"Music and Medicine" project note (served from a steaming "melting pot" albeit with a few cracks where the light gets in):
Project funding will be driven by performative "music and medicine" pieces on different platforms by the collaborative researcher participants of this project.
Competency in "music and medicine" is desirable but not essential but what is essential is a desire to learn and perform "music and medicine" in collaboration with the research team.
Some of the research questions this project is trying to answer are :
Are musical vibrational events (macro-swaras and micro-shruti tones) in a bound time-space (akin to bandish) analogous to "patient event data points" in a lived illness trajectory?
Are musical "nadas" that join musical vibrational events (macro and micro tones) analogous to "patient event data points" that are the routine events (akin to introns in a DNA strand) in an animate life trajectory?
Assuming that both the scalar and vectoral sequence of tonal vibrational events make up a "raga" are medical diagnosis analogous to ragas?
Is musical cognition as utilitarian as medical cognition? Does musical cognition hold the key to interventional research in "psychoneuroimmunology" that can influence illness event outcomes (aka music therapy)?
As both "music and medicine" are largely played out in the cognitive mindspace (aka chidakasa), do "musical events" and "medical life events" have similar origins or is music severely limited by a single aural interface while medicine is richer in terms of multisensory event data capture?
Is a medical illness akin to a musical vibrational event trajectory going out of accepted musical scales and causing anguish as well as displeasure if not downright pain and is medical intervention toward improved patient outcomes akin to restoring a music that pleases?
Is the body a musical instrument that plays well largely but goes out of sync when diseased?
Are environmental forces major players in playing the bodily instrument and the music keeps changing with shift of time and space around it?
Can one perform both music and medicine events in one presentation platform toward not just aesthetic appeal but utilitarian improvement in student learning outcomes as well as patient illness outcomes? Would this performance begin with a musical composition interspersed with patient illness narratives that would culminate in the identification of the diagnosis (raga) or sometimes discovery of a new raga (if the illness appears to replicate in the populace)?
While a raga is a gross diagnosis, can one discover newer ragas within ragas depending on individual micro data (akin to microtonal variations in ragas) giving every individual player a different unique diagnosis precise to that player's requirement?
How does one treat a scale or raga (diagnosis) after its expression is complete? Can one change event vibrations in a given patient (or known past composition that wasn't doing well in the past) from taking a certain trajectory and treat it to steer it toward a desirable and pleasing trajectory thus improving outcomes?
Can this endeavor to study and perform "music and medicine" scale well among not just beings with an interest in "music and medicine" but in people who are not interested but simply need it anyways?
What are the implications toward patient privacy and confidentiality and musical copyright?
This project is an extension of a recent current project on the "scholarship of integration" that is part of a "melting pot" strategy toward making connections with an aim to "unity."
