Company | MusicWorx Music Therapy News Advocate 2010

International Music Therapy News Resource

As an international music therapy authority and advocate, MusicWorx welcomes and publishes
news from any source that promotes the field of music therapy.

»View 2011 news archives.
»View 2009 news archives.

A. Blythe La Gasse

MusicWorx Internship Alumna Wins $15,000 Arthur Flagler Fultz Research Fund Award

Date	Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Photo	A. Blythe La Gasse, PhD, NMT, MT–BC

Story	A. Blythe La Gasse, PhD, NMT, MT–BC received a $15,000 Arthur Flagler Fultz Research Fund Award last week at the AMTA national conference in Cleveland, OH. Titled "The Effect of Music Therapy Groups on the Social Skills of Children with Autism," Dr. La Gasse's study will employ a randomized-control design consisting of two groups of children randomly assigned to two groups, including a music therapy treatment (n=10) and a control group (n=10; structured play group). From a major city, we will recruit 20 child participants, ages 7–9, all of whom have a formal diagnosis of an ASD but who have not had group music therapy experience in the past two years. Each group will meet for fifty minutes two times a week for five weeks. A neuropsychologist will administer measures, including the CARS, Social Responsiveness Scale (pre-test, post-test) and the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (pre-test, post-test, post-treatment follow-up). Children in both groups at these same intervals will be videorecorded for analysis of instances of social interaction.

Noelle Pederson

Two MusicWorx Intern Alumni Win Scholarships

Date	Thursday, November 18, 2010
Source	»Resounding Joy Inc.
Photo	L: Rebecca Vaudreuil, NICU–MT, NMT, MT–BC R: Noelle Pederson, NICU–MT, MT–BC

Story	Resounding Joy is excited to announce that its two music therapists, Noelle Pederson and Rebecca Vaudreuil, will receive $500 Anne Emery Kyllo Professional Scholarships this week at the 2010 national American Music Therapy Association conference in Cleveland, Ohio. The two MusicWorx alumni intend to apply the funds toward specialized certification that will result in exponential expansion of the Resounding Joy Healing Notes program for hospitalized infants and children. Healing Notes has been educating staff and supporters of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) throughout the US. Only 90 of approximately 4,000 US board-certified music therapists have completed the NICU–MT certification program, which includes the following: • lecture portion of an AMTA national conference • clinical field work in Tallahassee, FL • written exam Noelle and Rebecca completed the clinical field work using their own funding this past spring. The Kyllo scholarships they'll receive will assist them financially to finish the process leading to NICU music therapist certification this week in Cleveland.

Lindsay Hirata

Hello Song Wins Contest

Date	Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Source	Music Therapy Source
Video Location	»View Here
Photo	Lindsay Hirata, MT–BC

Background	Music Therapy Resource publisher Matt Logan states that there were many wonderful entries to this contest sponsored by the Iowa Chapter of Music Therapy. But Lindsay’s song won for the following reasons: “Very effective in its clean and predicatable simplicity.” “. . . Lindsay’s voice and affect! Really engaging and likable. The song is short and sweet and . . . includes directives.” “Pauses clearly prompt client responses.” “. . . the repeated lyrics of instructions so the client can listen to the instructions first, then have them repeated while completing the actions.” Contest judges included Denise Coovert, Laurie Farnan, Rachel Rambach, and Dr. Natalie Wlodarczyk.

Noelle Pederson

Reaching For a New Approach
The Music Therapy Applications of Sansulas and Kalimbas

Date	Monday, Octboer 11, 2010
Sourcre	»Therapy Times.
Photo	L: Rebecca Vaudreuil, NICU–MT, NMT, MT–BC R: Noelle Pederson, NICU–MT, MT–BC

