Music Therapy Today - World Federation of Music Therapy

Music Therapy Today 

a quarterly journal of studies in music and 

music therapy from the Chair of Qualitative 

Research in Medicine 

Volume VIII, Issue 1 (April 2007) 

David Aldridge & Jörg Fachner (eds.) 

Chair of Qualitative Research in Medicine 

Published by MusicTherapyWorld.net 

UniversityWitten/Herdecke 

Witten, Germany 

ISSN 1610-191X

Editor in Chief/Publisher 

Prof. Dr. phil. David Aldridge 

Managing Editor 

Dr. Jörg Fachner, joergf@uni-wh.de 

Translation and editorial assistance 

Christina Wagner, cwagner@uni-wh.de 

Book review editor and dissertations archive 

Annemiek Vink, a.c.vink@capitolonline.nl 

“Odds and Ends, Themes and Trends” 

Tom Doch, t.doch@t-online.de 

International contacts 

Dr. Petra Kern, PETRAKERN@prodigy.net 

Scientific Advisory Board 

Prof. Dr. Jaakko Erkkilä, University of Jyväskylä, Finland 

Dr. Hanne Mette Ridder, University of Aalborg, Denmark 

Dr. Gudrun Aldridge, University Witten/Herdecke, Germany 

Marcos Vidret, University of Buenos Aires, Argentinia 

Dr. Cochavit Elefant, Bar-Ilan University, Israel 

Prof. Dr. Cheryl Dileo. Temple University in Philadelphia, USA 

Prof. Dr. Marlene Dobkin de Rios, University of California, Irvine, 

USA 

Dr. Alenka Barber-Kersovan University of Hamburg, Germany 

Prof. Dr. Tia DeNora, University of Exeter, UK 

Dr. Patricia L. Sabbatella, University of Cadiz, Spain 

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Table of contents 

Music Therapy Today i 

a quarterly journal of studies in music and music therapy from the 

Chair of Qualitative Research in Medicine i 

Volume VIII, Issue 1 (April 2007) i 

Table of contents vii 

Editorial Music Therapy Today Vol. VIII, Issue 1 (Online 1st April 

2007) 1 

Fachner, Jörg 1 

On the aesthetics of popular music 5 

von Appen, Ralf 5 

Dining rituals and music 26 

Aldridge, David 26 

Co-Therapists in Nordoff/Robbins Music Therapy 39 

Fachner, Jörg 39 

Creating order out of chaos: Music therapy with adolescent boys diagnosed 

with a Behaviour Disorder and/or Emotional Disorder 56 

McIntyre, Joanne 56 

Conference report: National conference on music therapy as an alternative 

medicine - Feb 12-13, 2007, at India International Centre, 

New Delhi 80 

Puri, Seema 80 

vii

Portrait: Global Crisis Intervention - A Commission of the World 

Federation of Music Therapy 84 

Magill, Loucanne 84 

Odds and ends, themes and trends 87 

Doch, Tom 87 

viii


Vol. VIII (1) (April) 2007 

Editorial Music Therapy Today Vol. 

VIII, Issue 1 (Online 1st 

April 2007) 

Fachner, Jörg 

Welcome to a new issue of Music Therapy Today! 

This issue features one article on aesthics from the stance of popular 

music research, one article on dining rituals and music in residential set- 

tings and two articles that are centred around the practice of Nordoff/ 

Robbins music therapy. 

Sometimes we may ask ourselves what it is that makes pop songs that 

powerful and successful, when looking at its musical structure and con- 

tent does not offer that much. Even so some of these songs are touching. 

