Music - and the mind - and the body - and the science

This 'music and...' thread is rapidly developing potential for a dissertation, though perhaps not necessarily today's contributions, thank you (unless one of them gets more substantiated).

Today's snippet is contributed by my friend Pat who found this article in the Grauniad about music 'to stand bold upright to'.

Some chap in the US, called Carrick (as it happens, that's where Pat lives and where I used to live, albeit in Scotland) has found that a particular singer's CD helps people to stand upright.

So what, you may ask?

If you are an older kind of person (not mentioning any ages, but you'll probably have been drawing your pension for a while) falling over is actually quite dangerous. Ask my mum. Though in one case she was pushed - off her bike - and in another she should not have been on a piece of ice at minus god knows how many degrees...but I'm sure everyone knows of someone who fell and broke their neck of femur, and before you know it, they have a huge hospital bill (if not in Europe), a new piece of metal in their body and if they are lucky, they are back home after 6 - 8 weeks in hospital. If they are unlucky, they end up in a nursing home or dead.

So staying upright is very useful indeed.

The singer is one Nolwenn Leroy, and the effect is called the Nolwenn effect, also mentioned here, though Mozart's music features too on a CD they have brought out (but you can't call it the Mozart effect since that's already applied to young children). The latter site states that 'Only Mozart and the Nolwenn Leroy conditions improved a substantial
percentage of the subjects to the normal stability range. The success
rate for the Nolwenn Leroy treatment conditions was greater than Mozart
and all other music at 71.8% plus/minus 10.7%. If repeated samples were
drawn from the population, the expected success rate for the Nolwenn
Leroy treatment conditions would fall between 61.1% and 82.5% for 95%
of those samples.'

The site goes on to say that even a number of people without any sign of disequilibrium, when tested, were found to be at severe risk of falling. How did they test that? By poking them in the arm?

While hunting for the original article on the Guardian website I found this little audio file on music and science; all about how atoms sound. Don't find that topic altogether interesting, but noted that the composer David Horne, amongst others, had written music around this. I remember a TV programme about him as a boy at St Mary's music school in Edinburgh, and later hearing a huge and very complex piece written by him in a concert of the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland.