Music participation has both societal and health benefits throughout a person’s life. However, despite its global popularity and community benefits, the act of making music also involves highly repetitive actions under psychologically demanding conditions that may result in a high risk of injury for musicians, irrespective of age, musical style, genre or cultural background.
Led by Associate Professor Suzanne Wijsman of the UWA Conservatorium of Music, an international, interdisciplinary project has built a global research network to address the need for improved health literacy and health education mobility for musicians worldwide, with the support of a Worldwide Universities Network Research Development Grant and partner institutions.
Forming the Musicians’ Health Literacy Consortium, this project identified three research priorities:
- Musicians’ occupational health literacy: We seek to understand the role of musicians’ occupational health literacy and its role in promoting healthy, life-long music-making and occupational resilience. This included developing and validating the world’s first occupational health literacy assessment tool for musicians, the MHL-Q19, leading to new collaborations to translate this survey tool into other languages.
- A multicentre international implementation trial of Sound Performers: This research seeks to evaluate the efficacy of different health education delivery modes and add-on components to the online musicians’ health education course, soundperformers.com, contributed by team members from their diverse expertise. Implementation has occurred at international study sites in Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.
- Developing translational models for the application of health education in instrumental and vocal teaching practice: By researching music educators’ perceptions in an international survey and interviews in Training Sound Performers, we are gaining new knowledge about the important role of instrumental and vocal music teachers in promoting healthy practice and optimal performance outcomes, and their professional development needs for musicians’ health education.
An international research team formed through this project is designing a large-scale, international research program to investigate how to improve health education mobility for musicians, how to embed health education into higher education settings across multiple cultural and geographical regions, and multi-model translational applications of an existing, expert-designed online musicians’ health education resource, Sound Performers.
Outcomes from this project have been presented at the Performing Arts Medicine Association Annual Symposium (Los Angeles), the International Symposium on Performance Science (Melbourne), and the Australian Society for Performing Arts Healthcare conference (Sydney), with co-authored publications appearing in field-leading peer-reviewed journals.
