HARMONICS 2026: Exploring How Music Can Improve Our Health

It’s not every day that the keynote speaker of an academic conference pulls out a flute and starts performing. 

Yet that’s what happened at the UC Irvine Student Center on Oct. 28–29, 2026, as nearly 190 clinicians, researchers, music therapists, artists and students gathered for HARMONICS 2026: The International Conference on Music, Medicine & Science. The eclectic group came together from across the United States, Canada, Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom and Ukraine. 

In addition to two keynote speakers and live music performances, the program featured research talks, panels, a poster session and hands-on “experience” labs. Sixty-two presenters, including six students from UC Irvine, shared their work across three tracks: science and discovery, innovation and technology, and experience and practice. 

 “When I first became interested in ethnomusicology as an undergraduate, I never imagined that those ideas would one day grow into something like HARMONICS,” says Sean Young, PhD, a professor of emergency medicine at UC Irvine and the founder of the HARMONICS conference. “What began as a curiosity about the power of music is becoming a movement that brings musicians, scientists, clinicians, patients and entrepreneurs together to discover how music can improve health. This is just the beginning!” 

Emi Ferguson, internationally acclaimed flutist and Juilliard faculty member, welcomed attendees with the opening keynote. In addition to performing J.S. Bach’s Partita in A Minor, she gave a talk titled “Care in Common: Leveraging the Arts for Health Equity.”

Tracing the flute’s long history, she took attendees from the Divje Babe flute (a bone flute found in Slovenia) through the Greek myths of Pan, Athena, Marsyas and Apollo, to Asclepius, the god of healing, showing how closely music and medicine have been linked since ancient times. She closed with a simple call to musicians, clinicians and scientists: “Talk to each other.” 

On the second day of the conference, Brian Harris, co-founder and CEO of the neurotherapeutics company MedRhythms, gave his keynote, “Music by Prescription: The Intersection of Music, Neuroscience and Technology.” 

Harris explained how music engages most of the brain and drives neuroplasticity, and how rhythmic auditory stimulation — which syncs a person’s steps to a musical beat and is backed by more than 30 years of research — can improve walking after a stroke. He then shared the journey of turning that science into an at-home therapy prescribed by physicians. It began with small-scale feasibility studies and progressed to a multisite clinical trial, which demonstrated a 22% improvement in walking speed and ultimately supported FDA clearance and Medicare reimbursement. 

“The keynotes were truly inspiring. Ferguson traced music’s healing role back tens of thousands of years, and Harris showed how music can now be prescribed as an evidence-based treatment,” says Sweta Mathur, PhD, MPH, a research consultant who helped organize HARMONICS 2026 and who works in the Young Lab on Digital Behavior and Health. “In addition, the experience labs and live performances gave attendees a firsthand look at music-based techniques used in clinical and therapeutic care.” 

The UC Irvine School of Medicine, accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), designated the conference for up to nine AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ for physicians. The conference was also approved by the Certification Board for Music Therapists (CBMT) for up to 14 Continuing Music Therapy Education (CMTE) credits. 

“Offering accredited CME and CMTE credits at HARMONICS 2026 expanded the conference’s reach and impact,” says Mathur, “engaging clinicians and music therapists in interdisciplinary learning.” 

Young stresses that HARMONICS is more than an annual conference. “We’re building a community where musicians, scientists, clinicians, patients and entrepreneurs can form collaborations that might never otherwise happen,” he says. “Our goal is to turn those connections into new discoveries, better treatments and ultimately better health.” 

Partners for HARMONICS 2026 included Roland Corporation (technology partner), Able ARTS Work (creative arts partner), The Self-Care Institute (continuing education partner), and the UC Irvine Alec Glasser Center (community impact partner).

— Shani Murray