Toward Common Cause: Music, Team Science, and Global Health

On November 13, 2013, a group of seventy scholars gathered at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) for a full-day symposium entitled “Music and Global Health: Seeking New Paradigms.” Over five paper sessions, meals, and performances, we brought together our ideas about music’s role in illness and injury, creativity and scholarship. Academics, artists, and activists with backgrounds in ethnomusicology, folklore, performance, composition, medicine, music therapy, public health, palliative care, and sound engineering described partnerships combining a research component with goals of promoting public health and supporting human creativity. We encouraged a collaborative and experimental space, speaking openly about the challenges of crossing entrenched disciplinary lines in ways that could inspire common cause and develop meaningful integrated methods. We also examined persistent questions underlying the role of music in public health advocacy and intervention efforts. How, we asked, can sound add another dimension to studies of community health resources, or recalibrate perceptions of disease and wellness? How can we talk about music as part of a broader, real-life expressive economy? And how can we enable creative collaboration between music researchers, musicians, and health researchers to progress from mutual but romanticized attraction—I love music and think it’s really powerful / I admire how you really do things in medicine!—into meaningful, sustained dialogue? Among the themes that emerged that day, one presented itself with particular clarity: the success of such an endeavor relies heavily on full collaboration with our colleagues in the health sciences.

Accomplishing this goal requires ethnomusicologists and folklorists to reassess our ideas about collaborative research (“team science”) in the humanities. Team science has become the overwhelming norm for addressing large-scale questions in the sciences. Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin Jones, and Brian Uzzi, in an authorship review of 19.9 million papers and 2.1 million patents, describe the proliferation of multiple-author publications since the latter half of the twentieth century as a “transformation in the production of knowledge” (2007, 1036). In the sciences, they found an increase in multiple-author papers from fifty percent to over eighty percent between the years 1960 and 2000; they found correspondingly large increases in the social sciences and in patents. Even in the humanities, they found a small but statistically significant increase in plural authorship (p value of <0.001)—although not nearly to the extent of the other fields. Of course, the nature of scientific research, often carried out in labs in which workflow necessitates the collaboration of multiple researchers, contributes significantly to the normalized practice of multiple authorship of publications in the sciences. Beyond simply identifying a methodological divergence, this study highlights a growing gulf between major branches of knowledge that, in our experience, has become the basis of unease, feelings of cross-disciplinary inadequacy, and even existential moral judgment.

Team science exemplifies these differences. Science-based methods have trended toward a philosophy of knowledge-as-discoverable-entity, promoting collaboration as a method of objective collection and interpretation. Humanities-based methods, meanwhile, reacting to perceived bias in the very definition of knowledge, became wary of objectivity and came to value the deep interpretation of the trained individual. Norms within this rough dichotomy, innovative methodological experiments notwithstanding, have become so entrenched that scholarly attempts to cross over from one method to the other face perils of disciplinary legitimacy. Many institutional obstacles to collaborative work exist in the academy, most importantly the system for evaluating tenure and promotion of humanities and social science faculty, which not only favors but generally requires single-authored publications.

And yet, of these two models, team science offers the greatest possibility for spurring action on a meaningful scale, especially within a liberal-democratic worldview. Authorship within a team functions as a proxy measure for the interdisciplinary work involved in framing a problem, solving it, and implementing a solution. Scientific literature includes a growing recognition of and discourse regarding the need for translational, or “bench to bedside,” clinical research—a concept that the humanities have embraced in recent years, partially in a mode of...