Music to One's Ears: Familiarity and Music Engagement in People With Parkinson's Disease

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a complex diagnosis commonly associated with motor dysfunction, but known to comprise cognitive, psychiatric, and mood disturbances as well. Music has been successfully used to address motor and non-motor symptoms of PD. Still, little is known about the nature of an individual with PD's experience and relationship with music on conceptual and emotional levels, which may factor into their engagement in music-based techniques to ameliorate impairments. Two surveys were administered to 19 individuals with PD and 15 individuals without PD in order to gauge their subjective impressions and valuations of music. Participants completed The Brief Music Experience Questionnaire (BMEQ), a standard self-report measure pertaining to the role of music in one's life, prior to performing a perception task which involved listening to and making sound adjustments to three music recordings. Following the perception task, a custom Exit Survey was administered to evaluate the experience of listening to and engaging with the music in the perception task. In all six dimensions of the BMEQ, examining aspects of music experience including commitment to music, self-reported musical aptitude, social uplift, affective reactions, positive psychotropic effects, and reactive musical behavior (RMB, pertaining to actions or behaviors in response to music), the mean and the median were greater for the control group than for the PD group, but the difference was only statistically significant in the RMB dimension. On the Exit Survey, both groups assessed recent, specific, and interactive music listening more positively than the imagined, hypothetical or general music experiences addressed on the BMEQ. Additionally, familiarity had a greater effect on listening pleasure for participants with PD than those without PD. We conclude that people with PD may perceive less of an automatic connection between music and activity than their healthy peers. Additionally, they may receive more pleasure and value from music than they anticipate. Taken together, our results suggest that people with PD may require encouragement to participate as well as empowerment to choose familiar selections in order to better access music-based interventions and the benefits they can offer.

Keywords: Brief Music Experience Questionnaire; Parkinson’s disease therapy; Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation; neurologic music therapy; neuromusic.

FIGURE 1

Brief Music Experience Questionnaire (BMEQ) ratings by participants with and without PD. (A) Overall group means of six music experience scales of the BMEQ showing the categories: Affective Reactions (AR), Commitment to Music (CM), Innovative Musical Aptitude (IMA), Positive Psychotropic Effects (PPE), Reactive Musical Behavior (RMB), and Social Uplift (SU) as rated on a 5-point scale (y axis) by participants with (Black) and without (Gray) PD. Error bars indicate the standard error of the means. Asterisks (^*) indicate significance between groups at p < 0.05 as determined by Mann–Whitney U test. Individual question means for (B) RMB, (C) IMA, and (D) PPE for participants with and without PD. Q numbers (x axis) refer to the questions/items on the BMEQ that constitute the corresponding category. Data points represent mean responses for each participant group to that question.

FIGURE 2

Exit Survey results of music enjoyment and familiarity. (A) Mean responses (±SEM) for enjoyment and familiarity on the Exit Survey for healthy controls (Gray) and participants with PD (Black). Asterisks (^*) indicates significance at p < 0.05 as determined by Mann–Whitney U test. There were significant between group differences for both enjoyment and familiarity. (B) Enjoyment plotted against familiarity for control (top) and PD (bottom) groups. Responses for all songs and all participants are included in dataset. Size of circle and numbers below indicate the number of participants from each group who responded at that coordinate for the three songs.