Ralf von Appen 

in his article “ On the aesthetics of popular music” 

applies 

some ideas of philosophical aesthetics to give an explanation to it. Music 

has a sensual appearance and therefore he’s addressing three main cate- 

gories which have to be taken into account when trying to understand the 

aesthetics of popular music: contemplation or mere appearance, corre- 

spondence or atmospheric appearance and imagination or artistic appear- 

ance. His article refers somehow to the basic argument well known as 

1


‘Art for art’s sake’, meaning that mutual reception and performance of 

music has an end in itsself and that our actions do not need to be bound to 

functionalistic means. When being asked what music therapy does for 

our clients, it is sometimes as simple as that, doing music together makes 

fun and fills up our senses. 

Our next article on “ Dining rituals and music” comes from David Ald- 

ridge and continues our article series on music and its function in healing 

rituals. Dining rituals are important social forms in residential settings. 

The regulation and maintenance of these forms are based upon structur- 

ing events in time. Music is a traditional means of structuring ritual forms 

in varying cultures and music can be used in residential settings to offer a 

structural form for the dining experience. To do this, we need to be aware 

of various musical interventions that we can make within such a dining 

experience. That is why many societies have a form of opening prayer as 

a ritualised form of introduction followed by welcoming songs. We know 

from the research above that music can also be used during the dining 

experience to reduce agitation and promote a soothing atmosphere. To 

complete any ritual, we also need a musical intervention that signals that 

that ritual is coming to an end and we can do this through music and 

song. 

The article “ Co-Therapists in Nordoff/Robbins Music Therapy” 

from 

Jörg Fachner is an empirical contribution to an academic analysis of co- 

therapy in the Nordoff/Robbins approach of music therapy. Apart from 

work that explored team relations in Nordoff/Robbins music therapy, and 

some comments by Nordoff and Robbins themselves, the role of co-ther- 

apists in music therapy according to the Nordoff/Robbins approach has 

not been addressed. The focus has mainly been on the therapist in his 

Editorial Music Therapy Today Vol. VIII, Issue 1 (Online 1st April 2007) 

2


(musical) activities and not on the co-therapist. In the preamble to their 

book „Creative Music Therapy“ Nordoff & Robbins point out that this 

specific therapy form emerged in team work, with Nordoff as the musi- 

cian therapist and Robbins as the special education teacher therapist, but 

they also say that „each therapist working alone is confronted with the 

same world of musical reality and emotions“ (Nordoff & Robbins, 1986). 

Artistic and musical issues have been addressed frequently in explica- 

tions on therapy, but the aspect of co-therapy was never explored in 

detail. 

The article “ Creating order out of chaos: Music therapy with adolescent 

boys diagnosed with a Behaviour Disorder and/or Emotional Disorder” 

from Joanne McIntyre is based on a presentation given at the 3rd Interna- 

tional Nordoff-Robbins Symposium of Music Therapy held in Germany 

in June, 2006. It gives an overview of the evolution of a project funded 

by the Australian Federal Government awarded to Nordoff-Robbins 

Music Therapy Australia (NRMTA) in conjunction with the Golden 

Stave Music Therapy Centre (GSMTC), Kingswood Australia. A discus- 

sion on the students’ responses to music therapy and their progress 

through resistiveness is presented as well as the approach and methods 

used to facilitate their self expression, social and emotional growth and 

academic progress. 

The National Conference on Music Therapy as an Alternative Medicine 

at India International Centre, New Delhi was perhaps the first of its kind 

in India to focus attention on the growing realization that music is 

undoubtedly an efficient non invasive alternative medicine not only for 

the elderly population but for various stages of life. This short conference 


3


report from Seema Puri continues our focus on Music therapy develop- 

ments in India. 

As environmental and social issues become more demanding in today’s 

society, individuals around the world are encountering multiple losses 

and are experiencing the traumas of illness, impoverishment, residential 

displacement and personal hardship. Music therapists have humanitarian 

skills that may play key roles in helping attend to the multi-faceted needs 

of children and adult survivors. Lucanne Magill invites you to collabo- 

rate with her in her portrait on Global Crisis Intervention - A Commission 

of the World Federation of Music Therapy. 

