E-Book of Articles - World Federation of Music Therapy

Garcia, Maria: Forms Of Expression In Common To Movement ...
build our general experience. Considering this, we may better understand
why music therapists need to be trained in the practices that would help
them:
to recover their total perception abilities, which are often
forgotten;
to make their creative process more flexible, being allowed
to express themselves in different languages (movement and
music, for instance) both as an alternative and as an
integration.
The Body and Non-Modal Perception
These principles are confirmed by the empirical research carried out
by infant development psychologists. Some of the concepts developed by
these studies are now essential to analyze the relationships between
musical experience and body-motor experience.
The well-known works of D. Stern have evidenced that the perception
of infants during their first months of life transcends individual sensorial
channels and picks up the general qualities of experience (its intensity,
duration, movement, number, shape). (Stern 1989, page 69) This research
has also proved that the perception of these general qualities becomes what
he calls "vital affects": total affective states that sum up all these general
qualities into a comprehensive gestalt, and involve the whole experience of
oneself. For example, by saying that a certain gesture is "evanescent", we
are defining a comprehensive experience, that has in itself a given degree
of intensity and speed and a given shape.
Artists in general, and especially those who make use of the body as
an expressive medium, are well aware that this perceptive potential is due
to variations in the body's general conditions and particularly to variations in
its muscular tone. Therefore, the main source is the body, that in a certain
sense "vibrates" with every single perceptive act. From careful self-
observations we may perceive tone intensity, its modulation in time and the
circulation of energy from one part of our body to another.
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