Music Therapy Interventions for Improving Fluency Among People Who Stutter

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Re: Enjoyed reading your paper

From: Erika Shira
Date: 06 Oct 2008
Time: 11:38:06 -0500
Remote Name: 204.11.150.154

Comments

There isn't a lot of qualitative research on music therapy in general. This is for a couple of reasons. One, it's really hard to teach music therapy techniques out of a textbook, or even a video, so most of the teaching of techniques is done hands-on during internship or supervision. You really need to try out the techniques in real time and have someone give you feedback. So there's just not a lot of writing about MT in general, which is something I'm trying change! Most of the research that is out there is qualitative, at least in part. We usually need to include sound and video clips, or at the very least a very detailed description of the person's process, in order to present an understanding of what went on for the person. In terms of typically developing people, there usually aren't a lot of folks who are willing to put their personal issues out there into a case study. Individuals will often give permission for their clips to be used for training workshops for professionals, but usually not to be published in a way that someone other than the therapist could access them. So most of the published research tends to feature people with fairly severe disabilities whose guardians have felt that it was important to share the work. In terms of the angles I discussed, there's ample research as to the efficacy of psychotherapy techniques like expressing oneself and building a relationship with a neutral trusting person in order to reduce anxiety and build the sense of self. I think the same can be said for the mind-body connection and the idea of how when we're more comfortable with ourselves, it shows in our motor movements and our overall organization. There are some great articles here about neurologic music therapy that discuss the motoric techniques I mentioned: http://www.bethclark.ca/articles.php The articles by Michael Thaut in particular talk a lot about aphasia, fluency disorders, motor disorders, etc. I didn't cite any of these articles specifically, as they're kind of dry and way too detailed for a general-interest paper


Last changed: 10/06/08