And - last but not least the current Odds and ends, themes and trends by 

Tom Doch 

Jörg Fachner 


4



On the aesthetics of 

popular music 

von Appen, Ralf 

von Appen, R. (2007) On the aesthetics of popular music. Music Therapy 

Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 5-25. 

Pop, aesthetics and the aesthetics of music 

Adorno (1941, 1962) dismissed popular music as aesthetically inferior to 

so-called art music and deplored its extremely questionable effects on 

society; from then on, scientific analysis of pop music has been faced 

with a dilemma in trying to refute these accusations: either it takes pop 

seriously from an aesthetic perspective and as music, but only rarely 

explores really popular music, the tremendous sales of the charts and 

thus their social significance; or the analysis adheres to the perspective of 

cultural and social science and is mainly interested in what is really popu- 

lar and does not say much about the aesthetics of the music. Scientists 

either write analytical books about progressive rock, Dylan, Zappa and 

the Beatles with astute remarks on „A Day In The Life“ but nothing on 

the simple „Twist And Shout“ – or they address questions of identity for- 

mation, social boundaries and so on, whereby the music itself unfortu- 

nately remains rather interchangeable and nothing of substance is said 

about the music and its contextual function. Trends in English-language 

5

von Appen, R. (2007) On the aesthetics of popular music. Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) 

Vol.VIII (1) 5-25. available at http://musictherapyworld.net 

research in particular clearly favour a perspective of reception, sociology 

and cultural studies, whereas the disciplines of analysis and aesthetics are 

seen as work-oriented and ideologically biased. A reason for this general 

trend may be an (understandable) rejection of traditional musicology 

with its self-image as a science of art studies exclusively where neither 

„normal“ everyday music listening nor the social function and basis of 

musicology itself were ever addressed in an adequate way. 

The image of aesthetics is negative, not only in pop music research: it is 

seen as normative, and with its concepts of immanent timeless values, 

disinterested pleasure and contemplation too far removed from the reali- 

ties of customary music listening. Music aesthetics – although a disci- 

pline of systematic musicology – appears to be closer to the conventional 

middle-class, well-to-do, highly cultured musical historian who legiti- 

mizes his art music canon in this way, compared to a more liberal and 

progressive systematic musicology that often addresses musical forms of 

greater social relevance. 

One of the serious consequences of this current direction in pop music 

research is that many pertinent questions related to aesthetics have not 

been explored in connection with pop music. Examples are a theoretical 

discussion of appraisals by fans or professional reviews, or an analysis of 

the underlying guiding tendencies, or a review of historical changes in 

such tendencies and a search for parallel tendencies in other arts. And if it 

is part of the mission of aesthetics to systematically reflect on questions 

concerning the nature and significance of arts for human beings, then it 

will not do to neglect such a wide-spread aesthetical practice as listening 

to popular music. 

Today, basic research into musical preferences and the question which 

sensory, intellectual, emotional and physical attractions music may offer 

Pop, aesthetics and the aesthetics of music 6



– that is which value music has for us – is mainly empirical and follows 

music-psychological and music-sociological perspectives, which may 

without doubt produce significant results. Research of this kind has told 

us, for example, how minorities or majorities can influence public opin- 

ion, how opinion depends on age and stereotype gender roles, and how 

significant personality traits like neuroticism or personal arousal needs 

are (Crozier 1997; Russell 1997; Kloppenburg 2005; v. Georgi et al. 

2006). We know that we represent ourselves socially via music, and that 

as a consequence our opinion depends on whom we mention it to in 

which context. However, such aspects may complement an aesthetic 

approach in a meaningful way but they cannot replace it. They illuminate 

the problem from a completely different perspective; they do not cover 

the concerns of aesthetics, as Peter Faltin pointed out in 1977 (without 

specific reference to popular music): 

„Psychology, and today sociology in particular (…) divided the 

original object of aesthetics up between themselves. What was 

lost in this process was the object of aesthetics itself, the special 

nature of the aesthetic artefact which makes the difference to all 

other social and psychological phenomena. The aesthetic, a comprehensive 

and singular principle of a specific way of processing 

the world that humans have was dissolved in the hoped-for objectivity 

and exactness of those disciplines that actually address the 

conditions and preconditions but not the singularity of the aesthetic“ 

(Faltin 1977, p. 99, quotations in italics by RvA). 

