Music has been shown to help stroke victims recover their sleep schedules and their levels of comfort
I have just been listening to a recording of Dinu Lipatti’s last recital, in Besançon, in 1950.
Only 32, he knew he was dying – and did in fact die a few weeks later, of a disease that would now be treatable.
I don’t know whether my knowledge of this affects my response to his playing, or indeed whether his playing was affected by his knowledge of his impending death. But, certainly, I know of no picture of a man staring into the face of eternity more spiritually concentrated than the photograph of Dinu Lipatti at the piano then.
I would write that he played musica universalis – the music of the spheres – were it not that art is never as universal as we might like to suppose.
But music certainly hath charms. Does it have medical benefits?
A study from Italy suggests, not for the first time, that it might. The researchers performed a trial in which stroke victims were played music every day after their admission to hospital, and the results compared with those of similar victims who were not played music.
The strokes were relatively mild ones, the patients having preserved their comprehension and what, in the published paper, was rather coyly called their ‘communication’. They were also without major psychiatric conditions – hallucinations, delusions and the like – and were what doctors like to call ‘cognitively intact’.
The music played to the experimental group was Italian vocal music supposedly personalised – though whether this was by the patients themselves or by the researchers was not specified.
At the time of their discharge, the patients were assessed (without the assessor’s knowing whether they were in the experimental or the control group) for their levels of anxiety and depression, perceived quality of sleep and their pain and discomfort – all by means of self-report by questionnaire.
Although the experimental and control groups thought the quality of care that they had been given was the same, the experimental group experienced lower levels of anxiety and depression, better sleep and lower levels of pain and discomfort.
A certain caution in interpretation is necessary. Sleep quality was measured on the Insomnia Severity Scale. It is true that the experimental group had an improvement of 2.8 points on that scale by comparison with the control group. This was a highly significant difference – in the statistical sense.
It is generally held that a difference of at least 6 is necessary for what is called a clinically significant difference – one perceived by a patient as representing an improvement (or deterioration) in his or her condition.
One does not automatically feel better because one has a statistically significant improvement.
But here one must issue a meta-caution, as it were. One may be in better health while not feeling it. And all results in trial are aggregated – so a big change of score in some may be flattened out by an absence of a change of score in others. Since the playing of music to stroke victims is nearly costless, it might still be worth trying, even if only a small number benefit greatly.
We see here an almost infinite field opening up for research. Does some music have greater beneficial effect than other music? For myself, I can easily imagine, if I were lying in bed with a stroke in a hospital bed, that rap played in my ear would soon polish me off: no need for assisted dying. Given changes in musical taste, Bach and Mozart might one day have the same effect on future generations of stoke-sufferers.
In addition, there are different kinds of strokes, and they may not all respond in the same way. In short, different folks have different strokes.
