MENTAL HEALTH MUSIC (MHM) SANTÉ MENTALE MUSIQUE

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Music for Listening Experiment

About The Author

The author is an independent research principal and a person with lived experience of mental health disability: She received her first mental illness diagnosis when she was 35 years old, which was later assessed as Schizophrenia. During the time of illness and recovery that spanned more than ten years, the author developed a body of knowledge about music listening base from thoughtful multi-disciplinary original research on her own under normal and abnormal mental health conditions. In 2019, driven by observing how music had accompanied her own recovery, the author coined the term Mental Health Music (MHM) for her original research: a novel auditory theory that encapsulates a new science of music she discovered and formulated, which stands in contrast to the music therapy employed today in limited areas of medicine, with the objectives to enable more effective use of the appropriate kind of music compositions for ordinary listening as well as for medical listening. It is therefore envisioned that the research will develop new methods of musical training for musicians in composition methodologies, techniques, and choices. Most importantly, the author’s MHM theories concern with the Nature of “Things” as in the time of Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras who, along with their contemporaries, look at natural phenomena variously as a “Whole” without divisions into the disciplines invented by the age of Universities that dominate in nowadays under the umbrellas of “Science”, “Medicine”, “Art”, or “Humanities”.

The author’s interest was developed in the human mind and geometry at a young age. In the 1990s, the author received her B.Sc. in Biology with Computational Science minor from McGill University, Canada. She subsequently pursued a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research was inspired by a name “Helmholtz” given credit by her thesis supervisor at the time who was interested to model artificial intelligence in neural networks to simulate the way the human mind might be used to learn temporal patterns from input experience. The author’s interests continue to reflect in her later professional career for few years, where she independently chose to specialize her work in informational systems architecture before she returned to academia to complete an MBA in Science and Technology from Queen’s University, Canada. The author has held positions in Management Information Technology and Systems, Telecommunication, and a University-Health Organization in her professional life until the late 2000s.

Apart from academic scholarly education and professional work experience, the author had more than fifteen formal years of training in piano and music theory according to the British Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) pedagogy and examination system and attended level 8 in piano performance before 19-years-old, in addition to self-taught herself violin pedagogy for about five years. In the leisure time, the author also occasionally paints and draws. She enjoys Architecture and Archaeology, and she has travelled on her own to several parts of Europe, Asia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Oceania, include France, Italy, Greece; China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong; London, Bath; New York, Boston, Orlando, Denver, San Francisco; as well as Australia and New Zealand. The author was born in a British Colony and is a Canadian by immigration and spent her adult life in Canada’s various towns and cities. She presently lives in Montreal.

Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges Music Professor of composition, music theory and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Jonathan Berger, of Stanford University; as well as Psychiatry Professor and former academic dean at Harvard Medical School, co-director of the center for the neurosciences and chairman of psychiatry at Brigham and Women's Hospital, David Silbersweig, of Harvard University; both of whom the author acquainted during the course of sharing her Research thinking since October 2020 by virtual correspondence, for providing preview suggestions and proofreads of this research including the publishing of my research on this website for Intellectual Property non-disclosure purpose. This research is solely the author’s original research and opinions are independent from individuals and from both Universities; and has no affiliation or remuneration of any kind from any Universities, Health Institutes, Public, and or Private organizations and persons. An unofficial distribution disclaimer can be referred to here.