Aesthetics pursue different methods and different objectives that psy- 

chology and sociology cannot or will not address. The intention of aes- 

thetics is not to document the status quo, nor to indicate how individuals 

handle their aesthetic perception at a certain time and place and under 

certain conditions. The objective is rather to understand on a widest-pos- 

sible basis the significance and meaning aesthetic practice may have for 

individuals, independent of the specific historical or local context. Aes- 

thetics are moreover interested in what cannot be reduced to simple 




social and psychological uses like mood management, relaxation or dis- 

tinction. Music has more to offer. 

Unfortunately, however, institutionalised musical aesthetics have not 

looked into popular music so far, so that we cannot hope for stimuli from 

this end. We must look to philosophical aesthetics for useful approaches, 

since this field has changed considerably over the past three decades, so 

that clichés and resentments as described above are no longer applicable. 

Starting with the early 1970s, philosophical aesthetics are no longer lim- 

ited to art of a high cultural level, as was the case in the time of Hegel, 

Nietzsche, Gadamer or Adorno. In the introduction to a recent collection 

of essays, Christoph Menke and Joachim Küpper use the term „aesthetic 

turn“; for them the guiding term of this discipline is no longer art but 

rather „aesthetic experience“ (Küpper & Menke 2003, p. 9; cf. Bubner 

1989). Today, like 250 years ago when it was first established as a sci- 

ence, this discipline is generally concerned with aesthetic experiences of 

the individual wherever they occur: in nature or in a museum, a football 

stadium, a disco, or in bed. 

Aesthetic perception is seen as a specific case among all sensory percep- 

tion. In everyday life perception is a tool for survival, for orientation in 

the world. There it works according to interests, observation and aspects 

and assesses the world in the service of our current needs: we inspect the 

stain on the carpet carefully in order to find a way to remove it; we look 

to the sky to decide whether to put the washing out to dry; we look to the 

right and left in order to avoid being hit by a car; or we scour the masses 

on the beach for those dark-haired guys who promised to bring the beer. 

The aesthetic appearance of the carpet, the sky, the street or the beach in 

all their unreduced, sensory richness is usually not what we are interested 

in - unless we yield to the temptation, forget our original intention for a 

moment and contemplate the colourful scenario of the Bordeaux oozing 




slowly into the white woollen carpet, or pursue the sun rays peeking 

through isolated clouds on their way into the softly rustling treetops, are 

fascinated by the continuously changing play of light and shadow in the 

street, or enjoy the murmuring glittering sea, the indescribably deep blue 

of the sky, the sight of the sunbathers or the hubbub of voices on the 

beach. 

This type of perception has its own value, is not disinterested nor without 

purpose – but it does not seek any external usefulness; the way is the 

goal. Aesthetic perception also and always process-oriented and is an end 

it itself (compare Seel 2003, p. 44ff.). Moreover, it frequently contem- 

plates the world not only from the perspective of that specific aspect that 

is relevant to a pursued purpose – that is, it is not dependent on aspect, 

but far more global in nature and often synaesthetic. Conclusions from 

perceptions in everyday life may be formulated without difficulty – for 

example: dark clouds, so better use the tumbler! Or: Car approaching, so 

better stop; whereas the essence of an aesthetic perception can never be 

fully expressed in words, it cannot be replaced by description, as what is 

involved is the richness of the moment and the simultaneous character of 

different sensory stimuli that even the most detailed description could 

never reflect comprehensively. 

