Music is a complicated subject. There is much more than meets the eye. The Finnish Centre of Excellence has devoted their resources to explore these extraordinary tendencies. Funded by the Academy of Finland, the Finnish Centre of Excellence is an interdisciplinary research consortium that “explores the relationships between physical, perceptual, emotional, and social aspects of musical engagement.” They study emotion, rehabilitation, movement, and learning. They hope to create new methods and approaches in the field of music when it comes to medical healing or mental growth.
Since they have been established, their most important discoveries are (quoted from the article):
- regular music listening helps in stroke recovery
- music therapy alleviates depression
- infants naturally move to the rhythm of music
- dance moves reveal personality traits, and
- aptitude in music is linked to a better ability to learn a second language
The Finnish Centre of Excellence is made up of two teams of researchers, from the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Helsinki. The University of Jyväskylä team is made up of researchers and grad students from the Department of Music, each of whom specializes in a range of fields, inclufing “musicology, psychology, movement science, music therapy, music technology, music information retrieval, and computational modeling.”
The team from the University of Helsinki “consists of about 20 researchers and graduate students at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit. Students have a diverse set of backgrounds, spanning psychology, biomedicine, engineering, musicology, and genetics.” They are experienced in indisciplinary research methods, such as the combination of brain research with fields such as music rehabilitation and developmental psychology.
The Centre places a strong importance on interdisciplinary work, often imploring researchers to use more than on method in brain studying along with music and psychology studies to get a fuller picture of the problem at hand. The two teams often use each other’s research and even work together to play off of each other’s specialties in hopes of truly seeing the bigger picture.
The Finnish Centre of Excellence is an important demonstration of interdisciplinarity because they truly make a difference in the medical and musical fields, creating new methods of rehabilitation and recovery that may help people who used to be considered “lost causes” recover from even the worst of injuries. Further, they have already made huge advances by using the best and newest medical equipment, music recognition software, and psychological studies to keep their field of vision wide rather than getting sucked into the tunnel vision that many disciplines tend to view the world in. It helps me remember that there is so much potential to incorporate everything around me into my problem-solving, instead of trying to keep my brain inside the box of my profession. Sometimes, the problem will not be solved until you just ask for help.
Resources
Eerola, Tuomas. “Finnish Centre Of Excellence In Interdisciplinary Music Research, Finland.” Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, And Brain 22.2 (2012): 180-182. PsycARTICLES. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Brandon Rich 
Really enjoyed learning about this center and the initiatives they are working on. Might be useful for PSU to study how they are set up as we begin to rethink our own university’s design, and how we can enable interdisciplinary collaboration more effectively. Thanks for posting this!
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