Story	Music therapy is the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program. The music therapy field is continually adapting new music, interventions, and instruments to provide therapeutic opportunities to the increasing number of special populations. The sansula and kalimba have recently been implemented in a variety of music therapy settings with interventions such as: active music making, relaxation exercises, and individual or group musical performance. Music therapists utilize the kalimba as a vehicle to improve communication, increase group cohesion, encourage creativity through spontaneous music making, and to use as an alternate form of self-expression. This article outlines the music therapy applications of the kalimba and sansula both locally and globally with the following populations: traumatic brain injury, hospice, deaf/hearing impairment, hospital and special needs populations. Traumatic Brain Injury The kalimba and sansula both have shown effective outcomes when utilized with people with traumatic brain injury in both group and individual sessions. Brain injuries present with varying levels of functioning; however, these instruments accommodate all levels of abilities and are easy to play while promoting both gross and fine motor skills. In the group settings, clients play the kalimbas in succession to form chord progressions for client-preferred songs. The clients wait for their turn to play along as the therapist cues the chord changes. Guitar, piano, and other instruments also add a pleasing accompaniment quality. The aesthetic sound of the sansula successfully facilitates relaxation. The reverberating nature of the drumhead captures the resonance and allows the player to direct the sound. For progressive muscle relaxation, the sansula is placed over each part of the body that the therapist describes to the client to focus on relaxing. Vibro-tactile massage is another method of relaxation, which can be executed (with client permission) by placing the sansula on the client’s back and playing slowly as the vibrations massage the spine and surrounding muscles. The sansula is simple to manipulate while reciting a guided relaxation exercise and still maintains the quality of the sound. In individual sessions, the kalimba and sansula can be played together or with other instruments. The music created is used to express thoughts and emotions in the absence of words. A therapeutic intervention called “Kalimba Conversation” promotes turn-taking goals; as one plays, another listens, and then participants switch through non-verbal cuing in the music. For “Kalimba Mirror,” one person plays a short musical phrase and the other imitates the phrase back; then switch leader positions. Here are testimonials from clients with traumatic brain injury. “I like using the kalimba in music group because we can all play them together and sound real good like a band!” “I have only played the kalimba a few times, and I enjoy it because each time I can create a new melody that sounds different than what I played before.” Sansula in Jamaica In June 2010, music therapist Rebecca Vaudreuil provided services at Portland Parish of Jamaica with the Jamaica Field Service Project. The sansula was used in the following settings: hospice/infirmaries and schools for deaf/hearing impaired youth. The residents at the infirmaries suffer from the symptoms and results of long-term and untreated diabetes. Some of the ailments include, but are not limited to: blindness, paralysis, amputation, severe physical and emotional pain and distress. The sansula was used for relaxation and physical stimulation. Due to the lack of medical treatment and care staff, physical touch can be painful and massage and/or posture adjustments are often overlooked. The sansula’s sound and vibrations provide a method of touch and corporeal stimulation for the older adults experiencing chronic pain. In working with the deaf students, the sansula is used to provide sound vibrations both physically and through distant resonance. In holding the sansula around the student’s head and ears, they are able to sense the vibrations of the music made by the sansula. When directing sound through the instrument on the student’s body, they are able to feel what their audible impairment prohibits them from hearing (Photo 5). Much like with drumming, the deaf students gain an alternative method to experience the sounds of the music that they are producing. For these students, what an accomplishment. Kalimbas in Cambodia Resounding Joy Inc. (501(c) (3) non-profit organization based in San Diego. Music therapists traveled to Siem Reap, Cambodia with Paul Grossfeld, MD, of University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the cardiac surgical team through Variety Children’s Lifeline. Music therapists Alexandra Field and Noelle Pederson each volunteered nearly sixty hours of their services to twenty patients receiving patent ductus arteriosis (cardiac) surgeries and their families at Angkor Hospital for Children. Intervention goals primarily focused on relaxation and pain-management, normalization of environment, and diversion from the hospital experience. The therapists compiled detailed-oriented numerical and anecdotal documentation. Grossfeld stressed the importance of “keeping the patients calm to prevent their bodies from entering a hypertensive state post-surgery.” Sedation and medications can be administered to prevent hypertension; however, music therapy techniques offer a natural and holistic alternative. The therapists used a variety of relaxing melodic mediums to create a comforting, supportive, and relaxing atmosphere for approximately forty people in a one-room surgical unit; among them was the kalimba. Post-operative data was collected from each patient’s heart monitor every five to fifteen minutes to gauge increases and decreases in the heart beats per minute (bpm). The therapists matched the tempo of the kalimba music to the patients’ heart rates and gradually decreased the speed to entrain the heartbeats to a more relaxed rate. The medical staff watched in amazement as a patient’s pre-session heart rate was monitored at 146 bpm and was down to 107 bpm post-session after one hour of musical relaxation listening and interactive play. This occurred throughout the sessions and the staff took several photographs and repeatedly acknowledged the power that the music therapy interventions produced. Sound Minds Teen Parent Program Resounding Joy’s Sound Minds is an early-intervention program encouraging teen parents to bond with their babies. These music therapy sessions are located in school settings and use music to address goals necessary for child development while teaching the young mothers how to use music with their children to help them relax, learn, and develop. The program’s lead therapist, Noelle Pederson is a strong advocate for use of the kalimba and sansula stating: “The kalimba and sansula are great with this population. It is incredible to watch the process of the teen moms realizing that they are the ones calming their babies by playing relaxing music on the kalimba and humming along. The babies look up at their mothers with a look of wonder as their eyelids become heavy until they fall asleep. The music creates a bond among the mothers too; one teen will play the sansula while the other moms hold, rock, soothe, sing, and coo with their babies.” This article has only scratched the surface of possibilities for using the kalimba and/or sansula in the music therapy practice. Music therapists from MusicWorx Inc. and Resounding Joy Inc. recommend tuning the kalimbas to a pentatonic scale to increase accessibility for clients; creates a success-based scale with “no wrong notes”. It is the hope of these music therapists that these instruments will continue to be utilized with more diverse populations and provide high quality, enjoyable, and musical opportunities. Noelle Pederson BA, MT–BC, is currently in her third year as the Director of Education and Training for Resounding Joy, and she is the lead therapist for MusicWorx. Rebecca Vaudreuil BM, NMT, MT–BC is on staff at both Resounding Joy and MusicWorx. Barbara Reuer PhD, NMT–F, MT–BC is CEO and owner of MusicWorx Inc., a music therapy consulting agency in San Diego county and serves as the Executive Director and Founder of Resounding Joy Inc. Questions and comments can be directed to editorial@therapytimes.com.