Musical aesthetics should address the question in how far music in gen- 

eral encourages such an aesthetic mode of perception before the aesthetic 

particulars of the respective musical sphere are examined in some detail. 

How to determine our aesthetic interest in music, and also in popular 

music? What is the attraction of music that we willingly ruin our hearing 

or even run the risk of imprisonment for illegal downloads? Why do we 

listen to music? And has this anything to do with art? 




CONTEMPLATION OR 

MERE APPEARANCE 

Three dimensions in the aesthetic experience of 

popular music 

I shall outline three different answers with reference to Martin Seel, in 

particular to his two most important publications on aesthetics, Eine 

Ästhetik der Natur (1996a) and Ästhetik des Erscheinens (2003). Seel 

himself, by the way, does not refer to music much, neither popular nor 

other music – just like most representatives of current philosophical aes- 

thetics. I shall explore the possible contribution of this general theory to 

an understanding of the delight in pop music, and assess the general 

validity of the theory that Seel substantiates with a number of examples 

from the fine arts and literature with a focus on pop music. 

In the above-mentioned publications Seel proposes a phenomenology of 

aesthetic perception. He describes three different types of aesthetic per- 

ception and thereby three functions of the aesthetic: aesthetic contempla- 

tion, aesthetic correspondence, and aesthetic imagination. Or in other 

words and with reference to music: the merely sensual attraction of 

music; the significance of music in everyday life; and what is generally 

referred to as art. 

In contrast to the frequent use of the term in musicology, Seel does not 

understand contemplation as analytical listening, which Adorno (1962) 

lists as an ideal in his listeners’ typology. It does not mean sitting still in a 

concert or with earphones in order to take in the structures and contents 

of music, but rather the opposite: Seel’s term of aesthetic contemplation 

also implies something like losing or immersing oneself in the object of 

perception, but it does not involve deliberate thought nor understanding 

of meaning, which for Seel (1996b, p. 260ff.) is a matter of theoretical 

contemplation and not to be confused with aesthetic contemplation. Aes- 

thetic contemplation does not try to understand, interpret or define any- 

Three dimensions in the aesthetic experience of popular music 10



thing; it is not interested in meaning but in the purely sensual appearance 

of an object or a situation. 

Example: Imagine a student looking at a mathematical formula he will 

never be able to understand, written in chalk on a blackboard. As soon as 

he gives up any intention to understand the meaning and perceives what 

is written no longer as meaningful signs, as soon as he only registers the 

thickness and structure of the chalk marks and admires the elegant lines 

or sees an interesting abstract pattern if he squeezes his eyes almost shut, 

then he is merely interested in appearance. Or imagine yourself in your 

office with a noisy copying machine in the corridor outside. Perhaps you 

forget your work for a moment and listen to the continuous rhythm of the 

machine. This is also contemplative attention to mere appearance – pro- 

vided you do not try to analyse what you hear in order to find out if the 

copier does not work properly again. 

What is an exception in everyday life is far more significant in music: 

melodies, rhythms, sounds, harmonies want to be pursued and heard with 

attention. They have been created to carry the listener away from his nor- 

mal surroundings into the world of a particular piece of music with its 

own temporal rules and laws which he does not and need not understand. 

All this may be perceived not only contemplatively, of course; music has 

much to offer if we want to understand. But normally, music listening 

does not involve the need to understand meaning. Music has a purely 

sensual attraction so that we forget all considerations of purpose for a 

short while in order to just listen and yield to the music and its own laws. 

Those who are not musicologists nor play an instrument have a certain 

advantage here, like a listener to lyrics in languages that are not his own. 

Apart from melodies, rhythms, harmonies and their combinations, lyrics 

may also be heard as pure sound without attention to their meaning: this 

applies to foreign-language texts, of course, but also to meaningless syl- 




lables („A wopbop a loo bop a lop bam boom“), cut-up texts etc. It also 

applies to Rap, where apart from the semantic level the sound level is 

important (for example with numerous internal rhymes, end-rhymes, 

alliterations etc.) so that you may be fascinated by a Rap without under- 

standing a single word. 

