Music Therapy

How My Elementary School Teacher Helped Me Explain Data Collection Development

October 9, 2014
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Data collection seems to be a pervasive challenge for the music therapy student, intern, and even clinician. Whether it’s for a music therapy assessment, a regular music therapy session, or a periodic evaluation process, it can be difficult to collect client information in a meaningful and functional way that allows for accuracy, some level of […]

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5 Problems Music Can Create

August 15, 2014
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I am a strong believer in the incredible and varied effect music can have on us. I believe in its ability to shape our brains and our selves. It’s for this reason that I started both my children in piano lessons just shy of their fifth birthdays. Music is the vocational passion of my life […]

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Which Came First, the Music or the Musical? A Visual History of MT Language

July 31, 2014
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This morning, my husband—an avid reader of the New York Times—shared with me a tool on the NYT site that got the nerd in me really excited. This tool, called Chronicle, allows you to visually track language usage in the NYT since its launch in 1860. You insert keywords and/or phrases and the program graphs […]

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Music IN Therapy vs. Music AS Therapy: A Change in Perspective?

July 25, 2014
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A fellow music therapist published an insightful piece this week about his journey from a music snob to a music therapist. Based on comments and article shares, his post seemed to resonate with other music therapists. It did for me, too, but not in the music snob way . . . See, I’ve been trying […]

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Do We Value Our Worth Enough?

June 25, 2014
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Money negotiation. This was not a skill I was taught nor, quite frankly, is it something I’m good at. But it’s an important skill to practice, not only for your own personal security and happiness, but also for the profession as a whole. See, negotiating a salary or fee is not really about the money, […]

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5 Ways to Handle Misrepresentation of Music Therapy

June 11, 2014
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One of the most common complaints I hear from fellow music therapists relates to misrepresentation—that is, when a person, company, or media piece advertises “music therapy” when none exists (well, there may be music involved, but not music therapy as provided by a qualified professional trained with the rigorous competency standards of board certified music […]

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Presentational vs. Participational Music: A Recap of the 2014 CMS Summit

May 22, 2014
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Music therapy is an inherently interdisciplinary field, which makes it all the more surprising that it has taken me almost 15 years to finally begin attending non-music therapy-specific conferences. The first was the Society for Music Perception and Cognition conference in Toronto last summer. The second was the 2014 Summit for the College Music Society […]

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Comments on “Using” vs “Working In” Music

March 6, 2014
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I’ve been percolating on the ideas presented by Dr. John Carpente in a blog post he wrote this week in which he explores the concept of music being “used” in therapy as opposed to music being “worked in” in therapy. It’s not a new conversation—I usually read about the music AS versus music IN therapy […]

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[PsychToday] Music Therapy for our Soldiers

February 27, 2014
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My first non-familial encounter with veterans was as a soon-to-be sophomore in college, two days shy of moving to Iowa City as a transfer student and new music therapy major. I had just learned about music therapy and had spent the past month turning my life upside-down to transfer to the University of Iowa to […]

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