This is an ABC podcast.

Matt McCrary is a man of many talents. He's a jazz drummer.

Yes, I essentially went to university to play music as my undergraduate degree.

He's a former exercise physiologist. I worked as a postdoc on exercise trials for cancer patients.

And now he's a music and health researcher.

Combining all of those skill sets, he wanted to know how much of a quantifiable impact can music have on our physical or mental health.

We have just, you know, centuries really of stories about music improving people's health.

So there's a lot of evidence out there.

The evidence is not very quantitative and that limits what we can do in terms of when we present music as a potential health intervention.

So Matt set out to investigate, sifting through all of the data that's been collected

across 26 studies over the past 15 years.

And what he found was striking.

There are caveats, of course, but the research throws up all sorts of questions about how

music could be applied in medicine.

We're kind of at the moment viewing music as exercise 50 years ago.

So exercise 50 years ago was a recreational activity that people thought had some health benefits.

It wasn't really integrated into the health system.

There were no recommendations for physical activity.

Now that's, you know, exercise is an integral part of public health programs.

Optimistically, I think that music could go in a similar direction.

You're listening to All In The Mind. I'm Sana Khadar.

And music is central to the human experience.

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