Can Music Make You Sick? Mental health and working conditions in the UK music industry

In recent years there has been a growing body of research that has begun to examine the dark side of our relationship to music. The media understandably concentrate on the more sensational aspects of rock and roll; membership of ‘27 Club’, or the recent public declaration of critically acclaimed dubstep producer Benga as suffering from schizophrenia (Hutchinson, 2015). There is then a tension emerging between the notion that artistry is positive both for the economy and for well-being, and a growing awareness that a musical career is a risky business. ‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ surveyed over 2,200 musicians working in the United Kingdom, and interviewed more than 25 musicians and industry professionals, to explore how they are emotionally experiencing working in the music industry in the United Kingdom. This paper presents findings from this project, which seeks to ask challenging questions of music, and specifically musical ambition and aspirations, in the current climate of precarious labour and hyper competition. Is it possible that musical aspirations are potentially making artists sick

Can Music Make You Sick? Music and Depression

In recent years there has been a growing body of research that has begun to examine the dark side of our relationship to music. The media understandably concentrate on the more sensational aspects of rock and roll; membership of ‘27 Club’, or the recent public declaration of critically acclaimed dubstep producer Benga as suffering from schizophrenia (Hutchinson, 2015). There is then a tension emerging between the notion that artistry is positive both for the economy and for well-being, and a growing awareness that a musical career is a risky business. ‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ surveyed over 2,200 musicians working in the United Kingdom, and interviewed more than 25 musicians and industry professionals, to explore how they are emotionally experiencing working in the music industry in the United Kingdom. This paper presents findings from this project, which seeks to ask challenging questions of music, and specifically musical ambition and aspirations, in the current climate of precarious labour and hyper competition. Is it possible that musical aspirations are potentially making artists sick

Can Music Make You Sick?

In recent years there has been a growing body of research that has begun to examine the dark side of our relationship to music. The media understandably concentrate on the more sensational aspects of rock and roll; membership of ‘27 Club’, or the recent public declaration of critically acclaimed dubstep producer Benga as suffering from schizophrenia (Hutchinson, 2015). There is then a tension emerging between the notion that artistry is positive both for the economy and for well-being, and a growing awareness that a musical career is a risky business. ‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ surveyed over 2,200 musicians working in the United Kingdom, and interviewed more than 25 musicians and industry professionals, to explore how they are emotionally experiencing working in the music industry in the United Kingdom. This paper presents findings from this project, which seeks to ask challenging questions of music, and specifically musical ambition and aspirations, in the current climate of precarious labour and hyper competition. Is it possible that musical aspirations are potentially making artists sick

Analysis of a unidirectional composite containing broken fibers and matrix damage

An analytical solution is developed for the determination of the stresses and displacements in a unidirectional fiber-reinforced composite containing an arbitrary number of broken fibers as well as longitudinal yielding and splitting of the matrix. The solution is developed using a materials-modeling approach which is based on a shear-lag stress transfer mechanism. The equilibrium equation in the axial direction gives a pair of integral equations which are solved numerically. Excellent agreement is shown to exist between the solution and experimental results for notched unidirectional boron/aluminum laminates without splitting. For brittle matrix composites (i.e. epoxy) equally good results are indicated for both matrix yielding and splitting. For yielding without splitting the fracture strength depends on crack length while for large splitting it is crack length independent

Can Music Make You Sick? Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition

Grant Hutchison (Frightened Rabbit): “This book should be mandatory reading for every label, booking agent, manager and tour manager in the business of music and touring so we can all better understand what’s really involved in living the life of a professional musician and the role we all have in making that life as liveable as possible” Emma Warren (Music journalist and author): "Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally-Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health" Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer & Chair of the Ivor’s Academy): “Singing is crying for grown ups. To create great songs or play them with meaning music's creators reach far into emotion and fragility seeking the communion we demand of it. The world loves music for bridging those lines. However, music’s toll on musicians can leave deep scars. In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the well-being music brings to society and the well-being of those who create. It's a much needed reality-check, deglamorising the romantic image of the tortured artist” Adam Ficek (Psychotherapist [Music and Mind]/BabyShambles): “ A critical and timely book which is sure to kick start further conversations around musicians, mental health and the music industry” Joe Muggs (DJ, Promoter, Journalist [Guardian, Telegraph, FACT, Mixmag, The Wire]): “The best guide to what being a musician, and what "the music industry" actually are that I can remember reading... it manages to capture and quantify so much about how we value emotion, creativity, labour, relationships, time, other people, [and] ourselves, in the information economy” Mykaell Riley (Bass Culture, Director of Black Music Research Unit): ‘Whether you’re 16, 60 or any age, one’s relationship with music is for life. For many creatives, for better or for worse, that relationship is the meaning of life. Music might be a universal language, but we could all benefit by being a little more fluent. Can Music Make You Sick … is a great place to start’. ----- It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generatio

Theory of ice premelting in porous media

Premelting describes the confluence of phenomena that are responsible for the stable existence of the liquid phase of matter in the solid region of its bulk phase diagram. Here we develop a theoretical description of the premelting of water ice contained in a porous matrix, made of a material with a melting temperature substantially larger than ice itself, to predict the amount of liquid water in the matrix at temperatures below its bulk freezing point. Our theory combines the interfacial premelting of ice in contact with the matrix, grain boundary melting in the ice, and impurity and curvature induced premelting, the latter occurring in regions which force the ice-liquid interface into a high curvature configuration. These regions are typically found at points where the matrix surface is concave, along contact lines of a grain boundary with the matrix, and in liquid veins. Both interfacial premelting and curvature induced premelting depend on the concentration of impurities in the liquid, which, due to the small segregation coefficient of impurities in ice are treated as homogeneously distributed in the premelted liquid. Our principal result is an equation for the fraction of liquid in the porous medium as a function of the undercooling, which embodies the combined effects of interfacial premelting, curvature induced premelting, and impurities. The result is analyzed in detail and applied to a range of experimentally relevant settings.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Self-interaction effects on screening in three-dimensional QED

We have shown that self interaction effects in massive quantum electrodynamics can lead to the formation of bound states of quark antiquark pairs. A current-current fermion coupling term is introduced, which induces a well in the potential energy profile. Explicit expressions of the effective potential and renormalized parameters are provided

Temperature dependence of the nonlocal voltage in an Fe/GaAs electrical spin injection device

The nonlocal spin resistance is measured as a function of temperature in a Fe/GaAs spin-injection device. For nonannealed samples that show minority-spin injection, the spin resistance is observed up to room temperature and decays exponentially with temperature at a rate of 0.018\,K$^{-1}$. Post-growth annealing at 440\,K increases the spin signal at low temperatures, but the decay rate also increases to 0.030\,K$^{-1}$. From measurements of the diffusion constant and the spin lifetime in the GaAs channel, we conclude that sample annealing modifies the temperature dependence of the spin transfer efficiency at injection and detection contacts. Surprisingly, the spin transfer efficiency increases in samples that exhibit minority-spin injection.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure