's effect on humans has a similar caveat.

Excerpted from http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/singing-happy.htm

Jennifer Lopez Is a Better Singer after ‘American Idol’

American Idol Helped Lopez to Become a Better Singer

Jennifer Lopez has credited “American Idol” with pushing her to “grow as an artist” after stepping down as a judge from the TV talent show.

The “On The Floor” singer has quit the panel to return to performing but insists her two years serving as a mentor to contestants has helped her to evolve.

She tells MTV News, “Whenever it’s things like that, where you’re working with other people, like the audience, or even another artist, like we did with the contestants on the show, you learn, you grow. And whatever I’d tell them, it was funny, it was like telling myself. Like, ‘Don’t forget, when you’re onstage ... make sure you connect and make sure it’s about the feeling.’

“Because we all get caught up, when we’re the ones standing there, and everybody’s watching. But it’s about forgetting about that and conveying a feeling. And I always feel like whenever I was telling them this over the past two years of doing Idol, that it was helping me grow as an artist as well.”

Lopez calls her “American Idol” stint a career highlight, but admits she is ready to step back into the spotlight as a singer.

She adds, “It was a great experience to sit there and do that for a while, and I honestly feel like it was put in my life for a reason, to be part of my journey and part of my growth, because it definitely did that. But as much as I love the show, this (singing) is what I do.… And that was fun and it was great, but this is what I do.”