The healing power of music: Robin Spielberg at TEDxLancaster

I'd like to talk to you about the transformative power of music and I'd like you all to ponder this can music save a life I am a pianist composer and recording artist and I've been playing the piano for a very long time one of the most common questions I get asked is how when did you start playing the piano and in truth I really don't have a memory of not playing the piano if you were to ask my mother she probably would joke that I began playing the piano sometime in the womb but really I this is what I do remember I remember being this kid about 7 years old and taking piano lessons and I was very lucky I consider myself lucky because I discovered early on that the piano playing the piano simply made me feel better whatever was going on with me hard day at school tough family day sitting down and disappearing into the pianos mid all my troubles just melt away so I continued playing and Here I am just about hitting adolescence things getting kind of crazy and in searching for the ever elusive soundtrack to my life sometimes I came up short and so I started composing my own I continued taking piano lessons but I started getting the acting bug in high school and in college New York University I majored in undergraduate drama after graduating NYU I co-founded the Atlantic Theatre Company with several of my classmates and I spent the next 10 years as a struggling actress in New York City because I had the skill set of playing the piano I was able to stay centered and focused and employed and pay my bills because I was able to work in piano rooms in hotel lobbies all throughout New York City eventually I recorded an album of my original piano solos and that really took off and that launched my career as a recording artist and a touring artist Here I am performing at my Carnegie Hall debut in 1997 I love writing the soundtrack to my life and while I've never become a household name or wildly famous it does give me a certain amount of satisfaction to know that my music has provided the soundtrack to so many other people's life cycle events my music has accompanied couples couples down the aisle has lulled babies to sleep has helped families in mourning and I've heard from a number of graduate students studying for the bar exam that my music has kept them company late into the night it wasn't until September of 1998 in a life changing very scary and tragic incident that I realized that music had even more power than I had ever realized I was pregnant with twin girls everything was going very well with the pregnancy the only thing that went wrong was that the pregnancy was too short I experienced preterm labor in my 22nd week and I was in the hospital on bed rest for 11 days there was an infection in one of the placentas and so the doctors had to perform an emergency c-section this infection was threatening everyone's life and the doctors did not expect the babies to live one did not survive but the other one did and we named her Valerie from the Latin valor to be strong before you start feeling too bad for me Valerie's here in the audience today she's a happy and healthy teenage girl here she is about the size of a beanie baby she was born weighing 12 ounces and the protocol in the hospital at the time was to only perform life-saving heroic measures on babies of a certain weight and she didn't meet that criteria we had a very very kind nurse in the o.r she put her thumb on the scale for us so our daughter could tip that scale at one pound one ounce so on her birth certificate it says 11 inches 17 ounces Valery Spielberg Qasim here's a little another photograph of her close-up she was too small to be put into an incubator so she had this station and here's my wedding ring that she's wearing is her bracelet Valerie was the size of a can of coca-cola now the NICU 15 years ago was not anything I expected it to be it was filled with wonderful doctors and wonderful staff but it was also a very loud place it was hustling and bustling it had the energy of an emergency room as I mentioned it was loud it was not the kind of environment that you think of when you think of babies that need to heal that need to recover I wanted so badly to give Valerie the gift of music i wanted i wanted to play piano for her the way I did when she was in Euro that's what calm didn't centered and focused me I knew it would do the same for her so I did the next best thing I asked for permission to bring my CDs - Valerie's station so that we could drown out some of these other ambient noise that were so displeasing and the nursing staff said sure okay well they noticed something very interesting when my music was playing by Valerie station her vital signs improved in other words for saturation her oxygen saturation levels increased her blood pressure stabilized and her heart while still needing life-saving surgery was getting a little bit of a better rhythm and this was not just a fluke this didn't happen over a 24-hour period or a couple of weeks we were in the NICU for a long four months and time after time this is what we noticed and we could see the evidence on the monitors and it was not just Valerie he was affected it was all of the babies who were ripped in earshot of the music well I was perplexed I understand music preference I understand that what I couldn't understand or how this infant well actually like really couldn't call Valerie an infant Valerie was a fetus growing outside the womb how could music have such a positive medical real physical effect on this fetus so I did some research and I went online and I discovered the research of dr. Jane Standley I located her research through the American music therapy Association's website music therapy org dr. Stanley worked the University of Tallahassee in Florida and she has spent decades of her career studying this the effects of music on the premature infant her studies basically concurred with everything that we had been witnessing in the hospital studies came out years after we left the hospital showing that singing or playing womb-like sounds to infants helped soothe and calm them and 272 preemies were studied and it was noted that neurological changes took place after music therapy was employed valerie came home years went by and we continued to play music sing music and incorporate music in her daily life because Micro preemies like Valerie are subject to a myriad of learning disabilities delays and medical conditions we thought it was important to continue whatever we were doing with music as other conditions presented themselves one thing that presented itself rather early in elementary school was a condition that showed us that Valerie had difficulty with her short-term memory this became a problem in the second and third grade when teachers started sending home worksheets and asked students to memorize facts I remember one of her first test was on the definitions of some very simple health