Sound is also important in this respect, as it requires even less semantic 

interpretation than lyrics or melodies. This is what Tibor Kneif (1978, p. 

17) refers to when he says: 

„In rock music it is possible to listen in the sense of original aesthetics, 

that is in a sensual way, and to give up aesthetical contemplation 

as an educated, trained attitude. It even has a tendency to 

focus on subtly refined and presented sound, while the abstract, 

form-related layer of the composition is often interchangeable.“ 

For Kneif, aesthetic listening in the original sense is what Seel defines as 

contemplative listening, listening merely for sensual characteristics with- 

out interpretation of meaning. There is not much to understand about the 

roaring of a distorted guitar, a booming bass, hissing and clashing cym- 

bals. We have reached the last step to a level of absolute lack of meaning 

and an excellent opportunity for contemplation when we pass from sound 

to noise and rustling – the perfect setting for contemplation in nature as 

well as in art. In nature we have a splashing stream, rustling trees in a for- 

est, or the roaring surf of the sea. In music we think of the noisy improvi- 

sations of Velvet Underground in White Light/White Heat, of Lou Reed’s 

Metal Machine Music, Neil Young’s collage Arc – and many examples 

from heavy metal and techno with high volume and speed and a large 

percentage of deliberate noise, that aim to overtax the senses and stimu- 

late some loss of physical control, which makes it easier to listen with the 

senses only. There is much to hear in that music but hardly anything to 

comprehend. 




CORRESPONDENCE OR 

ATMOSPHERIC 

APPEARANCE 

Therefore, the attraction of popular music is in part based on the value of 

aesthetic contemplation. Essentially this is the experience of freedom – 

freedom from the obligation to interpret meaning and from the logical 

and temporal constraints of everyday life. The end-in-itself attention for 

sensual abundance, the wealth of the moment enables music listeners to 

free themselves from their conventional ties to external purpose. Sensual 

openness to mere appearance creates distance from all purpose and all 

significance, from all that is functional and pragmatic, that determines 

our acts and thus ourselves. Moments of mere contemplation may illus- 

trate how confined our normal „perception“ and interpretation must be, 

and how many more possibilities exist. Contemplation permits us to 

leave the normal course of events and experience the rare freedom to 

watch from a distance what otherwise appears given and as a matter of 

course. It releases us (although never absolutely) from the demand to 

understand and to maintain control. 

Another reason why we like a landscape, an easy-chair or a piece of pop 

music may be that the object somehow corresponds to our interests in life 

in a positive way. It either suits the moment, and therefore expresses our 

current mood, or it corresponds to our character or self-image and there- 

fore expresses how we see ourselves or would like to be seen. It is not a 

mere usefulness but a concord of personal ideal and the aesthetic atmo- 

sphere of the object in question: if you are freezing you will find a warm- 

ing woollen pullover useful but not necessarily corresponsively beautiful. 

It will only be beautiful to the wearer if the pattern is not embarrassing, if 

the slightly worn material and the frayed sleeves articulate that hers is not 

the world of accurate, ironed, well-ordered, clean and whole things. Or if 

the garment is from Sweden and reminds her of her time there, of her 

penchant for Scandinavian lifestyle and that specific atmosphere of dark 

evenings in front of an open fire – what for her is the good life. Accord- 




ingly she will probably find military uniforms or national costumes in 

Bavarian style corresponsively ugly, and prefer the Cardigans or the 

Kings of Convenience CDs to groups like Rammstein or Kraftwerk. Cor- 

responsively beautiful is what illustrates the idea of a good life vividly – 

more vividly than words may express the idea. 

This may be due to the situation or due to long-term specifics. Examples 

for a situation are hits for the carnival season or typical summer hits, 

Reggae music at a barbecue party, or soft rock for an intimate date. 

