Music, Brain Plasticity and the Resilience: the Pillars of New Receptive Therapy.

This paper describes a new type of receptive music therapy which aims to build the patients' psychological resilience by increasing the levels of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin in order to increase standard psychopharmacological treatment efficiency. Previous research concerning the musically induced production of the two neurotransmitters and a hormone is discussed and reviewed. Based upon the existent studies concerning the influence of music on dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin induction, a new design of specific music features for this purpose is proposed and elaborated upon. The music features are numerically described using Music Information Retrieval software in order to objectivise the otherwise intuitively chosen music elements such as event density (number of notes started in one second of time), tempo, harmonic rhythm (number of harmonies changes in one second), dynamics, key changes and roughness coefficient (level of sensory dissonance). Finally, the new concept of resilience enhancing therapy is proposed and defined using the music features described above.