User:Omars428/Choose an Article

Article Selection
Please list articles that you're considering for your Wikipedia assignment below. Begin to critique these articles and find relevant sources.

Option 1

 * Music Therapy
 * Article Evaluation

The article’s content is relevant to my topic which is how music creation could help heal trauma victims. It talks about the many different types of music therapy, but mostly focuses on the listening type of music therapy rather than the type of music therapy where a patient makes music. It touches a little bit on “active” music therapy, or making music, but only specifically mentions singing and playing the harmonica, so I’d want to expand on this with more instruments. The article also goes into detail about many pioneers in the music therapy field and different techniques, with sources cited for all of them at the bottom of the article. It also details many different types of music therapy and the conditions that music therapy can be used to improve including autism, heart disease, dementia, aphasia and more. Additionally, it explains the cultural significance of music therapy in many different countries and the history of the use of music therapy. Many of the citations come from centers that specialize in music therapy or from scholarly journals and published studies so they are very reliable.

The things I would contribute to this article would be more explanation on how creating music versus listening to it can serve as music therapy and also a more biological explanation of how the brain reacts to music.


 * Sources
 * www.ashford.edu/online-degrees/student-lifestyle/how-does-music-affect-your-brain.
 * www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4498438/#B6.
 * https://academic.oup.com/jmt

Option 2

 * Music Psychology
 * Article Evaluation
 * This article has a broader focus on how music affects the brain and the way that music is perceived by people and integrated into everyday life. It is written neutrally as it first explains the history of music and the emergence of a field studying it in relation to the brain. It then goes into the areas of the brain that process music and pitch and basically the mental pathways that allow humans to comprehend music. The content of the article is very relevant to my topic of the effect of music on trauma victims because I want to explore how music can affect a traumatized brain. To this article, I would add a section on how music can help heal trauma and how it can improve certain symptoms of trauma. I think this fits very naturally with the rest of the article because much of it has to do with psychology. There are many sources that support the claims made in the articles, and they are from institutions and labs that specifically study the effect of music on the psyche so I think they are very reliable.
 * This article has a broader focus on how music affects the brain and the way that music is perceived by people and integrated into everyday life. It is written neutrally as it first explains the history of music and the emergence of a field studying it in relation to the brain. It then goes into the areas of the brain that process music and pitch and basically the mental pathways that allow humans to comprehend music. The content of the article is very relevant to my topic of the effect of music on trauma victims because I want to explore how music can affect a traumatized brain. To this article, I would add a section on how music can help heal trauma and how it can improve certain symptoms of trauma. I think this fits very naturally with the rest of the article because much of it has to do with psychology. There are many sources that support the claims made in the articles, and they are from institutions and labs that specifically study the effect of music on the psyche so I think they are very reliable.


 * Sources
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRE624795zU
 * https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_harvey_your_brain_on_music?language=en
 * https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/keep-your-brain-young-with-music

Option 3

 * Neuroscience of Music
 * Article Evaluation
 * This article is more specifically focused on the ways that the brain processes music including the auditory pathway, pitch, and how the different auditory complexes react to music. This is a very scientific and more biological article that explains how the brain functions in relation to music. It also explores how making music can affect other areas of the brain positively like memory. This relates to my topic because I am researching if music making positively affects any similar areas of the brain that are affected by trauma. The article is impartial because it’s simply stating biological facts about the brain that have been discovered through lab research. The claims have many citations at the bottom of the article that come from hospitals, research institutions and scientific journals. I might not be able to expand as much on this wikipedia as others, but I think I would add to the very small section that the article has now on the therapeutic effects of music since it does not discuss if music has a reparative or healing effect on trauma patients.
 * This article is more specifically focused on the ways that the brain processes music including the auditory pathway, pitch, and how the different auditory complexes react to music. This is a very scientific and more biological article that explains how the brain functions in relation to music. It also explores how making music can affect other areas of the brain positively like memory. This relates to my topic because I am researching if music making positively affects any similar areas of the brain that are affected by trauma. The article is impartial because it’s simply stating biological facts about the brain that have been discovered through lab research. The claims have many citations at the bottom of the article that come from hospitals, research institutions and scientific journals. I might not be able to expand as much on this wikipedia as others, but I think I would add to the very small section that the article has now on the therapeutic effects of music since it does not discuss if music has a reparative or healing effect on trauma patients.


 * Sources
 * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5618809/
 * https://www.nature.com/articles/546351a
 * https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/12/19/460191654/the-neuroscience-of-musical-perception-bass-guitars-and-drake

Option 4

 * Music and Emotion
 * Article Evaluation
 * This page is about how music elicits human emotion. It starts with introducing philosophical theories about music and its relation to emotions, and then moves to the ways that people can convey emotion through music with chords and beats. The article is impartial because it doesn’t say if it favors that music creates emotion or not, it just state's evidence that music elicits an emotional response from people which is something that is undeniable. It also discusses the different theories that explain how music evokes emotion, because that is something that people have different theories about. It doesn’t agree or disagree with any of these theories, but it simply explains them all in sufficient depth. This does relate to my topic because I’m trying to determine if the emotional response that music elicits can be utilized to help people heal from trauma. If I added to this article, I would create a section talking about if music can heal buried emotions which occurs in many trauma victims and also help victims process a traumatic event in their past to move past detrimental memories and the emotions attached to them. There are less scientific sources for this article and more philosophical sources that detail different theories of the emotional power of music, so this article might be a little bit less related to my topic compared to the others but it is still interesting and important to take into account. The sources are all very recent however, which makes me think that the information is reliable because it is up to date.


 * Sources
 * https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/01/06/music-evokes-13-emotions/
 * https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1475-3588.2011.00626.x
 * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5705548/

Option 5

 * Trauma Systems Therapy
 * Article Evaluation

This page talks about the method for caring for kids who have been through traumatic experiences and how to help them heal. The four main parts are “skill-based psychotherapy, home and community based care, advocacy, and psychopharmacology.” The article describes this theory of treatment and how it is used to help traumatized children. The article is unbiased because it does not recommend the treatment or say that it works, but rather it just explains the treatment methodology and theoretically why it is supposed to be successful. If I were to add to this article, I would add research about how music therapy and music making could be a part of home and community based care. I would explain how this may improve results and the effectiveness of the treatment. The citations are mostly scientific studies so they are reliable and there are adequate citations to support the claims made in the article.


 * Sources
 * https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Feelings-and-Perceptions-of-Happiness-and-Sadness-Hunter-Schellenberg/2d9136dab4265cbd366ec474e0f7ec0641541246
 * https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/common-questions/what-music-therapy
 * https://www.berklee.edu/music-therapy/music-therapy-community
 * https://www.berklee.edu/music-therapy/music-therapy-community