Today is Tuesday, August 25th, and let’s begin this thirty-fourth episode.
Not very often, but often enough, I have heard colleagues complain because they felt “offended” after being denied the possibility of consulting the clinical records of the people with whom they were supposed to begin a music therapy pathway.
Of course, I am talking about music therapy practitioners who, like me, do not have a clinical background.
These colleagues experience this refusal as a real offence to their many years of training, and they cannot get over it.
As I have said many times, the responsibility for this “virus” — at least initially — does not lie with music therapy professionals themselves, but with the “silent flatteries” that are not uprooted during training, and that give birth to armies of convinced “doctors in music therapy”.
The solution that, in my opinion, brings peace to all this is to remember that, in order to obtain the clinical details of the person with whom we are about to begin our work, it is enough to ask someone on the team about that person’s functional state from a cognitive, motor, sensory, relational, and communicative point of view.
And then let us take the time — at least a couple of sessions — to observe.
Not that observing is a walk in the park, of course.
You have to train yourself.
And train a lot.
But we can truly obtain a mountain of information from this practice.
So many things pass in front of us that, unless we make a choice, we are left with nothing in our hands.
So let me tell you what I observe as a musician, and what I then share with the team in a healthy and equal exchange of specific competences.
I observe, with my eyes and my ears, how and where the person places themselves within the “field” defined by the parameters of sound.
In other words, I create a sound portrait, using as broad reference points:
frequency,
intensity,
timbre,
and duration.
These are parameters that have to do with the sounds produced directly by the person, and by the instruments that person explores or activates.
What sounds do they make?
At what pitch?
At what volume?
With what kind of sound production?
Quickly?
Slowly?
For a short time?
For a long time?
And so on.
Besides providing a useful starting point — a kind of initial assessment to be compared with what emerges at the end of the music therapy pathway — this type of sound observation also gives me an idea of where to orient my work, and of which sonic aspect or parameter differs most from the “norm”.
Of course, it is a subjective tool, with no psychometric validity.
But it does its dirty work extremely well.
In every team I have worked with, the “sound portrait” that emerges has always been welcomed and appreciated.
I wish everyone the chance to experience that wonderful feeling of adequacy and usefulness.
I’ll stop here.
We’ll meet again on Tuesday, September 1st, with a new episode of A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy.