Our “Project CHROMA Personnel” series in Archways highlights the key researchers behind the Rice ARCHES Initiative.
Russell Ku
This month Dr. Melia Bonomo from the Department of Bioengineering interviews our Project Coordinator for Project CHROMA.
Last week I had the opportunity to speak with our Project Coordinator, Russell Ku, about his background and involvement with Project CHROMA in the Biobehavioral Mechanisms Explaining Disparities BMED Lab. Russell is local from Katy, TX and graduated from Rice University with his B.A. in Psychology in December 2021. He started as Project Coordinator this past July, but Russell isn’t new to the BMED Lab — he’s been a research assistant for Project CHROMA since Spring 2021.
As Project Coordinator, Russell handles the administrative duties of the project and oversees the day-to-day activities. He’s also in charge of training new new research assistants and delegating tasks. On the recruitment side of the project, he distributes flyers, organizes community recruitment events, explains the study details to potential participants, and screens for eligibility. For participants that are recruited to the study and confirmed eligible, Russell helps to prepare for their study visits, run their visits, and take care of the logistics and supplies for the music class that participants in the intervention group attend for 6-weeks.
As the coordinator, he is also responsible for communicating with the team and collaborators about study updates. Finally, he helps with data management, which includes organizing, cleaning, and preparing data for future analyses.
Group shot from a recent Project CHROMA coffee shop outing. From left to right, Sarah Roberts, Taylor Stowers, Lydia Wu, Vincent Lai, Amara Anyanwu, Russell Ku. Not pictured: Robin Whitehead.
When asked about his favorite part of being Project Coordinator, Russell said that it’s seeing how much participants enjoy their experience in the music classes, especially those who were initially hesitant about it. Participants really support each other and work as a collaborative team throughout the class. He’s also glad to work with such a friendly and supportive team at the BMED lab, especially the amazing, dedicated undergraduate and graduate researchers of Project CHROMA!
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Our “Project CHROMA Personnel” series in Archways highlights the key researchers behind the Rice ARCHES Initiative.
Vincent Lai
This month Vincent Lai, who previously worked with Project CHROMA as the Project Coordinator, reflects on his experiences as part of the team.
Before joining Project CHROMA, I had been part of the BMED Lab for about two years. I first stepped into Dr. Fagundes’s lab as an undergraduate student, unsure about what “doing research” entailed. I was excited and nervous to explore that side of my academic journey, and those same feelings resurfaced when I started with CHROMA.
I joined CHROMA in the summer of 2021, and it was a pivotal time for the study. During this time, we resumed regular study activities, including in-person visits with our participants. Despite being nervous at first, I found that I was able to quickly got into the flow of things. I met and worked with an amazing team of undergraduate and graduate researchers. We got to work closely with members of the Houston community who were passionate about our work and helping others. Most rewarding was seeing how much our participants learned and grew during the music class.
All smiles from the CHROMA team! Pictured, from left to right: Lydia Wu, Russell Ku, Amara Anyanwu, Vincent Lai, Victoria Lee, and Sarah Roberts.
I will be returning to the BMED lab as Dr. Fagundes’s graduate student, and while there will be many more projects and research directions to explore, Project CHROMA will always have a special place in my heart. My time with CHROMA taught me so much about the ins and outs of doing research and allowed me to work with and support so many wonderful people.
Whether you’re interested in taking part in the study or someone looking for research experience, give us a chance! If you’re looking for a supportive and collaborative environment to explore your interest in psychological research, then the BMED lab might just be the place for you.
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Our Mini Review series in Archways does a brief dive into research topics at the intersection of the arts and health.
Research on Music Therapy
This month, Amara Anyanwu, a Research Assistant in the BMEDLab working on Project CHROMA, tells us about the emerging research on therapeutic music engagement.
Rice University’s Project CHROMA studies the effects of music creativity on brain health and well-being in older adults and individuals with mild cognitive impairment. According to the American Music Therapy Association, music therapy can be used to help decrease anxiety and stress, decrease the perception of pain, increase confidence, and improve memory making [1].
