Music, Computing, and Health

Interdisciplinary approaches to music technology for well-being and healthcare, drawing from music cognition, computing, music information retrieval, and medicine

Music is increasingly thought of as beneficial for health, however the scientific research supporting this is not yet very robust. Furthermore, our ageing society is calling for more standardized, cost-effective methods in medicine, leading to a surge in interest in e-health and computer-based interventions. Music lends itself exquisitely to technological applications, and great strides are being made in computational analysis of music which allow an enormous range of computerized, but personalized interventions. Despite these recent advances, the potential of music technologies for healthcare applications still requires considerable research attention.

In the proposed workshop, we will bring together prominent researchers from music psychology and neuroscience, medical technology (medtech), music information retrieval (MIR), healthcare and music therapy to find common ground by exploring the state of the art, as well as the big challenges in each field. We will create a roadmap for the areas in health and well-being where music technology might not only allow more standardized, large scale research on music-based interventions, but also further the relevant fields by tackling existing challenges using a novel interdisciplinary approach.