Music Therapy for Stress Control and Autism

Abstract

Music is not a single entity, it’s a collection of sounds. Music has the power to influence on any person’s mood, feelings, stress level, health and physical action. Music therapy is gaining more concentration in the field of medicine especially in treating people who are mentally unstable. Technology is being used in music therapy like data mining and music therapy sessions are being assisted by robots. Using person’s blood pressure value, we can get an idea about person’s stress level. With the help of music this stress can be reduced. It is seen that there is change in person’s heart rate after listening to particular songs. Indian ragas are the key music used in music therapy. A case study on effect of music therapy on different people of different age, on different timings, by using different ragas and measuring the blood pressure value have been analyzed in this paper. Further the effect of music therapy on children diagnosed with autism and how robots are used for assisting music therapy session is explained with a case study. The intention of this paper is to show and convince that music therapy can be used to replace the medicines that are taken to reduce stress and to cure autism and to show that music therapy can decrease the recovery time too.