Text

Background: A randomized controlled trial (RCT) by Schäfer et al. (2022) demonstrated that receptive music therapy using monochord and voice significantly improves depressive symptoms, mindfulness, and autonomic regulation.

Objectives: The Relax!@MUMUTH project transfers these therapeutic principles into an artistic, multisensory concert setting, exploring how improvisational sound, visual media, and spatial staging may foster therapeutic effects while expanding aesthetic experience.

Methods: The therapeutic manual was adapted for a transdisciplinary performance involving music therapy, visual arts, instrumental pedagogy, and electronic music students. Live improvisation with monochord, voice, piano, guitar, clarinet, and electronic media forms the auditory core. Real-time visual installations—3D abstractions, point-cloud imagery, dynamic lighting—respond to evolving sound. The dramaturgy follows therapeutic principles of alternating stimulation and rest. Audience members may experience the performance in lying, seated, or standing positions.

Results: The RCT showed significant symptom reduction in both study arms, with the music therapy group demonstrating greater improvement in mindfulness, total heart-rate variability, and parasympathetic activity. These effects confirm enhanced relaxation and emotional regulation through receptive monochord-voice improvisation. The artistic adaptation expands this modality into a multidimensional concert installation, retaining mindful listening, resonance, and nonverbal communication.

Conclusion: This project translates an evidence-based music therapy protocol into a multisensory performance environment, offering an immersive aesthetic and potentially therapeutic experience. It bridges clinical research and artistic practice, presenting an innovative model for transferring validated therapeutic processes into cultural spaces.