Resources & references

Les Impatients is an organization that helps people who have mental health problems, offering art-based services. With Dany Bouchard, a certified music therapist, and people participating in his group music therapy sessions, the reporter Alexandre Courteau explored this discipline that is still not very well known. After one hour of musical improvisation, some participants accepted to share how music therapy has changed their life.

The objective of this phenomenological research is to document the experience of music therapists practicing in mental health with adults receiving services in community and hospital settings in Quebec. Reflections, recommendations, research ideas, and the results of interviews are presented here. It is hoped that this work will help to foster the use of music therapy practices in mental health, an innovative and creative approach.

This book is available in an official English edition by the Publisher.

This book, written by music therapist Guylaine Vaillancourt, is divided in two parts. This book is intended to make parents, educators and care-givers aware of how music and music therapy can benefit children. It also explains how the purposeful use of music by music therapy professionals can restore, maintain or enhance physical and psychological well-being of children.

See the record of the book Music, Music Therapy and Child Development
 

Entrainment is defined by a temporal locking process in which one system’s motion or signal frequency entrains the frequency of another system. This process is a universal phenomenon that can be observed in physical (e.g., pendulum clocks) and biological systems (e.g. fire flies). However, entrainment can also be observed between human sensory and motor systems. The function of rhythmic entrainment in rehabilitative training and learning was established for the first time by Thaut and colleagues in several research studies in the early 1990s. It was shown that the inherent periodicity of auditory rhythmic patterns could entrain movement patterns in patients with movement disorders (see for a review: Thaut et al, 1999). Physiological, kinematic and behavioral movement analysis showed very quickly that entrainment cues not only changed the timing of movement but also improved spatial and force parameters. Mathematical models have shown that anticipatory rhythmic templates as critical time constraints can result in the complete specification of the dynamics of a movement over the entire movement cycle, thereby optimizing motor planning and execution. Furthermore, temporal rhythmic entrainment has been successfully extended into applications in cognitive rehabilitation and speech and language rehabilitation, and thus become one of the major neurological mechanisms linking music and rhythm to brain rehabilitation. These findings provided a scientific basis for the development of Neurologic Music Therapy.

After 35 years in the field of information technology followed by some time in politics, Suzanne Caron became a music therapist and founded the National Music Therapy Institute. Its mission is to raise awareness of and facilitate access to music therapy. A number of steps had to be completed before the dream of launching this Institute could become a reality —a process that demonstrated the importance of a determined, flexible, and creative approach. The COVID-19 pandemic— a tragedy in many respects—led the Institute to explore music therapy online for autistic people and family caregivers, and to develop training that would facilitate the transition for music therapists across Canada. The future looks promising for this Institute, whose story has yet to unfold.

Modern music therapy, starting around the middle of the twentieth century was primarily conceived to promote emotional well-being and to facilitate social group association and integration. Therefore, it was rooted mostly in social science concepts. More recently, music as therapy began to move decidedly toward perspectives of neuroscience. This has been facilitated by the advent of neuroimaging techniques that help uncover the therapeutic mechanisms for non-musical goals in the brain processes underlying music perception, cognition, and production. In this paper, we focus on executive function (EF) and attentional processes (AP) that are central for cognitive rehabilitation efforts. To this end, we summarize existing behavioral as well as neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies in musicians, non-musicians, and clinical populations. 

This article describes the Intergenerational Jamboree music therapy intervention. The benefits for yound children and older adults are outlined, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed. A complete guide is provided for music therapists who wish to implement the Jamboree in their community. 

The Nordic Journal of Music Therapy serves the international community of music therapy by being an avenue for publication of scholarly articles, texts on practice, theory and research, dialogues and discussions, reviews and critique. Publication of the journal is based on the collaboration between the music therapy communities in the five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and the three Baltic Countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

In this news report, giants in their fields of music and science, soprano Renee Fleming and phyician and geneticist Francis Collins, are merging their knowledge to propel advancements in body and mind. Recent discoveries are shared. A recent international gathering of researchers, therapists and artists took stock of what is known and what is yet to be discovered. 

This article describes a music therapy program in a maximum security psychiatric state facility. Brief descriptions of the patient population, admission and discharge criteria, safety and security concerns, music therapy interventions, and behavioral strategies are given in order to provide a picture of the program and the concerns associated with this population.

This paper explores perspectives on musical competence for seven people with borderline personality disorder participating in an 8-week music therapy program using group improvisation. Participants’ perceived changes in musical competence appear to have facilitated relational insights and learning from which they derived therapeutic benefits. As participants’ musical competencies expanded, emotionality decreased, and a healthier self-concept emerged.

 An individual who suffered from polio as a child described the impact of music therapy on his recovery over the years.