What is Music Therapy?

Music Therapy is the enhancement of human capabilities through the planned use of musical influences on brain functioning.

Music Therapy is useful because music triggers whole brain processes and functioning which directly affect one's cognitive, emotional, and physical functions and abilities. Music permeates our society and culture making it familiar and easily accessible for our clients. Thus, a professional music therapist can select and apply appropriate music for effective treatment of our clients. This treatment is often faster and more effective than treatment without music. Additionally, our clients report the treatment is more enjoyable and normalizing.

A full spectrum model of music therapy is offered at the Center for Music Therapy. We incorporate the wide breadth of music-based interventions, techniques, research, and philosophies to meet the individual needs of our diverse client population. Music therapy is used as a tool to assist in making non-musical gains in order to apply the focus of the patient's music therapy treatment directly to the patient's desired needs, outcomes, and appropriate diagnosis and treatment setting. For example, if a patient has aphasia and is in a rehabilitation setting, music therapy can be implemented to increase expressive language by using MIT (Melodic Intonation Therapy) or singing techniques. Likewise, if a person has depression and aphasia yet is in a psychiatric partial hospital program, music therapy can be implemented to assist in emotional expression and healing by using imagery and/or non-verbal musical expression. These are just two examples that illustrate how we use our skills and knowledge as music therapists to benefit the client appropriate to the client's desired treatment outcomes, setting, and client's diagnosis. All our therapists practice the uses of music in a variety of ways:

• Education/Resource Room - To motivate, reinforce, teach, shape behaviors, and increase social skills and expression.
• Psychiatric - To identify and express feeling through verbal and non-verbal musical expression.
• Alzheimer's - To cue memory recall and socialization.
• Medical - To manipulate biomedical levels and reactions (ACTH stress hormones, cortisol levels, immune responses, and endorphins), as well as to address social-emotional aspects of treatment.
• Rehabilitation - To neurologically manipulate neurological functions (motor, speech, and cognitive processes).
• Wellness - To reduce anxiety, to promote progressive and autogenic relaxation, to maintain function and facilitate life enrichment experiences which facilitate an overall sense of well-being in an individual.

We work with an interdisciplinary model which incorporates medical, neurological, and biochemical research and philosophies. Additionally, we use a cognitive/behavioral approach in our psychological model-integrating psychodynamic principles, such as transference/countertransference or aspects of the iso-principle, in everything we do. Although medicine, education, and psychology are usually considered separate fields of treatment, we find that information from each field can often be applied for the benefit of another field. Thus, we integrate these fields in our practice to yield new and enhanced benefits for our clients. In conclusion, the underlying principle in every therapeutic interaction at the Center is: Music is a defining feature of our humanity and gives voice to our deepest and most intimate experiences. Therefore, the therapeutic directive is: Value the power of each moment and the persons within it with great awe and care.