Mar 25, 2026
A conversation with Concetta Tomaino—Spiritune Music Therapy Advisor—for International Women in Music Day.
Concetta Tomaino has worked at the intersection of music and health for nearly fifty years. Along the way, she’s co-authored numerous studies, co-founded the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function alongside leading neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, and, perhaps most importantly, helped patients with severe illness find their voice through sound.
Spiritune is honored to call Tomaino our Music Therapy Advisor. As Founder and CEO Jamie Pabst shares, “Connie’s decades of work in music therapy have laid the scientific and clinical foundation that makes what we’re building at Spiritune possible. Having her as an advisor helps us understand what’s been built in the past so we can more thoughtfully build toward the future—and I feel incredibly lucky to have her guiding us. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to carry her legacy forward by bringing music-based care to more people, more accessibly than ever before.”
This International Women in Music Day (March 28), we’re tracing Tomaino’s time in the field—from her childhood as a trumpet player to her early research in New York nursing homes to her modern goal to bring the power of music therapy to the masses.
How did you get started in the music therapy field?
I wanted to be a medical doctor since I was two years old. But I’ve also been involved in music my whole life. I sang in the choir at church, and in high school, I picked up the trumpet and played in the band.
I was really a science geek, and in college, I became a pre-med student in chemistry and biology. I wanted to keep up with trumpet lessons in college, but in order to do that, I had to become a music major. So I was double-majoring in music and sciences.
By my junior year, I had a dilemma: Do I pursue music or medicine?
It was just by accident that one day I saw an ad that said ‘Career in music therapy.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, what is music therapy?’
It just so happened—again, by luck—that the band director at my college at the time was also the band director at NYU. And two years before, NYU had just started a master's program in music therapy. And so I graduated in June of 1976 and started attending my first music therapy course that July. My first internship was at a nursing home in Brooklyn, New York.
What was it like to work as a music therapist in nursing homes at that time?
Not much was known about Alzheimer's and dementia back then. Patients were overmedicated, tube-fed, and tied to wheelchairs so they wouldn't scream and pull out their nasogastric feeding tubes. They were written off as being non-responsive and not aware of themselves.
But when I sang a familiar song to them, they came back to life.
They not only participated, but they also seemed less agitated. They obviously knew the words to the songs. I’m wondering: ‘How can they process sound if they supposedly have no cognition left?’ That really started my search to understand how music affects the brain, and why music is preserved in people who have severe brain injuries and damage.
What was the public perception of music therapy back then?
It was a fairly new field, and nobody really knew about it. When Dr. Sacks and I went to see neuroscientists, they would say, “‘You can't study music. There's no way, it's too complex, and there’s no scientific way to study it.’”
But he and I were seeing that music was really helping people change and improve. People who’d had strokes and couldn't speak were able to speak again. People with movement disorders were able to walk better.
One of the reasons we started the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function was to raise funding for basic neuroscience research. We got some early grants that allowed us to look at the cause and effect of what was working and why.
How were you able to study music’s impact on patients before modern brain imaging devices?
That was the interesting thing. In my first study with Dr. Oliver Sacks, he was still using his 8-channel paper EEG [editor’s note: This type of ‘analog EEG’ recorded spontaneous electrical activity onto paper]. PET scans and other types of functional imaging were just starting—they were so limited in what they could do.
So, we had to look more at clinical applications in real time. We studied the effects that music had on people using other types of tools, such as psychological measurements and neuropsychological assessments. We had to learn as we went and try to find applications that made sense within the context of caring for these individuals with a variety of neurologic impairments.
Do any patient success stories stick out to you?
I worked with one woman who was being treated with medication for a pituitary tumor, I believe. Because of the medication, she had something called Tardive dyskinesia (TD)—her tongue was constantly moving in and out of her mouth. Because she couldn't speak well, the staff treated her as if she had severe cognitive impairment.
But I noticed that if I got her to sing, her TD shut off. It was an example of auditory-triggered motor activity actually canceling out involuntary movements. When she was in this state, she was able to talk and have full conversations. And she was 100% cognitively intact.
We were able to show the staff that somebody who seemed to be incapacitated was fully aware and alive and functioning. It was just because of her medication that she’d had this side effect.
What has been the most memorable or meaningful moment of your career so far?
We've been working all this time to build up an argument for supporting music-based interventions in clinical music therapy.
I think a big win for the field of music therapy happened about ten years ago when Renee Fleming got involved with the NIH [to fund and standardize music and health clinical research for brain disorders].
Having the NIH recognize that there's real promise in music and brain research and that money and research efforts should be put behind this… that was amazing.
How have your past experiences shaped the work you do at Spiritune?
Throughout my career and with the Institute, I've been really involved in engaging with scientists and trying to understand the specific elements of music that can affect our function.
I'm very interested in auditory entrainment and how the frequency of sound or the rhythm patterns of sound affect motor function and physiological states.
I think it was my scientific background and my experience working directly with patients that led Jamie to ask me to be part of the Spiritune team. My contribution has really been, with Dr. Daniel Bowling at Stanford, looking at the sounds that seem to affect emotional responses in very specific ways.
What do you hope is next for the field of music and medicine?
We’ve come a long way since I started in the field: Medication and surgery aren’t always the end-all healthcare treatments anymore. Physicians are more open to alternative practices and other methods of healing. This has allowed the discussion of music therapy and its benefits to expand throughout the healthcare system. You no longer have to prove that music therapy is important.
But I still see room for improvement in two areas. One: Participation in music and creative arts should be an essential right for all children. Opportunities to access music should be available from birth until death.
Two: There has been some great research to show that personalized music can help people with Alzheimer's disease and dementia overcome behavioral issues. Music therapy reduces the need for psychotropic drugs. Yet still, many nursing homes use a schizophrenia diagnosis in order to give inappropriate psychotropic medications to people with dementia.
One of my goals is to make a case that music therapy should be the first ‘prescription’ given to somebody with dementia, before psychotropic medication. I would love to see that happen.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Share this post
