Sound Reflexes: Micro-Analysis of Meaningful Moments with Children Receiving Music Therapy

<p>This study investigates meaningful moments in improvised music created during individual music therapy sessions with children who have delays in various areas of development. Secondary analysis of clinical records (session notes and video footage) was used in this music centred research to identify meaningful moments in the music. Six meaningful moments were chosen, each from a different child, and subsequently the musical interactions of the child and student music therapist were transcribed in detail. An ethnographic, microanalysis approach was applied to analyse and interpret the observable features of the music. The analysis of what was happening in the music helped the researcher to understand and articulate the meaningful moments. Meaningful moments were found to be shared experiences in the co-creation of music, which provided opportunities to foster a responsive interpersonal relationship between the child and therapist. They occurred because the music provided a framework for structure and change through synchronicity and regularity/flow as well as variation, tension, suspension, expectation and anticipation. The meaningful moment was facilitated by musical elements: rhythm, tempo, pitch/melody, harmony, timbre and volume/dynamics; and musical techniques: imitation, pause, space, repetition, anacrusis and gestural actions. A review of the literature was undertaken to examine the use of improvisation and the importance of meaningful moments, in music therapy. The findings are discussed drawing from the related literature and the theory of expectation. The strengths and limitations of the study are stated along with the implications for training and further research in this field.</p>

Sound Reflexes: Micro-Analysis of Meaningful Moments with Children Receiving Music Therapy

<p>This study investigates meaningful moments in improvised music created during individual music therapy sessions with children who have delays in various areas of development. Secondary analysis of clinical records (session notes and video footage) was used in this music centred research to identify meaningful moments in the music. Six meaningful moments were chosen, each from a different child, and subsequently the musical interactions of the child and student music therapist were transcribed in detail. An ethnographic, microanalysis approach was applied to analyse and interpret the observable features of the music. The analysis of what was happening in the music helped the researcher to understand and articulate the meaningful moments. Meaningful moments were found to be shared experiences in the co-creation of music, which provided opportunities to foster a responsive interpersonal relationship between the child and therapist. They occurred because the music provided a framework for structure and change through synchronicity and regularity/flow as well as variation, tension, suspension, expectation and anticipation. The meaningful moment was facilitated by musical elements: rhythm, tempo, pitch/melody, harmony, timbre and volume/dynamics; and musical techniques: imitation, pause, space, repetition, anacrusis and gestural actions. A review of the literature was undertaken to examine the use of improvisation and the importance of meaningful moments, in music therapy. The findings are discussed drawing from the related literature and the theory of expectation. The strengths and limitations of the study are stated along with the implications for training and further research in this field.</p>

Improvised music to support Intensive Interaction for children with complex needs: A feasibility study of brief adjunctive music therapy

This study investigates Triadic Support of Interaction by Improvisation, an application of music therapy as a brief adjunctive therapy for children with complex needs who are receiving Intensive Interaction. A small randomised controlled trial measured changes in child-support worker interaction between the 4th and the 12th of 12 weekly sessions of Intensive Interaction. In each of two special schools, a control group of four children with complex needs received Intensive Interaction only and an experimental group of four children additionally received improvised music in sessions 5 through 8. Experienced Speech and Language Therapists made blind assessments from video recordings of sessions 4 and 12 using an adaptation of an instrument developed by a National Health Service learning disability service for tracking progress in Intensive Interaction. The experimental group at one research site showed significantly enhanced interaction (p = 0.02). This offers provisional proof of concept, provided environmental factors identified as impacting results at the other site can be resolved in future studies.

Coherence and Musical Meaning in Jazz Improvisation

In the context of improvised music, and more specifically in jazz—a situation in which at least part of the musical “work” is created at the moment it is perceived—the performers find themselves in an ambivalent condition: like their listeners at the same time they perform the music they experience it for the first time. Improvisers experience the musical content they produce in the act of improvisation as an improvised part of a “work”—an update of it. The “work”, in this case, reveals itself at the moment of performance. In this work I discuss the understanding of musical coherence in order to

The Noise Indoors

This article is a reflection of a collaboration between musicians Anton Hunter and José Dias who, in April 2020, organised a free, biweekly improvisation streaming festival, which ran for three weeks, entitled The Noise Indoors (TNI). Devised as a way of encouraging musicians and fans to stay home by providing the chance to continue experiencing and celebrating improvised music during confinement, TNI gathered twenty-eight artists based in seventeen cities across Europe who filmed solo or duet performances in their homes. As TNI progressed, this festival became a platform for sharing each artist’s intimate music-making, as well as an opportunity for networking and community building. In this article, using an eclectic mix of critical and dialogic writing styles (including field notes and text messages), they reflect on their experiences as researchers, musicians, and curators who organised and participated in TNI, and the potential wider implications of this.

Music, Mayhem, and Management

This piece examines the ways in which management consulting firms have co-opted concepts drawn from jazz and improvised music to develop corporate responses to the pandemic.

In the moment with music: an exploration of the embodied and sensory experiences of people living with dementia during improvised music-making

The term ‘in the moment’ has received growing interest in the context of music programmes for people living with dementia, with music therapists, family carers, health-care professionals and people living with dementia themselves reporting the value of framing musical experiences in the ‘here and now’. Although this term is being used more frequently within the literature, there has yet to be a formal examination of such ‘in the moment’ musical experiences and how they might benefit a person living with dementia. We used a multiple-case study approach to develop a thematic framework of ‘in the moment’ musical experiences within the context of a music-making programme for people living with dementia. The research followed six people living with dementia and four family carers, and used video-observation and video-elicitation interviews to capture and analyse ‘in the moment’ experiences. Four thematic observations were developed which captured ‘in the moment’ musical experiences: Sharing a life story through music, Musical agency ‘in the moment’, Feeling connected ‘in the moment’ and Musical ripples into everyday life. These findings showcase the creativity and musical abilities of people living with dementia whilst affirming music as a medium to connect people living with dementia with their own life story, other people and the environments in which music-making takes place.

The Social Science Music of Terri Lyne Carrington

This chapter explores the music, life, and institutional building of drummer, feminist, and artistic director for the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, Terri Lyne Carrington. Through and examination of her cultural work, this chapter discusses Carrington’s attack on patriarchy in jazz culture through Black feminist thought reflected in her musical practices. Her work exposes the irony of the Black aesthetic values of inclusion at the foundation of African American improvised music in contrast with the patriarchal practice of marginalizing women improvisers. Carrington’s musical arrangement of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s composition “Echo” on The Mosaic Project (2011) is analyzed as linked critique of anti-blackness over and several compositions on Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science (2019) are analyzed as an intersectional critique of police brutality, gay conversion therapy, celebration of Black feminism, and gender inequity represented respectively in “Bells (Ring Loudly),” “Pray the Gay Away,” “Anthem,” and “Purple Mountains.”