Kansas City holds a special place in my heart. Four summers ago, my wife and I embarked on a road trip from New England to travel scenic byways and, ultimately, to explore the national parks of Montana and Wyoming.
On our return journey, Kansas City served as the sole urban destination of our itinerary. Among its many attributes, the city boasts a lively jazz scene—a legacy local lore attributes to Kansas City’s reputedly lax enforcement of Prohibition-era liquor laws.
About a year later, we met our future daughter-in-law and learned that her mother grew up in Kansas City. As a result, when my wife and I planned another road trip last autumn—this time through the Midwest—we eagerly included the City of Fountains1 on our route once again.
It was during the second visit to KC that I met Rebecca Lepping, Ph.D., whose work I featured in a prior post.2 When we met, Dr. Lepping introduced me to her friend and colleague, Amy Wilson, a board-certified music therapist who has since earned her Ph.D.
Wilson’s doctoral thesis investigated the use of music therapy to improve respiratory function in patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The primary objectives of her singing intervention were to enhance phrase length (the number of syllables a participant could sing in a single breath) and pitch jumps (how big a musical interval a participant could achieve between successive notes). As a secondary goal, she aimed to leverage music therapy techniques to alleviate anxiety as a means of further improving respiratory control. In addition, she embedded assessments of hope, her personal research focus, in the protocol. Dr. Wilson emphasized that this highly interdisciplinary research was conducted alongside a team comprising a physician, a neuroscientist, and a biomedical engineer.
Dr. Wilson works at Saint Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute, a 60-bed acute rehabilitation facility within the expansive St. Luke’s Health System of the Kansas City metropolitan region. She primarily works with people who are recovering from strokes; individuals recovering from Guillain-Barré syndrome constitute another sizable component of her patient caseload. She regularly collaborates with speech, occupational, and physical therapists. Her music therapy sessions are typically conducted on a one-on-one basis, although she sometimes facilitates group singing sessions as part of patient rehabilitation.
By design, Dr. Wilson aims to harness the unique therapeutic properties of music in her practice. For instance, when treating neurological conditions that impair sensory perception, she introduces drums or chimes, utilizing tactile and auditory vibrations to help patients recover sensory function.
Beyond her clinical practice, Dr. Wilson is an active researcher. Her particular focus is the connection between music and psychology—specifically, the concept of hope. She and a colleague (Stephanie Kolakowsky-Hayner, Ph.D., CBIST, FACRM, and Saint Luke’s neuroscience research director) received a grant from the American Music Therapy Association for their research project. Titled “Recovery Through Intervention and Sound Engagement (RISE),” it marks the first funded research initiative at the Saint Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute.
The RISE study protocol calls for Dr. Wilson to conduct four individual sessions with each participant. Matching a patient’s mood with specific musical characteristics, she aims to guide each participant toward a more regulated emotional state. Mood and progress will be evaluated using a standardized hope scale that has been validated across multiple academic studies.
“Participants will choose one song that’s meaningful to them from a [curated] list,” Dr. Wilson explained to me. “They’ll identify specific goals for therapy, steps towards those goals, and then we will create a short song together. Hope is cognitive and emotional. As we use the participant’s own words in song creation, they are practicing agency in their recovery and simultaneously exercising cognition and speech. Participants will play percussion instruments to address fine motor skills, coordination, and attention.”
Dr. Wilson traces her academic interest in the role of hope in rehabilitation to her undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas. Her professor’s mentor was C.R. Snyder (1944–2006), whose seminal book, The Psychology of Hope, is widely considered foundational to the field of positive psychology. Snyder defined hope as a cognitive process rather than a mere feeling. This process, which relies heavily on the prefrontal cortex, requires setting goals, planning to achieve those goals, and the agency to pursue them. Another profound influence on positive psychology in general, and Dr. Wilson’s thinking in particular, is Viktor Frankl,3 whose work posits that hope is driven by one’s ability to find meaning in life.
Dr. Wilson is abundantly optimistic about the RISE study. She believes it has the potential to reshape how music therapy is integrated into rehabilitation, given music’s unique capacity to access profound physical and emotional depths in service of patient recovery.
“Music is a helpful tool in neurologic rehabilitation because of the way music is stored and processed in the brain,” Amy says. “By engaging in live music-based interventions, patients activate neuroplasticity, process emotions, and experience agency.”4