Sound Practice—improving occupational health and safety for professional orchestral musicians in Australia

Abstract

The Sound Practice Project is a 5-year study involving baseline evaluation, development, and implementation of musician-specific work health and safety initiatives. A cross-sectional population physical and psychological survey and physical assessment were conducted at the same time, with an auditory health assessment conducted later. The results were used to guide the development of a series of targeted interventions, encompassing physical, psychological, and auditory health components. This paper provides an overview of the project but focuses on the health findings arising from the cross-sectional survey. Three hundred and seventy-seven musicians from the eight professional symphony orchestras in Australia took part in the cross-sectional study (about 70% of eligible musicians). Eighty-four percent (84%) of musicians reported past performance-related musculoskeletal disorder (PRMD) episodes; 50% were suffering a current PRMD. Of the 63% who returned hearing surveys, 43% believed they had hearing loss, and 64% used earplugs at least intermittently. Noise exposure was found to be high in private practice, although awareness of risk and earplug use in this environment was lower than in orchestral settings. Improved strategic approaches, acoustic screens and recently developed active earplugs were found to provide effective new options for hearing protection. With respect to psychosocial screening, female musicians reported significantly more trait anxiety, music performance anxiety, social anxiety, and other forms of anxiety and depression than male musicians. The youngest musicians were significantly more anxious compared with the oldest musicians. Thirty-three percent (33%) of musicians may meet criteria for a diagnosis of social phobia; 32% returned a positive depression screen and 22% for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PRMDs and trigger point discomfort levels were strongly associated with increasing severity of psychological issues such as depression and music performance anxiety.

Fit to Perform: An Investigation of Higher Education Music Students’ Perceptions, Attitudes, and Behaviors toward Health

“…The research into musicians’ health undertaken over the past three decades has employed mainly clinical and diagnostic approaches to identifying and understanding the multitude of problems that arise from music practice and performance, in particular in the Western classical tradition. This research has made great strides toward legitimizing the health challenges that classical musicians face and toward enabling discussion of health issues both among musicians and more widely within educational and professional contexts ( Brandfonbrener, 1986 ; Jabusch et al, 2004 ; Altenmüller and Jabusch, 2009 ; Ackermann et al, 2012 , 2014 ). Indeed, health education and provision has increased considerably within music in the intervening years (for reviews, see Chesky et al, 2006 ; Williamon and Thompson, 2006 ), although not nearly enough to match the size and scope of problems reported in the literature and driven by an agenda that is predominantly reactive rather than preventative and proactive.…”

Have musicians’ musculoskeletal symptoms been thoroughly addressed? A systematic mapping review

“…Some 22 studies also investigated the association between different MSS outcomes. Similar to the extent/severity studies, the majority (86%) of the studies of risk factors reported general symptom outcomes[27,28,30,38,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]53,54,60,64,65,69,71,74,76,[79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][91][92][93][95][96][97][106][107][108]110,111,115,116,119,122,125,126,[129][130][131][133][134][135][138][139][140][141][142][154][155]…”

MusicCohort: Cross-sectional feasibility study of an assessment protocol for student musicians

“…A preliminary analysis of gender differences showed a trend for females to present with poorer physical and mental health outcomes. These results were, however, not statistically signi cant and need to be studied further (48,49).…”