By Kelly Meyer
In the winter of 2020, Dian Zeng was a college student in China and had just enrolled to minor in her school’s music therapy program when Covid-19 emerged. As the pandemic spiraled out of control, medical staff were called up to hospitals from their homes to work long, grueling shifts. Zeng was called up as well, to support the overwhelmed medical staff.
“So many people were dying at the very beginning and the doctors were so anxious, so my school provided a group of 20 people… to provide online musical therapy for the staff,” Zeng said.
Throughout the pandemic, Zeng continued providing music therapy, not just to Covid-era doctors, but also to cancer patients, pediatric ICU staff, autistic patients and more.
“I started thinking about music’s function in people's everyday lives and what music can bring to us,” she said.
UCSB Ph.D. student, Dian Zeng, plays the guitar during a music therapy session in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in Beijing, China.
Today, Zeng’s music therapy experience has brought her to UC Santa Barbara’s Ethnomusicology Program, where she is a fifth-year Ph.D. student. Zeng spends her time working as a teaching assistant for both UCSB’s Department of Music and the Department of Asian American Studies. And she is currently researching older Tai Chi practitioners in L.A. about the impact of their music activities on mental and physical well-being.
Q: What kind of impact do you think music therapy has on patients?
A: The most impressive case that I remember was actually the first day when I was doing music therapy in the breast cancer center. After doing musical activities like group singing and simple instrument playing, one patient came to me and said ‘Thank you so much for your musical activities. I really enjoyed it.’ And she invited me to listen to a song she once recorded. She explained that because the cancer had spread to her whole body, especially the lungs, she could not sing or speak in a beautiful voice anymore. So, we just listened together and she was so happy.
She asked me ‘My voice is so beautiful right?’ I told her if she would like to listen together again, we are here every week, but she said ‘I will not be able to go next week, or in the future. I am already at the end of my time.’ She continued to say ‘thank you’ and it was so beautiful for her to start recalling the memory of her beautiful voice.
Q: Now that you are pursuing your Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at UCSB, what kind of research are you conducting?
A: I started a new research project half a year ago. I started walking around the Chinese neighborhood [in Los Angeles] and realized that, wow, there are so many people doing Tai Chi, and so many of them are elderly, in their 60s or 70s, sometimes 80s. I’m focusing my research more on the community and especially how music fits into the physical exercise of Tai Chi…These kinds of musical practices are embedded with cultural traditions and cultural understanding, but also with generational memory because of the specific selections of the music.
I want to bring attention to this marginalized group to see how they build up their own communal and sonic infrastructure through their own activities in music. Also, since it's related to well-being and health, what kinds of resources [these groups] are in need of.
A group practices Tai Chi in a park in Los Angeles, California. UCSB graduate student Dian Zeng is researching the role of music in Tai Chi for older people.
Q: You also work as a teaching assistant for Asian American history. Do you ever use music as a teaching tool in class?
A: Oh yeah. It's quite different when I play a song or share music in a music class compared to a class outside of the Music Department. In the former case, we are learning knowledge, but in the latter case, like in Asian American history, it's more like we are trying to expand our knowledge to the other field. In my summer class I brought in music about immigration and grassroots workers. This music was more about African Americans, but it matched very well with the experiences of Asian American laborers.
Q: Where do you see yourself in the future?
A: I think my ultimate goal is to be a professor, especially in the Music department. I also would like to bring more attention to how music influences people's everyday lives and facilitates different kinds of cultural expression. I want to learn more about music in an applied way, such as music therapy, music healing and musical medicine. For my own project, I really want to pay attention to the elderly's musical participation, not only about Tai Chi, calisthenics or dancing, but also their everyday musical practices.
Kelly Meyer is a third-year pre-economics student at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this piece for her Digital Journalism course.