Image from Leiden University [2]
Playing musical instruments has been shown to significantly improve frontal lobe function in patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment. In Shimizu et al.’s multitask movement music therapy study, patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment were asked to create repetitive rhythms with a Naruko clapper instrument. After the task, the researchers found increased cerebral blood flow in the prefrontal cortex, indicating increased stimulation. The patients also showed improved scores on the Frontal Assessment Battery, a cognitive test for frontal lobe function [3].
Music is very much about connecting with people, connecting with the external world.
Dr. Orii McDermott
Patients with moderate or advanced dementia may not be able to clearly communicate how they feel. In The importance of music therapy for people with dementia, Dr. Orii McDermott introduces the MiDAS scale (Music in Dementia Assessment Scales). Previous research in music therapy was often qualitative. Dr. McDermott developed a way to quantitatively assess how patients with dementia engage with music, using five key scales: interest, response, initiation, involvement, and enjoyment [4]. The MiDAS scale is now used in over twelve countries by music therapists, researchers, and clinicians to improve the quality of life of patients with dementia. Dr. McDermott explains that “music is very much about connecting with people, connecting with the external world”.
In Project CHROMA, participants learn, compose, and create their own music in group music classes. Many of the instruments that the participants use are household items, so the classes are accessible and can be replicated all over the world and with individuals across socioeconomic groups. As a research assistant, I have had the opportunity to observe many of the music classes, and it is amazing to see the participants become more confident in their musical skills as the class progresses. There is always so much joy and life in the classroom. The participants support and encourage each other throughout the class, giving each other feedback and helping each other make their ideas come to life. This creative environment hopes to improve the brain health and wellbeing of our participants.
[3] Shimizu, N., Umemura, T., Matsunaga, M., & Hirai, T. (2017). Effects of movement music therapy with a percussion instrument on physical and frontal lobe function in older adults with mild cognitive impairment: A randomized controlled trial. Aging & Mental Health, 22(12), 1614–1626. https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2017.1379048
[4] Regehr, K. (Host). (2019, May 6). Dr Orii McDermott: The importance of music therapy for dementia patients (No. 1) [Audio podcast episode]. In How Researchers Changed the World. Taylor & Francis. https://www.howresearchers.com/podcasts/episode-1/
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Our Research Updates in Archways give a snapshot of the Rice ARCHES Initiative’s current work, research progress, and future directions
LiveWire
This month Dr. Anthony Brandt, a Co-Investigator in the Rice ARCHES Initiative, tells us about the research team’s participation in the first International Workshop on the Neural and Social Bases of Creative Movement.
In April, members of the Project CHROMA team participated in the first International Workshop on the Neural and Social Bases of Creative Movement, held in Wolf Trap, Virginia. Co-investigator Chris Fagundes and Lydia Wu gave a presentation on the progress of Project CHROMA’s NEA Research Lab involving musical creativity and seniors with mild cognitive impairment. Meanwhile, thanks to additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts, composer and co-investigator Anthony Brandt presented “LiveWire,” an innovative inter-disciplinary collaboration involving music, dance, and neuroimaging.
“LiveWire” was created with choreographers Andy and Dionne Noble from Sam Houston State and neuroengineer Pepe Contreras-Vidal from the University of Houston’s BRAIN Lab, and performed by members of NobleMotion Dance Company and the new music ensemble Musiqa. The production was originally premiered in Houston in January 2022.
Image: LiveWire performance. Photo credit: Lynn Lane
Each section of “LiveWire” is meant to reflect a different feature of brain behavior, progressing from more fixed to more flexible networks. Two of the dancers wore portable EEG caps that monitored their brains as they performed. Data from the caps was displayed on a monitor and also abstracted in the dance’s lighting design. In the final section, the neural synchrony between the two dancers–as measured by their brain caps–controlled the lighting.
Throughout the rehearsal process and performances, Dr. Contreras-Vidal and his team gathered data about the cap-wearing dancers’ activation patterns and neural synchrony. That data is currently being analyzed. Topics of interest include changes in brain behavior as the dancers mastered the choreography, as well as differences in activation patterns between the first four sections—which have fixed movements—and the fifth—which is largely a structured improvisation.
Image: LiveWire performance. Photo credit: Lynn Lane
As far as the collaborators know, this is one of the first—if not the first—dance to be both a performance and an experiment. All of us in Project CHROMA are very thankful to the National Endowment for the Arts and Rice’s Faculty Initiative Fund for supporting this project.
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Our Research Updates in Archways give a snapshot of the Rice ARCHES Initiative’s current work, research progress, and future directions
Project CHROMA Completes Another Music Course
This month Sarah Roberts, a Research Assistant in the BMED Lab, tells us about Project CHROMA’s progress and recent music class.
More than two years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rice University no longer requires masks for vaccinated students anywhere on campus, except for classes where mask usage is determined by professors. Weekly testing is voluntary, and at-home rapid tests are free and available for student use.
Across the street at the BMED Lab, Project CHROMA has maintained much of the COVID protocol. Masks are still required for staff and students interacting with participants, and proper cleaning procedures are still in place. Participants are additionally contacted via phone and screened for COVID symptoms prior to arriving for their visit at the lab. Despite these additional safety measures, Project CHROMA rang in the new year with the first music class for participants since pre-pandemic times.
Image: Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, location of CHROMA’s music classes
Held at the Moody Center for Arts on Rice University campus, participants attended the class in person three times a week for a 2-hour class. Composer Dr. Karl Blench led the creativity workshops and centered his teaching around making music in a non-traditional manner, turning household items into instruments, and composing melodies from everyday sounds. After 6 weeks, participants concluded their time with a concert featuring the newly acquired skills and compositions. Friends and family attended, eager to see their loved ones’ progress and to hear their newly acquired music skills.
Now, three weeks out from the concert, CHROMA has a new set of 7 participants attending music classes and has a fourth class planned for the fall.
See https://coronavirus.rice.edu/ for more information on how Rice is minimizing COVID-19 transmission risk on campus and keeping the community safe!
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Our “Tools of the Trade” series in Archways highlights the research technology and methodologies used by the Rice ARCHES Initiative.
Why are we interested in modularity?
This week Dr. Melia Bonomo from the Department of Bioengineering tells us about the interesting theoretical grounding for studying brain modularity in Project CHROMA.
In Project CHROMA, we’d like to understand how creative music engagement during a 6-week class impacts brain activity and leads to changes in cognitive health, quality of life, and social and emotional well-being. One of the methods we’re using to study this is brain modularity.
In a previous Archways post, Dr. Fengdan Ye provided a great introduction to the way that brain modularity is calculated from neuroimaging data. This provides us with a way to quantify brain activity for a variety of reasons, such as to determine biomarkers for neurological disease and trauma, to look for individual differences in how people’s brains work to determine the best course of treatment, or to develop a metric to follow how therapeutic interventions impact the brain.
Image: Project CHROMA researchers collect neuroimaging data at the Houston Methodist Research Institute’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility.
But there are many ways to quantify brain activity, so why are we interested in modularity?
I like to use an analogy of blending up smoothies — Let’s say you want to make a strawberry smoothie. It’d be really inefficient if you had to put your blender together from scratch every time you wanted to make one…
Fortunately, your blender is highly modular! There’s the base module with all of the electronics in place, the module where you blend up your fruit, and the module you drink from.
But what if you’re having a party and everyone wants a different type of complex smoothie? Here, it’s more efficient to have a blender with lower modularity where there’s some cross-talk between the modules, such as being able to use the container for drinking and to switch out different tops and blades as needed.
Image: A KitchenAid blender with high modularity (left), and a Magic Bullet blender with low modularity (right).
So as you can see, Modularity in general describes how the components of any complex system are grouped into modules [1]. Higher modularity is beneficial at short timescales for simple tasks, and lower modularity is more advantageous over longer timescales for complex tasks. This relationship has previously been tested for brain activity in theory [2] and in experiments [3], and now we’re interested in seeing how this plays out in Project CHROMA!
For more in-depth reading:
[1] H.A. Simon, Proc Am Philos Soc, 106(6): 467–482, 1962 [2] M. Chen & M.W. Deem, Phys Bio 12(1):016009, 2015. [3] Q. Yue et al., J Cognitive Neurosci, 29(9):1532-1546, 2017.
