Q: Where did this interest in music and the bond between parents and their babies come from?
A: Part of my interest in the relationship between obstetric care, motherhood and music is an intersection of things I’ve lived through. I lost my mother when I was fairly young and my husband had a fellowship in obstetrics, so he's been involved in the medical side. I was learning a lot about the challenges of caring for pregnant women watching him train and then becoming a mother myself without having one.
I'm also a musician, so when I was figuring out what to do with my dissertation (in musicology), there was a confluence of all these things happening, and I was just drawn to it.
I was thinking, ‘How can we use art, music and education to improve maternal wellness for pregnant women? What can we do? I designed a course to deliver prenatal education with arts interventions.
Q: Tell me about your research with the Lullaby Project.
A: I visited a few websites during my research, and I stumbled across Carnegie Hall's Lullaby Project. I called them up and asked them more about their process. They were fantastic. They expressed interest in having Texas Tech join the international organization, which spans across the world.
I now meet with a group of parents in Lubbock and share our findings with the larger collective. I’ve got a group of students helping me with the data collection.
Q: What questions are you hoping to answer?
A: Can music help us write a different future? That’s what I want to know.
Research has already shown a direct correlation between music and health. Music can influence our heart rates and stress levels. Those are things you can quantify.
In the Lullaby Project, we look at the settings and contexts of participants. Maybe they’re experiencing homelessness or perhaps they’ve lost a child. Some of the women I work with are coming out of sex trafficking. There are so many challenges people go through, so a lot of this research centers on contextualizing those experiences.
One of the things we evaluate is the recorded audio and interviews. We analyze the language people use to describe their life experiences, and then we compare that to language they put into their songs. Often, people find when they talk about challenges in their lives, their language is colored by their fear and anxiety. But when you ask them to write a song to their child, that language shifts.
There is a lot of data from psychology that suggests when you tell yourself a more positive story, it creates more positive outcomes. So, we’re measuring if this proves true as the children age, and we’re also exploring how this bonding affects the parents over time.
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