Music for Health and Well-Being: Dr Kat Agres

• Tell us more about yourself

  Hi, I’m Kat Agres, an Assistant Professor at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music. I teach classes on music cognition, the psychology of music performance, and soon will be offering a new module at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine on Music, Health and Well-being.

  I have a background in cello performance as well as cognitive psychology, so I was lucky to be able to major in both of these things at Carnegie Mellon University. It then seemed natural at a certain point to combine these, so my PhD is in music cognition and cognitive science from Cornell University. I’ve been interested for a long time in how people learn musical information, and that was broadly the topic of my PhD – when you hear a new piece of music, what gets encoded in your memory and why? And why not all the other information that doesn’t get encoded in your memory?

  Since then my research interests have expanded quite a lot, and now I am also interested in topics such as statistical learning and computational creativity. Another one of my longstanding interests is at the intersection of music and health.

• What drives you?

  I’ve had a long-standing interest in music and health, and there are several things that prompted that interest. One of them was when my grandfather had a stroke – a pretty major life event for my family and me. I was still doing my undergraduate studies at the time. We went out to my the nursing home where my grandfather was staying – at the time he was not capable of speech any more. We all rented instruments – a cello, a violin, and my dad was playing the guitar – and we played several times on his floor at the nursing home. (They even asked us to be the New Year’s Eve band – apparently people liked it!)

  Interestingly, it was the first time since his stroke several weeks earlier that the doctors found a motor response in the affected limb, when he was tapping to the music. I found that really moving and began talking to some music therapists in Pittsburgh. I was also very fortunate to receive a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, in which I was linked up with a music therapist, and we played for patients with different conditions such as schizophrenia and adolescent mood disorders. I also started volunteering regularly at the cancer ward on my own. These experiences were deeply meaningful to me and I could see that in many cases, my presence and music made a significant impact on the people that I was playing for.

  Fast forward to today, and now I am able to incorporate these ideas of music for health and well-being into my research.

• Key projects?

  One of the big projects I have been working on recently is a music-based brain-computer interface (BCI) for emotion regulation in listeners. To unpack that, our system combines an artificial music generation system that is creating music in real time, and neurofeedback via electroencephalography (EEG). The listener is hearing music that is generated in real time from the system, which creates affective responses (induces emotions in the listener). Throughout, the participant is wearing an EEG cap (non-invasive) which records the brain’s electrical activity and transmits the data to the music generation system, helping to drive the music generation in real time.

  For example, we could tell the participant to try to make the music sound ‘happier’. They then have to figure out what to do in their mind in order to make the music generation system produce ‘happier’ music. We then also have feedback because the ‘happier’-sounding music then influences the listener’s emotional state once more – all in all, a closed-loop feedback process. (see demo in video at 5:23).

• On NOURISH

  This research that I’ve just described is one project of a larger grant that several of us in Singapore were lucky to receive. The grant is called NOURISH, which stands for Next-Generation Brain-Computer-Brain Platform – A Holistic Solution for the Restoration and Enhancement of Brain Functions. My part focuses on developing a music-based brain-computer interface (BCI) system for emotion regulation in listeners. There are several other aspects to the grant, such as BCIs for cognitive support and motor control. This is a four-year project and we’re just a few months in, so we have a few exciting years of research ahead of us!

  The ideas began developing more concretely after I had a couple of conversations with Prof Guan Cuntai at NTU – one of the world leaders in BCI – and also after meeting Dr Stefan Ehrlich whom Prof Guan was working with. We now have a team driving the research in this project, and the Automatic Music Generation System is being developed further with input from YST composers Cliff Tan (BMus.4) and Lim Wen Liang (’21), Phoebe Chua (PhD student at the NUS School of Computing) and Adyasha Dash (YST postdoctoral research fellow).

  For more information on NOURISH and Prof Guan Cuntai’s research, see here.

• Larger research questions, implications and applications

  This is part of a larger holistic approach to treating and supporting several different aspects of a person and their well-being, such as emotion regulation, cognitive function and motor function. So we actually have quite a large team of amazing researchers and clinicians from all over Singapore involved!

  The research questions that I and my team are tackling have to do with the effectiveness of this system and how exactly emotions are elicited in the brain (neurosignatures). Eventually we’ll be testing the system on stroke patients and those with mental health disorders such as a depression and anxiety, to test whether it is effective for these clinical populations.

  In summary: we’re aiming to develop a novel closed-loop brain-computer-brain system that delivers affective (emotion-inducing) stimuli in real-time to provide an effective, non-invasive and non-drug-based solution to support mental health, depression and anxiety in particular.

• What's next?

  I’m at the beginning of a long-term large-scale project, so that is the most immediate view on the horizon. But generally I’m interested in anything at the intersection of music and health, so another one of my recent projects was looking at music therapists, their experiences during COVID-19, as well as their use of technology to support their practice during these difficult times.

  In addition, a very different kind of project and something that I will certainly be continuing in the future is applying findings from cognitive science and performance science (music cognition in particular) to the performance of music. The module on the psychology of music performance that I am offering is a relatively new module and is the subject of a teaching grant I have from NUS. It’s been very interesting to explore more formally all of the potential connections in this area, and I think it’s the relative beginning of a long-term research interest as well!