Music Therapy Maven — The Business and Science of Music Therapy. The Life of a Music Therapist, Academic, and Career-Minded Mommy.

How My Elementary School Teacher Helped Me Explain Data Collection Development

October 9, 2014

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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[PsychToday] 5 Intrinsic Perks of Music

September 17, 2014

There is mounting evidence that music training benefits skills and areas that are non-musical in nature. Musicians tend to score higher on verbal and math tests. There are differences in the motor and sensory processing areas of a musician’s brain. Musicians also have greater aural acuity, meaning they can more accurately process pitch. Plus the […]

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Starting a Private Practice: Yay or Nay?

August 27, 2014

In this first week of my tenure as a full-fledged professor, I’m going to take a moment to reflect on my time in private practice. In some ways this seems fitting as until this week I have never held a full-time position as an employee. I ran across a question I received awhile back from […]

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5 Problems Music Can Create

August 15, 2014

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

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

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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Mommy Mondays: The No-Guilt iPhone-Wielding Parent

July 13, 2014

My phone is a pretty constant presence in my hand. I use it to check email, take pictures, share pics to Instagram, post updates on Twitter and Facebook, reference my grocery list, listen to audiobooks, text, make phone calls, look up passwords, check the weather, play Words with Friends…it basically has a function in almost […]

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Feeling Stagnant

July 9, 2014

I’ve been struggling to come up with topic ideas for this blog. It’s not a new struggle—this kind of stagnation has happened periodically in my 5+ years of blogging. You may even call it writer’s block. My initial reaction to this feeling is always one of alarm. After all, I take a developmental approach and […]

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[PsychToday] Can Moving Together Rhythmically Combat Toddler Selfishness?

July 2, 2014

Take a moment and think of all the ways we interact rhythmically with children. We rock. We bounce. We dance. We walk. It seems the developmental benefits of this intuitive, simple play may extend farther then we thought. New Research: Motor Synchrony and Prosocial Development Researchers at McMaster University conducted a series of studies to […]

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