How Music Could Take the Place of Drugs

Marko Ahtisaari is the CEO and cofounder of The Sync Project, a collaborative venture of scientists, musicians, technologists, and patients, working toward developing functional music that responds to each individual body and serves as precision medicine.

Marko is also a director’s fellow at the MIT Media Lab, working on the Open Music Initiative to develop a new distributed ledger system to identify and compensate music rights holders and creators. He was the executive vice president of design at Nokia and worked on award-winning N9 and Lumia products. His startup Dopplr was acquired by Nokia.

Marko presents ideas and undergoing projects born out of the vision that in the near future people will use non-drug modalities to heal, enhance well-being, and assist in therapy. He guides us through the recent experiment Unwind.ai, which uses your heart rate to select the tracks that will bring you peace of mind — at least for 5 minutes.

For further reading on the Sync Project and music in medicine, please see:

• Understanding Music as Precision Medicine
• Sync Music Bot (cutting-edge music recommendation technology)
• UNWIND.AI (using biometric data to generate music for sleep)
• Studies in neuroscience reveal music’s effect on the reward system
• Using music to manage pain
• Using music to support physical activity and sports training
• More on music recommendation/analysis technology in general