What is Music Therapy?

I thought I would explain my ambitions to become a music therapist since about 98% of the people who ask what I do give me that quizzical expression when I say I'm interning as a music therapist.  I've included bits and pieces of a paper, which is a bit impersonal, but I think it is a start.  I plan to include some glimpses into my experiences, but to respect the privacy of my past and future clients, I have to be careful.  Until then, check this out and visit the American Music Therapy Association website at http://www.musictherapy.org.  

The research and evidenced-based practice of music therapy is the manipulation of salient musical elements such as rhythm, melodic contour, harmony, timbre, etc. to achieve therapeutic outcomes and transfer of functional skills in social, cognitive, and behavioral domains.

Music therapy is a client-centered service encompassing various techniques of the behavioral, cognitive, neurologic (NMT) and biomedical models of music therapy.  Music therapists must continue to develop and assess their therapeutic skills within these models to ensure the most effective and comprehensive client treatment.  Collaboration within the field as well as dissemination of knowledge to parents, teachers, staff, and other professionals is also very important to increase the transfer of functional skills.  Lastly, the continual research and expectation of best-practice or evidence-based practice is vital to maintain the vitality of the profession to ensure its benefits to a diverse clientele. 

Music therapy is a service in which music is used as the therapeutic medium for intervention to accomplish specific goals and objectives.  Musical elements such as rhythm, melodic contour, harmony, timbre, etc. are manipulated to achieve therapeutic outcomes in social, cognitive, and behavioral domains (American Music Therapy Association definition, 2005).  It may be used in conjunction with other related services including speech, physical, occupational, and other therapies. 

This service is client-centered in that a client’s ever changing strengths and needs must be evaluated in order to make informed decisions regarding treatment strategies.  Both formal and informal assessment are conducted including standardized functioning assessments, musical assessments, chart or file review, and interviews with the client, family members, staff, and/or related professionals.  Throughout treatment, the therapist is responsible for continual evaluation of progress and must adapt treatment accordingly.  It is of utmost importance that the needs of the client and not the knowledge, skill, or preference of the music therapist determine interventions as described in the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) Code of Ethics.

It is very important in many therapy settings to actively participate within an interdisciplinary team and/or with parents, teachers, staff and other professionals.  This increases the transfer of functional skills to all areas of treatment and provides opportunities for co-treatment and reinforcement of treatment interventions.  These diverse settings provide many opportunities to promote awareness regarding the benefits of music therapy.  The American Music Therapy association strongly instructs music therapists to take advantage to present at staff meetings, conferences, and community events.

Related disciplines (e.g. speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, etc.) define best practice methods within the standards related to research and evidence based practices.  The American Speech-Language Hearing Association defines evidence-based practice as “an approach in which current, high-quality research evidence is integrated with practitioner expertise and client preferences and values into the process of making clinical decisions” (Evidence-Based Practice in Communication Disorder, 2004).  The association also outlines five themes of evidence practice: independent confirmation and converging evidence, experimental control, avoidance of subjectivity and bias, effect sizes and confidence intervals, and relevance and feasibility (Evidence-Based Practice in Communication Disorder, 2004).  Similarly, the field of physical therapy describes evidence-based practice as the “use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The American Physical Therapy Association (n.d.) supports and promotes the development and utilization of evidence-based practice that includes the combination of “best available research, clinical expertise, and patient values and circumstances related to patient/client management, practice management, and health policy decision making.”  The American Music Therapy Association practices similar standards.

Although music therapy does not lend to the “gold standard” of experimental research (i.e. random sample, large n, etc.) music therapists have the ability to define replicable interventions as proven by the Neurologic Music Therapy Techniques and related techniques as described by Thaut, practices of NICU (Cassidy & Standley, 1995; Standley, 2000, 2003; Standley & Moore, 1995),  etc.  Music therapists and researchers outside the field have created an advancing and rich body of literature of experimental, quasi-experimental, and descriptive studies to examine the effects of music upon the mind and body, the effectiveness of various treatment techniques, the cost effectiveness, and so on.

References

American Music Therapy Association. (2009). Retrieved from http://www.musictherapy.org/.

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2004). Evidence-Based Practice in Communication Disorders: An Introduction [Technical Report]. Available from www.asha.org/policy.

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2005). Evidence-Based Practice in  communication Disorders [Position Statement]. Available from www.asha.org/policy.

Clair, A.A., Pasiali, V., & Thaut, M.H. (2004). Neurologic Music Therapy. In A.A. Darrow (Ed.), Introduction to Approaches in Music Therapy (143-158). Silver Spring, MD: The American Music Therapy Association, Inc.

Madson, C.  A behavioral approach to music therapy center for music research.  Available from  unam.mx.

Standley, J., Johnson, C.M., Robb, S.L., Brownell, M.D, Kim, S., & Madsen, C.K. (2004). Behavioral Approach to Music Therapy. In A.A. Darrow (Ed.), Introduction to Approaches in Music Therapy (103-124). Silver Spring, MD: The American Music Therapy Association, Inc.

Taylor, D.B & Tomaino, C. (2004). Biomedical Music Therapy. In A.A. Darrow (Ed.), Introduction to Approaches in Music Therapy (159-174). Silver Spring, MD: The American Music Therapy Association, Inc.

Scovel, M.A. (n.d.). Music Therapy Within the Context of Psychotherapeutic Models. In W.B. Davis, K.E. Gfeller, & M.H. Thaut (Eds.), An Introduction to Music Therapy: Theory and Practice. (3^rd ed.). (96-108).