A crowd is gathering in a corridor on the Victoria Ward, at the Royal Brompton Hospital, West London. Doctors and nurses look intently into a room where Gabriella Dall’Olio, one of Britain’s leading harpists, sits at her instrument, plucking beautiful sounds from the strings. Her official audience is four respiratory patients. As she finishes the piece — Alphonse Hasselmans’s
Chanson de Mai — one of the patients, amid the applause, demands that she play something else.
For a decade, a handful of researchers have claimed that harp music can reduce anxiety and help to alleviate pain. But now, new evidence points to unexpected results. Abraham Kocheril, the head of cardiac electro-physiology at the Carle Heart Centre, in Illinois, has been researching the effects of harp music on respiratory levels and heart rate. He claims that the harp’s unique sound holds positive benefits for our hearts. Soon, he predicts, doctors will prescribe their patients courses of baroque harp classics.
Hospitals in America, where harpists have played in a small number of wards since 1996, have led the way in the therapy. But it’s starting to spread here, too. Dall’Olio has been playing in the Royal Brompton since 2004 and the Velindre Cancer Centre, in Cardiff, has been using a volunteer harpist on an ad-hoc basis since December. So is the harp really good for our health?“At first, the idea was to lift patients’ spirits,” says Dall’Olio, who is more usually found in recording studios or with the London Symphony Orchestra. “For centuries the harp has been considered soothing. But now it seems that it taps in to the human body in a special way.” She visits the Royal Brompton four times a year. Her therapy repertoire is broad. “Baroque and romantic composers are popular; so is jazz,” she says.
“Patients say harp music makes them feel calmer and able to breathe more easily on their ventilators,” says Anita Simonds, a consultant in respiratory medicine at the Royal Brompton. “The studies show clear benefits.” Simonds cites one such study, published in Paediatric Research in 2003, which found that premature babies exposed to live harp music showed significantly lower levels of the hormone cortisol, an anxiety indicator, in their saliva and healthily relaxed breathing rates. The babies were calmer and slept more, allowing for faster weight gain.
In another study, published in Alternative Therapy Health Medicine in 2002, post-operative lung patients reported lower pain levels after 20 minutes of live harp music. Dall’Olio says she has seen the results for herself. “I played to one child at Great Ormond’s Street who was suffering from spina bifida. Initially, the doctors were reluctant to allow me to enter her sterile room. But when I played it was obvious that for 20 minutes this girl was in less pain. The doctors saw the transformation and next time I visited they let me straight in.”
At the Carle Heart Centre, Dr Kocheril is trying to pin down the science behind harp therapy. Though the claims made for harp music are diverse, most support its ability to lower breathing rate and to slow the pulse, says Dr Kocheril. “Within normal range, a slower heart rate is a sign of a stronger, healthier heart. Athletes have a slower heart rate than the average. Harp music may produce a temporary version of this benefit”.
Recently, he asked a harpist to play Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major to unconscious patients in his operating theatre. “It was important that there was no conscious processing of the music,” he says. In his experiment on 15 patients, he noted heart rate at the start, after five minutes of music, and again five minutes after the music stopped. In every patient but one, the harp music seemed to cause a significant drop in heart rate, from about 90 beats a minute to 60 in one case. And in healthy hearts (10 of his 15) the lower rate was maintained even after the music stopped. “These hearts were behaving more healthily. We also found that hearts placed under stress recovered more quickly if music had been played beforehand.”
Dr Kocheril concedes that his study is small. Still, he suggests that the science behind his observations lies with a principle discovered by a 17th-century Dutch physicist, Christiaan Huygens, and called “entrainment”. Entrainment is when two oscillating systems, placed close to one another, tend to synchronise; in this example the harp is one oscillating system and the heart another. But doesn’t this mean that any instrument will work just as well? “My suspicion is that the harp has a particular influence on the nervous system so that we entrain to it more strongly than, say, the violin,” says Dr Kocheril. “The wide range of vibrations and particular rhythmic variability have a palpable feel to me. But that’s not proven.” He wants to see if recorded harp music will have similar effects. If so, he says, that could open the way to harp music on prescription.
The British Heart Foundation is not convinced. “We’d be very surprised if such prescriptions ever come about,” says its spokesman, Ian Fannon. “Our advice is to stick to conventional medicine.”
Nevertheless, belief in the harp’s therapeutic power is spreading and some patients go beyond just listening to the music. At her private practice established in 1991, one of harp-therapy’s founding figures, the nurse and psychologist Sarajane Williams, sees about eight clients a month for her version of the therapy. To administer it, Williams attaches a microphone to her harp, which is then connected to a reclining chair fitted with pads, which vibrate according to the strings that are plucked.
“It’s called vibroacoustic harp therapy,” she explains. “Really, it’s a kind of ‘sound massage’. I see patients with arthritis, fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s and chronic back pain. As I play, patients typically report a feeling of calmness, decreased pain and increased mobility. One woman with chronic foot pain was back in high heels after a few sessions.”
Williams established the Harp Therapy Journal in 1996 to keep track of developments in the field. It’s easy to imagine how her chair could provide a soothing massage. But couldn’t some of the benefits supposedly accrued by listening to harp music — relief of pain, for example — be fleeting and psychological, rather than genuinely physiological? “We need more research.” Williams says. “Part of the benefit may be psychological, but I firmly believe that the harp’s special acoustic properties tap into energy centres in the body.”
As far as patients on the Victoria Ward at the Royal Brompton are concerned, though, the science is secondary. Valerie Ford-Hunt, a 65-year-old severe asthmatic, says. “Gabriella’s music just flows over you like a waterfall. I certainly feel calmer. I can well believe that it’s doing me a world of good.”
For more information, www.harptherapy.com
Music therapy
Research published in 1993 suggested that students who listened to ten minutes of a Mozart piano sonata did better in spatial reasoning tests than those who listened to a relaxation tape. Scientists also suggest that Mozart can reduce the severity of epileptic fits. Others say it is just about relaxation. DR TOBY MURCOTT
Dr Murcott is a former BBC science correspondent