You can hear Dr. Bonomo speak about this and more in her recent interview about modularity of brain activity on Ryan’s Science!
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Our “Tools of the Trade” series in Archways highlights the research technology and methodologies used by the Rice ARCHES Initiative.
Measuring Social/Emotional Wellbeing
This week Sophie Clayton, a Research Assistant in the BMED Lab, tells us about social and emotional wellbeing and how these are assessed in Project CHROMA.
When evaluating how effective an intervention is, measuring an individual’s wellbeing (or change in wellbeing) is essential. Individual differences result in diverse emotions and reactions; the wide variability in humans makes assessments difficult to standardize and to apply to all possible subjects. Social and emotional wellbeing assessments, as they are used today, work to make sure researchers ask the right questions to receive answers that measure the same general idea across many individuals.
Social well-being is often defined as an individual’s ability to acquire necessary resources and to coexist peacefully in communities with room for advancement.
Emotional well-being relates to how an individual can handle stressful situations, showing their resilience and ability to generate positive feelings.
Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay.
Assessments should be structured to ask simple questions that have straightforward answers. In many assessments, subjects are given statements or descriptions and asked to rate how relevant the items are to their current state. These statements could include sentences like “I feel content” or even words like “happy” or “stressed,” and possible responses could range from “Not like me at all” to “Very much like me.”
As mentioned, these types of assessments measure current states of wellbeing. This allows researchers to monitor changes in current states across a period of time, which would account for individuals’ changes based on daily factors. Social and emotional wellbeing assessments taken for a period of time before an intervention and a period of time after an intervention would allow researchers to measure an increase or decrease in average responses from subjects, suggesting how effective their study was.
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Our Research Updates in Archways give a snapshot of the Rice ARCHES Initiative’s current work, research progress, and future directions
Adapting for Pandemic Safety
This week Russell Ku, a Research Assistant in the BMED Lab, tells us about precautions the Project CHROMA team is taking based on CDC guidelines.
After the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic began, Rice University began implementing a system of precautions that are based on CDC guidelines to prevent the spread of the virus and keep community members safe.
These include weekly testing for all members of the Rice community who interact with campus, use of personal protective equipment such as masks and face shields on all parts on campus- both indoors and outdoors, physical distancing, and increasing cleaning and disinfection of buildings, all of which apply to the CHROMA lab as well.
Image: Rice University offers fast and free COVID-19 testing to all students, faculty, and staff each week.
More specifically to the CHROMA lab, the team also made efforts to reduce visit times and physical contact as much as possible to keep our participants safe.
We now give participants links to online questionnaires or printed copies so that they can complete them in the comfort of their own homes and eliminated most high-contact measurements, such as blood pressure, height and weight, and waist measurements. We also give participants the option of electronic or no-contact delivery of some pre-visit forms.
Although Texas has ended its mask mandate and lifted restrictions on building capacity limits, Rice University has not changed its protocols. All of the above-mentioned precautions are still in effect. Any changes that may be made in the future will follow the university’s Research Reactivation Program guidelines.
See https://coronavirus.rice.edu/ for more information on how Rice is minimizing COVID-19 transmission risk on campus and keeping the community safe!
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Playing unfamiliar music to patients could improve music therapy outcomes.
Music can promote brain healing, but scientists are still trying to understand which types of music work best for each patient.
Ajwad Creative/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images
When Melia Bonomo wants to kick back and relax, she turns to music and the gentle melodies of pop star Ed Sheeran. Like many people, the physicist feels her mood lift with certain tunes, a change doctors exploit to improve the health of patients with cognitive impairments. But some patients are unresponsive to music therapy. And it remains unclear exactly what restorative changes music actually induces in the brain. New results from Bonomo, a graduate student at Rice University, Texas, and her colleagues suggest that clues to both of these problems lie in how the brain responds to a listener’s favorite tune. Bonomo was set to share her findings in a session on the physics of the brain at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society earlier last month. (The meeting was canceled due to concerns about the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19, but Physics is reporting on some of the results that would have been presented.)
