Music Therapy
Learn how and why therapists are using Music Therapy...
Why does a screaming baby finally quiet down when his or her mother sings or hums a soft song? Or teenagers faint, cry, scream, and pull at their hair during a rock concert? Or an Alzheimer's patient who can no longer talk or understand language suddenly become focused and cognitively aware while listening to a song?
Music Therapy Resources
The answers to these questions are directly linked to the field of music therapy. Music affects people in ways that no other art or therapy can match; it distracts the mind, slows the body's rhythms, alters moods, and influences behavior.
Taking the empirical results from studies done on the effects of music on mental and physical health, music therapists apply musical interventions to individuals of all ages, with a number of conditions, and in a wide range of clinical settings.
What are musical interventions?
A trained music therapist assesses individuals based on their physical health and abilities, cognitive abilities, emotional states, interests, and communication skills to determine the appropriate technique or intervention.
They do not exclude any individual for lack of talent. As in other forms of therapy, patients seek treatment to address problems or issues - not because the patients are gifted musically or artistically. Music is a type of therapeutic intervention just as hypnosis, deep breathing exercises, or cognitive behavioral therapy (see Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) are specific interventions.
However, music holds a unique place among all other therapies. Music is a universal, nonverbal, pan-cultural activity that people from all ages, socioeconomic classes, skills, abilities, and lifestyles enjoy and use for fun, relaxation, and spiritual practice.
Music therapists generally break down music interventions into two categories, creative and receptive.
Creative interventions.
These interventions involve creating or producing music, such as composing a song, instrumental improvisation, drumming, or singing.
Receptive interventions.
These interventions take the form of listening to music and, afterwards, discussing evoked thoughts, feelings, and emotions - or using music for relaxation and meditation techniques.
To read about some unique music therapy interventions, see Music Therapy Interventions...
With A Little Help From The Beatles
How often have you heard a song from your past, perhaps a Beatles song, and instantly you recall memories from that time of your life, memories that connect you to former classmates, old friends, families, special events?
Memory researchers are connecting Beatle memories to important findings in the field of long-term memory - specifically autobiographical memory. This type of memory tells us who we are, providing a context for our sense of self, connecting us to emotions about our past, memories and emotions that define our identities today.
Magical Memory Tour, a collaboration between the British Association for the Advancement of Science (the BA), and researchers Martin A. Conway and Catriona Morrison at the University of Leeds, is studying how memories about the Beatles intersect with lives today. No other music group has impacted so many generations or had the cultural and social impact as the Beatles.
This study has important implications for those working in the field of music therapy. Of all therapeutic techniques used to stimulate long-term memory and emotions, the sensory power of music has no equal. Music therapists know that when individuals recall memories through songs, and connect these memories to significant life events, a very definite autobiography - or review of one's life - emerges. These remembrances also help us reinforce who we have become, and our purpose in life.
To participate in this ongoing study, or simply to read about others' Beatles memories, visit the Magical Memory Tour website.
Music therapy treats individuals of all ages and abilities, struggling with a range of issues, including the following:
What conditions does music therapy treat?
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Why music therapy?
Researchers now know that the brain processes music differently than language. Unlike language, which is processed in one part of the brain, they know that music affects many parts of brain, that, according to renowned scholar Oliver Sacks, music is "engraved on the brain."
Sacks, physician, best-selling author, and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, is a strong proponent for music therapy.
In an article for the neurology journal "Brain," Sacks said that for patients who have lost language ability or understanding - dementia, Alzheimers, and stroke patients - familiar music can evoke memories or states of mind that they are not able to call up any other way. Cognitive awareness can come back for a short time periods with music.
"Music may bring them back briefly to a time when the world was much richer for them," Sacks said.
Besides helping those who have lost the ability to use language, the beneficial effects of music therapy extend to numerous other conditions.
Researchers have shown how the power of rhythmic drumming helps those with motor control illnesses, such as Parkinson's disease. In his article for "Brain," Sacks said that patients with parkinsonism can use the regular tempo and rhythms of music to overcome their fast, slow and sometimes frozen movements.
And a Stanford symposium (click here for more info) that brought together researchers on the therapeutic benefits of musical rhythm reported that rhythms and sounds do affect brainwaves, either speeding them up or slowing them down.
Researchers attending that symposium stated that strong beats stimulate the brain and ultimately cause brainwaves to resonate in time with the rhythm. Slow beats encourage the slow brainwaves that are associated with hypnotic or meditative states; faster beats may encourage more alert and concentrated thinking.
Slowing down brainwaves has shown to help patients get to sleep, relax, find passion and happiness. Research on increasing brainwaves has proven effective in helping children with ADHD (see ADHD) and ADD, and various learning deficiencies.
Symposium organizer Gabe Turow, a visiting scholar at the time in Stanford's Department of Music, compared the effects of music therapy to taking medication.
"We may be sitting on one of the most widely available and cost effective therapeutic modalities that ever existed," Turow said. "Systematically, this could be like taking a pill. Listening to music seems to be able to change brain functioning to the same extent as medication, in many circumstances."
Music therapy's benefits
Music therapy offers many benefits, and researchers continue to find more positive results from its therapeutic application. Here are only a short list out of many important research results reported on the Music Therapy Association of British Columbia website:
- Using music therapy in delivery and labor, women showed improved abilities to walk, and reported decreased pain in childbirth.
- Children with cancer exposed to singing showed an increase in the antibody IgA - a key component in stimulating immune systems that helps the body fight the disease.
- For those with profound cognitive impairments, autism, and mental and physical disabilities, their brains respond more easily to music therapy than to speech.
- When in tachycardia - heart rate that exceeds the normal range for a resting heart rate -cardiac patients were able to reduce their heart rates to 50-60 beats per minute when listening to music that was exactly 50-60 beats a minute.
- For chronic pain patients, bringing into resonance the vibrations of pain and the vibrations of music alters the psychological perception of pain - even altering the pain or eliminating it.
- Music used in the operating room helped both the OR staff and patients. Staff improved their concentration, speed, and accuracy. Music chosen by the patient before, during and after surgery helped reduce anxiety, and improved pain tolerance.
- Mentally handicapped children participating in music therapy programs had increased concentration, performance, self-control, and improved speech.
Where do music therapists work?
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How do I become a music therapist?
Individuals must complete an approved college music therapy program (including an internship), and then are eligible to sit for the national examination offered by the Certification Board for Music Therapists.
Music therapists who successfully complete the independently administered examination hold the music therapist-board certified credential (MT-BC).
If you have a love a music, and a desire to help others with physical, mental and emotional disorders, request information from a school offering a degree in music therapy.