Music Therapy Interventions for Improving Fluency Among People Who Stutter

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Re: Music therapy

From: Erika Shira
Date: 07 Oct 2008
Time: 17:17:38 -0500
Remote Name: 216.195.210.138

Comments

Oh, I didn't touch on your other point there. Yes, I don't think very many people would resort to singing to deliver a message. Remember though that the process I described involves improvising lyrics to a song in real time; this is a different skill than learning to sing a song. Imagine working on improvising lyrics, first with the music therapist following you in a sort of freeform way, then maybe doing a fill-in song where you filled in one word at a set place in each verse, then eventually being able to do so in a song with set structure (an example that comes to mind is lyric substitution for "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, where the person would list their own things), then doing maybe something more rap-like that would be more like speech. Many individuals find a great improvement in speech before even getting to the rap part. The brain is learning to retrieve and produce words at a set point in time, which is what we need to do to speak fluently. Pitch doesn't matter as much. Some folks seem to need the pitch aspect faded out gradually, while others don't. I'm not sure whether this is because they need that additional activation of the auditory cortices, or because they have a social/emotional hurdle, or what. (I actually am pretty convinced that these things are so tied into one another that we can't ever really know, so my take on it is that it usually is most effective to view the issue as stemming from whatever the client feels is the case for them.) Any thoughts?


Last changed: 10/07/08