“Music therapy doesn’t work for everybody,” says Bonomo, who collaborated with researchers at Houston Methodist Hospital’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine. “We wanted to see if we could better understand why that is from how a person’s brain processes music.”
In the study, Bonomo and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the neuronal activity of 25 people as they listened to six audio excerpts. Each person’s set list included their favorite song, a Bach concerto, and an old newscast by Walter Cronkite. The team then translated the resulting fMRI images into network-like maps, with one map for each excerpt per person. To make these maps, the researchers divided the brain into 84 regions and drew a connecting line between two regions if they had similar patterns of activity during an audio excerpt.
Bonomo looked first at the brain maps of participants listening to their favorite songs. Within these networks, she noticed that some regions were more strongly connected with each other than others, forming a “community.” She then found that the networks fell into two categories: those where there were many connections between different communities and those where there were fewer. And interestingly, the category for a participant’s map was predictive of how they would respond to the other five sound clips.
She and her colleagues found that when a participant’s “favorite-song” network had many intercommunity connections but few intracommunity ones, the distribution of connections changed significantly for each of the other excerpts. But when the opposite was true, these connections tended to stay in place, unless the participant was listening to the most unfamiliar sound clips. (For the people in the study, the least known excerpts were a melody from a Japanese opera and a passage of foreign language speech.)
Bonomo and colleagues made network-like representations of brain activity in response to music. The maps indicate that the brain’s response to a favorite song (left)—specifically, the types of connections between regions of activity—predicts how it will respond to other music (center and right).
The fact that networks with more isolated communities are harder to disrupt is well known in network theory, explains Bonomo. Seeing this effect in the brain’s response to music tells us that, for some, forming new neuronal connections—something the brain needs to do to compensate for an injury, for example—may require a bigger auditory stimulus. That could have implications for music therapy, where clinicians select music to foster neuronal connections and help the brain heal. Typically, therapists select popular melodies, such as the classical music of Bach or Beethoven, to stimulate a recovery. But the new study suggests that those pieces might not be the right ones to play for everyone, says Bonomo. Instead, unfamiliar music might be the best bet. Bonomo and her colleagues are currently testing this hypothesis in a study of people with mild cognitive impairment.
Although Bonomo’s work went unpresented at the March Meeting, she did share it on Twitter. Inspired by fellow physicist Douglas Holmes of Boston University, she condensed her planned talk into ten slides that she tweeted out under the hashtag #APS10slides10tweets. She hopes that the tweets will scroll across the screens of others studying how music impacts the brain. While she doesn’t know yet if that has happened, she said that sending the tweets “was a cool way to publicly share a snapshot of my research.”
Our “Project CHROMA Personnel” series in Archways highlights the key researchers behind the Rice ARCHES Initiative.
Kristi Parker, M.Ed.
This month Nyla Vela from the Department of Psychological Sciences interviews our Lab Manager in the Biobehavioral Mechanisms Explaining Disparities (BMED) Lab.
Earlier this week I got to sit down with our very own, Kristi Parker, the Lab Manager here at the BMED Lab, and she gave me the ins and outs of what its really like to oversee the incredible projects we have here.
Kristi, a California native who got her master’s in education at the University of Southern California, found herself drawn to the BMED lab due to her interest in Psychology. She says that she is very fascinated with the work the lab is doing regarding connecting the mind and the body.
Before we were lucky enough to have her however, she actually worked as a paralegal for 5 years!
Further, she began to tell me about what her job entails. In her words, she takes care of a lot of administrative work. From scheduling and working with grants to overseeing progress made by all the different projects under the lab’s wing, Kristi could be seen as the glue that keeps this lab together. Serving as an immediate liaison between Dr. Christopher Fagundes, our primary investigator, and the rest of the lab, we are always well informed and on top of our immediate goals as a team.
When asked about what she enjoys about her job, Kristi told me that she really enjoys the participant interaction aspect of the lab. She detailed a story about one participant who, when Project Heart was still doing home visits, would bake cookies and tell stories every visit.
Evidently, Kristi is a caring and hard-working figure here at the BMED Lab. If it weren’t for her, our lab would simply fall apart, so we are very grateful that her interest in learning about others landed her here with us!