Meryl Barns

Helping Kids Through Music

Date	Thursday, September 19, 2010
Source	Tampa Bay Online News
Publisher	St. Petersburg Times
Writer	Syliva Lim, Times Correspondent
Article Location	»Full Article Here
Audio Slide Show Location	»View Here
Photo	Meryl Barns, MT–BC

Story Introduction	Jomanivz Aristhyl, 11, moves her lips to the lyrics at first. Sitting on her hospital bed, the slender girl with bright eyes seemed small, surrounded by sterile sheets and blinking machines.

Noelle Pederson

Sound Minds: Musical Bonding for Teens and Their Babies

Date	September 1, 2010
Source	Imagine, an online magazine
Publication	»Imagine
Article Location	»Download Full Article Here
Video Location	»Download the GoodBye Song Video Clip
Publisher	Dr. Petra Kern
Photo	Noelle Pederson, MT–BC

Story Introduction	Resounding Joy Inc., a non-profit organization based in San Diego, provides music therapy, recreational, and supportive music services to under-served populations. Resounding Joy’s Sound Minds is an early-intervention program which uses goal-directed music experiences to encourage and teach teen parents how to bond with their babies and increase school readiness for infants through three-year-olds. This program was started through an Innovative Grant funded by First 5 San Diego from November 2008 to January 2010 to provide music equipment and direct services twice a week for children and teens in four different San Diego schools.

Tim Ringgold and Daughter Bella

When Your First NICU Patient Is Your Own Child

Date	September 1, 2010
Source	Imagine, an online magazine
Location	»Listen Here
Publisher	Dr. Petra Kern
Photo	Tim Ringgold, NICU-MT, MT–BC

Story Introduction	Tim Ringgold, MusicWorx intern alumni, music therapist, father, and author, narrates in the podcast linked above his unique experience as both trained NICU-MT (neo-natal intensive care unit music therapist) and father of a fragile infant patient struggling for life against Epidermolysis Bullosa. Ringgold recounts using music therapy to prepare with his wife for their daughter Bella's birth, and after delivery, finding comfort in employing music therapy to connect with Bella.

