PsychToday

[PsychToday] Why Holiday Music Can Hurt

December 4, 2013
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It took less than a week living in my first apartment as a new board certified music therapist and soon-to-be graduate student to be cornered in the hallway by a neighbor asking a music-related question. When I divulge that I am a music therapist, most of the time I get responses such as . . […]

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[PsychToday] Music, Your GPS Voice, and the Science of Timbre

November 1, 2013
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“Timbre” is a rather difficult-to-define yet hard-to-ignore concept. When it comes to musical timbre, I have described it before as the color of sound. It’s the quality of the sound we hear that helps us differentiate between a flute, a violin, and a tuba . . . Read more

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[PsychToday] Is Commonplace Creativity a Lost Art?

September 27, 2013
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“…every human being has a social and biological guarantee of musicianship and evidence (suggests) that everybody, regardless of social, educational, psychological or medical aspects can communicate through music.” (Hallam & MacDonald, 2009, pg. 472) I dare you not to smile as you watch this 3:44 minute video clip . . . (Read more)

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[PsychToday] Translating Comedic Impression to Clinical Experience

September 22, 2013
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The following video recently made the rounds in music therapy-land. When I first watched the video, I was highly entertained, moving to the music and laughing at my favorite impressions: Julie Andrews, Zooey Deschanel, Celine Dion… When I watched the video a second time, I began to think…wow! How is she DOING that?…(read more)

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[PsychToday] 43 Easy Ways to Engage Young Kids in Music

August 2, 2013
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Evidence is mounting that encouraging your child’s involvement in music is good for his or her development. Research indicates that music training helps make children better at language, math, and science. And as any parent will tell you, children are naturally musical. They create sounds out of found objects (e.g. pots and pans), sing themselves […]

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[PsychToday] WWI and Istanbul: Using Music to Bind Us

June 29, 2013
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The story goes that on Christmas Eve 1914, in the middle of a brutal WWI battle between the British and the Germans, the sound of gunfire was replaced by singing voices. It happened spontaneously, spreading slowly throughout the troops as the camps sang their favorite Christmas hymns. Sometimes they alternated songs, but . . . […]

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[PsychToday] Music, Adaptation, and Evolution

June 14, 2013
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One of the advantages of working on a PhD is that you get to do a lot of reading and re-reading. I find the re-reading more interesting than the initial reading as I read the article or book in a different way, with a different level of depth and understanding. This happened recently when re-reading […]

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[PsychToday] “Thank You Mister Speaker”: On Music and Social Behaviors

May 9, 2013
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Think music doesn’t matter in our lives? You would be hard-pressed to watch this 2 minute clip and not see how music can change the entire mood of a rather serious group of people…Read more

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[PsychToday] Musical Medicine and TB: A Q&A with author James Markert

March 28, 2013

I’m a history buff and a music lover . . . so when I first heard about James Markert’s latest novel, A White Wind Blew, I jumped at the opportunity to interview the author! Set in the late 1920s in TB-ridden Louisville, Kentucky, A White Wind Blew follows Wolfgang Pike, a doctor-musician-almost priest, through his […]

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