The Possibilities and Prospects for the Use of Music Computer Technologies in Therapy Dealing with Psychogenic Disorders

Abstract

The beneficial effect of music on the human body has been known since ancient times and has been actively used in the methods of music therapy. The article analyzes in the manner of a survey the advantages, possibilities and limitations of the traditional methods of music therapy, wherein the patient is presented with a set of musical compositions empirically selected. A radically different and innovative method of music therapy is based on musical or music-like stimulation that is generated by a computer on the basis of feedback signals from the patient’s own physiological characteristic features. The advantages and prospects of this innovative method are examined here and an evaluation is given of the effectiveness of computer-aided transformations of the patient’s brain biopotentials into musical or music-like effects, which are used in the adaptive neuro-stimulation technology developed by the authors with feedback from the current electroencephalogram (EEG) parameters. By means of the examples from our own research with the use of EEG-guided adaptive neurostimulation, we have outlined the prospects for the development of music computer technologies in the treatment of psychogenic disorders and the cognitive rehabilitation of human beings.