Music Therapy Helps Sick Kids

Date	Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Source	Tampa Bay Online News
Location	»View Here

Video	Footage includes MusicWorx intern graduate (2009) Meryl Barns leading a music therapy session with a young leukemia patient at All Children’s Hospital in Tampa, Florida.

Davida Price

Rock-and-Roll Therapy

Date	Thursday, June 30, 2010
Source	San Diego Reader
Location	»View Here
Writer	Dave Good
Photo	Davida Price, MT–BC

Story	“There’s a study by Barry Bittman,” says Davida Price, “that found that 30 minutes of drumming actually improves the production of T-cells.” Price, 29, is a certified music therapist. “Those are the cells that are helpful to the immune system.” Bittman, a Pennsylvania medical researcher, for decades has been studying the effects of music and drumming on human health, a subject that Price is familiar with. Her own work, which she calls rock-and-roll therapy, is directed at kids and teens. “I developed it working with children at various local hospitals.” She says she’d rather not say which ones for reasons of confidentiality. “I get a one-time shot,” she says. “I’ll come in with a bass guitar and a regular guitar and some amps and some keyboards, and we all play music together.” Price says there is no time to teach the nonmusical how to play an instrument and therefore has developed a system. She tunes the guitars to open bar chords, then marks the fretboards and keyboards with strips of colored tape that tell a beginner where fingers should go. For example, red is the G major chord, while green is a C major chord and yellow a D major chord. “We could play ‘Three Little Birds’ with those chords.” She then sings the colors, by way of demonstration, over coffee in Normal Heights. The sounds of music, says Price, hold restorative powers. She describes a hypothetical scenario in which a patient has suffered sexual abuse and is depressed. “I’d say, ‘You’ve never played bass before?’ So then I’d put this big, heavy bass guitar in her lap. I’d say, play this cherry-red Ibanez. When she says ‘I can’t,’ I’d put her fingers in the right places and help her make some low notes.” That, Price says, is when healing begins to take place. “She’s playing this traditionally masculine instrument that is libidinous in a way, and she’s in control of it. Can you imagine how powerful that is?” Price got her degree from Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Price considered a career as a performer but says she found music therapy emotionally and monetarily more rewarding. Following an internship in music therapy at MusicWorx Inc., she opened »Bliss Music Therapy. In the final analysis, do drummers live longer than other musicians? “I don’t know,” Price laughs. “I don’t know if there are any studies on that.”

Aniruddh D. Patel, PhD

A Conversation With Aniruddh D. Patel

Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind

Date	Monday, May 31, 2010
Source	The New York Times, NY
Location	»View Here
Writer	»Claudia Dreifus
Photographer	Robert Benson for The New York Times
Photo	Aniruddh D. Patel