terms vaccine thermometer germ she was to define all of these terms and be able to answer them on a test however when I was studying with Valerie and helping her learn and the way I learned probably many of you have learned Fowler was unable to repeat back the answers she and she was unable to remember them I was getting pretty frustrated as the Valerie what is a vaccine we've gone over this so many times geez I'm sorry mommy I don't know in my frustration I just started to do what I do naturally I turned to music and I said Valerie a vaccine is a shot the doctor gives you so the germs don't get just sick a vaccine is a shot the doctor gives you so the germs don't get you sick and that was over nine years ago and I still remember it and you can rest assured that Valerie did too and she went from a C student to an A student I grabbed all of her curricula I started setting all of her social studies all of her science all of her history to music and I cannot tell you the joy that my husband and I experienced when we went to parent-teacher conferences and we saw their faces and they said to us Wow Valerie went from being such an anxious little girl to so calm and relaxed and I said how could you tell and I said well she takes an exam and she just sings her weight right to the test we were so excited about that Valerie started taking percussion lessons as well not only did with music lessons her dexterity improve but her sense of rhythm and when you think about it it makes sense we have so much rhythm in our daily lives right there's the rhythm of waking up in the morning and getting prepared for work or for school and packing our backpacks and getting our lunch prepared and incorporating rhythm in a music kind of way just helped reinforce all of the rhythms of Valerie's day-to-day activities and helped her a great deal when students have music in school their brain stems are more robust and when rhythm is introduced it is true they do a bit better in school and their rhythms in their lives are accompanied by the rhythms in the music and this is not a brand new idea as early as post-world War two nurses noticed that veterans were faster to get up on their feet and get better when big-band music was playing and no wonder music is does not just exercise one part of our brain it kind of lights up all of our brain there's not one area of our brain that we could say this area is the music area of our brain the way we could say this is the speech area of our brain music lights up all of our brain and it's really really good for us a few years ago I was on tour in rural Missouri and as I often do I stopped by a nursing home to visit with patients and play piano I usually love these book jobs because these little side gigs their kind of volunteer gigs that I do under the radar and they're fun to do because I love a good Broadway show tune and I love being able to introduce and reintroduce the music of yesteryear to the elderly it really brightens their day so I had my whole bag of tricks with me I had a big fake book along with me I had all kinds of ideas I thought well maybe I'll play name that tune but as soon as I walked in and saw the shape the condition of this particular nursing care facility which was state-run the condition of the piano and the residents I knew this was not going to be my favorite hour the residents were kind of slumped over in wheelchairs some of them were wheeled in on stretchers and as I began to play piano there was no applause after the song so I decided well I'll just finish out the hour I'll disappear into piano land and what I'll do is I'll just play an hour of tunes and then I'll leave that's exactly what I did I felt kind of sad and kind of depressed when I was walking away just as I was about to exit to the parking lot a nurse came running down the hall and she said to me Robin Robin wait wait I just wanted I just wanted to thank you I wanted to thank you so much because what you did today it was just amazing all of the connections you made and I said really and I wasn't being sarcastic I mean all of the ways that I have measured success up into this point well they were just a big fat zero for me all I had to measure my success were all the societal standards money applause how many CDs were sold and many requests were made where you chart on the radio standing ovations none of those things had just occurred and she said well remember when you're playing that song Aroon River and I said yes yes I remember playing Moon River and she said well there was a man he was singing along I said yes I actually kind of recall a baritone voice singing along as I was playing Moon River and she said yes but what you couldn't have known is that this man has not spoken in six months he lost his wife about a year ago and he began to withdraw he stopped speaking to the staff and then he didn't want any of his family visiting him he completely was in his own shell well as it turned out Moon River was his wedding song and when I played it it brought him back and he asked for his family to visit with him because he was ready to and she said no the reason no one was there to see you out the door is because we all went to call his family to tell them the good news so that they could come and cyst visit with him and tears were pouring down her cheeks and as I walked out to my car I realized that the greatest success the most successful gig of my lifetime had just occurred because of this connection I have witnessed firsthand the power of music in working alongside music therapists I have seen them work with traumatic brain injury patients with Alzheimer's patients with autism patients with children with learning disabilities of course music in the neonatal intensive care unit I have seen music help with pain management it has really been profound and what has once started as a love for the piano has now grown to a love of all things music because music I have seen as I have seen can open pathways to healing that I never knew were possible this is Valerie playing drums here she is playing for mallet marimba she earned her letter last night in varsity band so can music save a life I can't say for sure but I can tell you for sure that music can have a life-changing effect on your life music is breaking new ground and music therapy is groundbreaking I'd like to share with you now a song which is typical of the kind of music that I shared with Valerie while she was in the NICU and Beyond and this is a song entitled dreaming of summer I invite you to dream of long as you listen you you you the thank you thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 409,118

Keywords: tedx, ted x, ted talks, tedx talk, ted talk, Musician (Occupation), United States Of America (Country), English Language (Human Language), Health Care (Issue), TEDx, Pennsylvania (US State), Robin Spielberg (Musical Artist), ted, tedx talks

Id: 8LTusPwrH9E

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 07 2014