Our Vision
A world where occupational health is embedded within the music discipline itself: higher education music programs establish the standard for learning environments where occupational health and artistic excellence develop together, wherever music is created, taught, learned, shared, and experienced.
Our Mission
Our goal is to advance science, education, and professional accountability by integrating music-specific occupational health principles directly into musician and clinician training programs. Recognizing tertiary music education as the key social context for responsibility and influence, we promote change through interdisciplinary meetings, research, training, innovation, and global partnerships. Our work aims to reshape how the music disciplines and healthcare communities understand, prevent, and address music-specific occupational health issues—shifting these fields toward proactive, systematic, and practical approaches to well-being and artistic excellence.
Why It Matters
Occupational health in music matters because everyone involved in the creation, teaching, performance, production, and application of music encounters distinctive health risks—risks that affect not only individual well-being, but also artistic quality, professional sustainability, institutional responsibility, and the cultural vitality of the music disciplines.
Music is an occupation, and the people who make it possible—performers, educators, students, composers, recording professionals, conductors, arts leaders, and therapists who use music in healthcare—are exposed to music-specific occupational concerns that are often preventable but widely overlooked.
A Global Burden With Wide-Ranging Consequences
Rates of physical and mental health challenges among those involved in music lead to lost potential and preventable career disruptions.
Musculoskeletal disorders are common among musicians, including performers, students, university faculty, music teachers, sound engineers, and others who repeatedly perform physically demanding music-related tasks.
Mental health issues such as performance anxiety, depression, chronic stress, and burnout are highly prevalent within the music profession. Learning environments, cultural norms and expectations, schedules, levels of social support, and socioeconomic conditions can influence these issues.
Hazardous sound exposures are common in various musical environments, affecting not only performers but also conductors, educators, students, recording and mixing engineers, healthcare professionals, and audiences.
A Matter of Ethics and Professionalism
When music-making occurs in unsafe or inadequately supported environments, entire artistic ecosystems are compromised—raising fundamental concerns of ethics and professional responsibility:
Educators face heightened risk of burnout, moral distress, and liability when they lack the training or authority to safeguard student health.
Institutions risk failing their ethical and professional duty of care to learners, faculty, and staff.
Healthcare providers remain ill-prepared to recognize and treat music-specific occupational health concerns due to a lack of competency-based training.
Communities lose cultural contributors long before their artistic and societal potential is fully realized.
Ensuring healthy and sustainable engagement with music is therefore not only a matter of preventing occupational injury or illness; it is a matter of ethical practice and professional integrity. Occupational health in music education matters because musicians face distinctive risks at every phase of their development and careers—risks that threaten not only individual well-being, but also creative capacity, professional longevity, and the cultural vitality of music itself.