Story	Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published “Music, Language, and the Brain,” Oliver Sacks described it as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the »Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, was in New York City in May. We spoke over coffee for more than an hour and later by telephone. An edited and condensed version of the conversations follows. Q. You describe yourself as a neuroscientist of music. this has to be a new profession. How did you come to it? A. I’ve been passionate about two things since childhood — science and music. At graduate school, Harvard, I hoped to combine the two. But studying with E.O. Wilson, I quite naturally got caught up with ants. In 1990, I found myself in Australia doing fieldwork on ants for a Ph.D. thesis. And there, I had this epiphany: the only thing I really wanted to do was study the biology of how humans make and process music. I wondered if the drive to make it was innate, a product of our evolution, as Darwin had speculated. Did we have a special neurobiological capacity for music, as we do for language and grammar? So from Australia, I wrote Wilson that there was no way I could continue with ants. Amazingly, he wrote: “You must follow your passion. Come back to Harvard, and we’ll give it a shot.” Wilson and Evan Balaban, a birdsong biologist who taught me about the neurobiology of auditory communication, mentored me through my thesis, which was called “A Biological Study of the Relationship Between Language and Music.” When I defended it in 1996, this was unusual scholarship. The neurobiology of music wasn’t yet a recognized field. Q. When did it go mainstream? A. Not too long after that. By the late 1990s, all of neuroscience was being transformed by the widespread use of imaging technologies. Because it became possible to learn how the brain was affected when people engaged in certain activities, it became acceptable to study things previously considered fringy. Today you have the neuroscience of economics, of music, of everything. I published a paper in 1998 that really surprised people. It was the first imaging study showing what happens when the brain processes musical grammar as compared with what happens when it processes language. From what we learned, this was occurring in an overlapping way within the brain. And this was a clue that the neurobiology of music could give us a new path to access and perhaps even heal some language disabilities. Q. How would that work? A. One example. There’s a neurologist in Boston, Gottfried Schlaug, who uses music therapy to return some language to stroke victims. He has them learn simple phrases by singing them. This has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy. Schlaug’s work suggests that when the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that processes music to take over. Music neuroscience is also helping us understand Alzheimer’s. There are Alzheimer’s patients who cannot remember their spouse. But they can remember every word of a song they learned as a kid. By studying this, we’re learning about how memory works. Q. Recently, you’ve been working with a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Snowball. What prompted the collaboration? A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys! My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours. Q. What did you do with this insight? A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.” One day, Irena Schulz, the proprietor, played “Everybody” to amuse the abandoned creature. And Snowball began to move. Irena then made the YouTube video, which immediately went viral. Millions saw it. “Let’s design an experiment to see if this is real,” I proposed to Irena, who had a science background herself. We took the Backstreet Boys song, sped it up and slowed it down at 11 different tempos, then videoed what Snowball did to each. For 9 out of the 11 variations, the bird moved to the beat, which meant that he’d processed the music in his brain and his muscles had responded. So now we had the first documented case of a nonhuman animal who, without training, could sense a beat out of music and move to it. Q. You say that Snowball changed your thinking. How? A. Before Snowball, I wondered if moving to a musical beat was uniquely human. Snowball doesn’t need to dance to survive, and yet, he did. Perhaps, this was true of humans, too? Since working with Snowball, I’ve come to think we could learn more music neuroscience by studying the behaviors of not just parrots, but perhaps dolphins, seals, songbirds — also vocal learners. We eventually published the Snowball research in Current Biology. A group at Harvard published a paper right alongside ours in which they surveyed thousands of YouTube videos to see if there were other animals spontaneously moving to a beat. They found about 12 or 13 parrots. No dogs. No cats. No horses. What do humans have in common with parrots? Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music. Q. Is it difficult to find money for this type of research? A. It's easier than it used to be. One of the founders of this field, Dr. Robert Zatorre, before 2000, he never used the word music in a grant application. He knew it would get turned down automatically because people thought this was not scientific. Instead, he used terms like “complex nonlinguistic auditory processing.” But in recent years, it’s become O.K. to say: I study music and the brain. [ END ] Watch Snowball dancing to music in the video below.

Gift of $2.5 Million to All Children's Hospital to Keep Music Playing

Date	Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Source	St. Petersburg Times, FL
Author	»Richard Martin, Times Staff Writer

Story	St. Petersburg—Sometimes, a kid needs to bang a drum, sing a song or listen to a relaxing tune. That's the basic idea behind the music therapy program at All Children's Hospital, which has been a hit with patients for nearly 20 years. On Monday, the program got a big boost with the announcement of a $2.5 million gift from local music executive and businessman Bill Edwards. The gift comes just as the current grant for the program is about to expire, hospital spokeswoman Ann Miller said. But Edwards' largesse also will enable the hospital to train additional certified music therapists. Edwards is founder of Bill Edwards Presents Inc. and Big 3 Entertainment; chairman and chief executive of Mortgage Investors Corp.; and is one of the new owners of St. Petersburg concert venue Jannus Live. In a news release, he said, "we all owe a responsibility to our community to help our children stay healthy and happy." Music therapy is used for patients of all ages, for many types of therapy. It relaxes and soothes; provides a distraction from the pain, fear and stress of being in a hospital; and it also can help with motor skills. Meryl Barns, [ MusicWorx Inc. July 2009 intern alumna ] the hospital's lone board-certified music therapist, said the program works with about 90 to 100 children each month. A patient might write a song or play an instrument to express his feelings, Barns said. Kids who face long hospitalizations might set a goal, such as learning to play a song on the guitar. Edwards' gift will also help the hospital expand GetWellNetwork, an interactive education and entertainment system run through bedside televisions. Richard Martin can be reached at rmartin@sptimes.com or (727) 893–8330. Go to tampabay.com/health for more medical news.