
Musicians and music therapists have long known that music can have health benefits: a favorite song, for example, can reduce stress or even lower blood pressure. More recently, scientists and researchers have collaborated with musicians to study music's physical and psychological impacts on every aspect of health.
This year, Berklee's Music and Health Institute is ramping up its investigative efforts in this area with the Music and Health Innovation Challenge, a series of events culminating in a three-day hackathon April 5-7. Joy Allen, chair of the Music Therapy Department, spoke with us about the challenge and its aims.
How did you come up with the idea for the Music and Health Innovation Challenge?
Music and health are both such human endeavors. We've known about connections between them for thousands of years. The potential of music and music-based experiences has always been there, but it hasn't always been used.
Hospitals, medical research centers, and national organizations like the National Institute of Health, the National Endowment for the Arts, and others, are starting to study this in a new way. Researchers are collaborating with musicians and music therapists to study the impact of music across the health continuum. Music can have a positive effect on chronic conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. It can help with disease management, and obviously it has powerful psychological effects.
We saw all this happening, and we wanted to take part in the converging of these disciplines: from academics to science to healthcare to music. We wanted to provide a convening space to gather like minds to explore the possibilities of those ideas, and help accelerate those outcomes. We want to contribute to the research and policies that can help drive innovation, and that led us to the challenge.
The Institute is partnering with two other organizations. Can you talk a bit about that?
We are partnering with MIT's Hacking Medicine Institute and with MilliporeSigma, a Swiss pharmaceutical company that is dedicated to music. They even have their own in-house orchestra! Members of MilliporeSigma were present at the first Music and Health Exchange event, which led to the inaugural innovation summit we hosted last fall. They wanted to partner with us, to work on ideas at the intersection of music and science.
One of the things about being a musician is creativity. We know how to think outside the box. Musicians actually tend to thrive in medical school, because their background in music provides structure and discipline, but also creativity and connection. To really make advances in this field, you need the collaboration between experts.
This isn't a typical hackathon in some ways: it's not only about writing code to solve problems. Can you talk about that?
Broadly defined, a hacker is someone who's trying to find new solutions to problems. It's not necessarily about writing computer code. So you have different pieces: musicians, music therapists, technology experts. We want to think about finding new ways to collect data, and come up with innovative solutions that may or may not involve advanced technology.
We're so used to thinking in our own lanes. So, when you have the opportunity to interact with someone from a different discipline, coming at the same issue from a different angle, it can be really powerful. This will be one of the first hackathons in the world centered on music and health.
Musicians actually tend to thrive in medical school, because their background in music provides structure and discipline, but also creativity and connection.
-Joy Allen
What challenges will the hackers be tackling?
We have five challenge questions on our website, and we'll have briefs related to each one. We will provide basic information, but we don't want to limit their creativity.
Who can participate in the hackathon?
It's open to anybody. We want musicians, clinicians, students, people involved in the healthcare industry. Psychologists, therapists, speech language pathologists, researchers, tech experts, entrepreneurs, engineers. Anyone who's passionate about the possibilities of music and health.
Five winning projects will receive initial seed funding for their ideas. We'll come back a few months later and choose three winning teams who will have the chance to present their work at HUBweek and go into full product development.
How does this connect with the larger goals of the Music and Health Institute?
All of us-all human beings-have a connection to music. Physical, emotional, social, spiritual. That's what allows us to use music for health outcomes. And we really need to understand how different professions are using music in relation to health. We need more research; we need program development.
We're trying to develop the institute as a resource so we can impact policy and service delivery. We have so many goals: compiling and reviewing existing research, identifying gaps, defining an agenda. Serving as an open-access clearinghouse of research allows us to advance the knowledge and the work, and it also informs industry policy. We're also hoping to provide education and training for music and health professionals. And we want to develop a center for case studies: they really capture the story so people can understand how music is being used in various ways.
To learn more about the hackathon or apply, visit berklee.edu/music-health-innovation or watch the video below.
Video of Hackathon
Related categories:
News
Related Reading
Soundbreaking: Music and Health Institute Takes Shape Berklee Today
Fall
2018
Volume
30
Number
2
Harvard Dual Degree Students Make Music on Both Sides of the River Students in Berklees dual degree program with Harvard receive vastly dif
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...