Meet the teams: Music for space
Music for Space is an international team composed of four music-related students from Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Széchenyi István University of Győr, Faculty of Art and University of Pécs, Faculty of Psychology and University of Strasbourg.
Music effects under confined hypergravity environment
| University | Hungarian Academy of Sciences,Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology |
| Endorsing professor |
László Balázs, Loïc Treffel Envionmental Adaptation and Space Research Group; Université Claude Bernard, Faculté de Médicine Lyon |
| Team | Luis Luque Alvarez(Team leader), Tamás Nagy, Mihály Rámpay, Nicolas Deveix |
The main idea of Music for Space Team was stablished by the team leader as classical violinist student and inspired by personal comments of several astronauts in interviews about the emotional importance of music listening in space, and how music helped to support the moral and positive behaviour for the crew. Music would influence astronauts no to involve a mission as a scientific crew but as an integrated multicultural family.
Since Yuri Gagarin’s journey to space, NASA's Apollo missions to the moon and ESA’s Human Spaceflight Program, listening to music and play musical instruments in space has been very important for maintaining psychological and moral outcomes of astronauts. Starting with the “wake up call", when a music sample is used to start the astronaut’s day to astronauts listening to their personal music collections and playing musical instruments at the International Space Station. The hypothesis arises: could be astronauts’ stresses symptoms reduced through listening to preselected music? It is therefore proposed to test musical intervention, according to astronaut’s cultural roots and music personal criteria using psychological questionnaires and preselected music samples in the Short Arm Human Centrifuge (SAHC), to determine the stress-reducing effects of music in the aspect of psychological moods, cortisol hormone levels in the saliva, muscle tone and an evaluation of stress by neurovegetative response such as interval R-R spectral analysis and skin conductance. The first objective of the experiment is to discover and select particular music styles that could reduce stress symptoms, as well, to study behavioural, psychological and physiological reactions. Finally, it is expected to test if the methods developed in this experiment could be used in the future with astronaut crews, reducing sleep loss, space motion sickness, precision loss and cognitive fatigue symptoms in prolonged confinement or during future deep space missions.