From a long-term perspective, we seem to prefer music that reflects what 

we see in ourselves: there is much empirical proof that the preference for 

certain musical styles correlates significantly with certain character traits 

(compare Gembris 2005; v. Georgi et al. 2006; Kloppenburg 2005; 

Schwartz 2002). The chosen music can demonstrate to ourselves and to 

others a non-conformist attitude, for example, toughness or emotionality, 

a basically positive or negative outlook on life and so on. This is why 

music often plays an important role in getting to know someone more 

intimately. Visiting new acquaintances, we all try to find out who the host 

is by furtive glances at his CD collection or his books. Pierre Bourdieu 

(2000) and Gerhard Schulze (2000), however, exaggerate this dimension 

of the aesthetic practice considerably: they often reduce the aesthetic 

attraction to a potential gain in distinction promised by possession of the 

object. The effect of our taste on others certainly plays a role, but the 

world would be a sad place if all decisions on preference were nothing 

but a way to show off, to underline the complicated things we under- 

stand, or the expensive things we can afford. 

The appeal of music may be explained in part by the value of aesthetic 

correspondences. Alertness for such correspondences conveys to us and 

others a vivid picture of ourselves and helps to find our place in society. 




IMAGINATION OR 

ARTISTIC APPEARANCE 

Music creates a space where we feel good and helps in specific situations 

but also in general to perceive and recognize ourselves in this performed 

space. In this way it helps to satisfy basic human needs for safety and 

comfort, orientation and self-recognition. 

What has interested us so far are general aesthetic functions that apply to 

the perception of nature as well as of music. This is not true, however, in 

the case of the third dimension, where music listening is considered an 

art. In contrast to nature, each object of art provokes an effort to under- 

stand – whether this will be successfully concluded or not. The underly- 

ing idea is not a strictly defined concept of art that would help to decide 

which works are masterly, but there are more basic questions. In how far 

is popular music generally qualified for art, and in listening, do we per- 

ceive music not only on a contemplative and corresponsive level, but also 

as art? 

Just as objects of contemplation or of a corresponsive experience become 

such only through pertinent perceptive attitudes, there is no art if we do 

not consider it as such. This sounds trivial, but what it means is that there 

are no material characteristics to identify works of art unequivocally. 

According to Seel’s aesthetics an object becomes a work of art through 

an observing attitude that sees it as a sign; a sign which does not only 

represent something that might be conveyed in a different manner as 

well, but which presents something that cannot be translated comprehen- 

sively into words and that can only be ‚understood’ if we direct our atten- 

tion to the individual constellation of what is presented sensually (Seel 

2003, p. 179f.). 

It is therefore a characteristic of any reception of art that it is equally 

interested in contents and in the ways these contents are presented. To 

simplify this idea, we might use the formula: form and contents = mean- 




ing; but in the case of music, even more so with instrumental music, it is 

hard to decide what is form and what is contents; moreover, the true aim 

is the aesthetic experience a piece of music offers, and not meaning 

defined in words. 

The interplay of presented situation and artistic procedures encourages 

imaginative participation in the outlook of others. Artistic literature, spe- 

cifically lyrics, is concerned not only with content of words but with the 

way something is uttered – formal structure, verse, rhyme, dark or light 

vocals, soft or hard consonants, metaphors etc. all influence the way in 

which we imagine the presented outlook; the same thing happens in 

music, and not only in so-called serious music: 

If Eric Clapton told us in private about the heavy blows that affected his 

personal life the impression on us would remain rather faint. But if we 

attentively follow the multidimensional effect of his song „Tears in 

Heaven“ with its powerful, suggestive metaphors, if we yield to the 

simultaneous richness of the emotional characterization resulting from 

vocal sound, harmonies, rhythm, melody, dynamics, formal structure of 

instruments and sound, then we meet a dense image of the present – pro- 

voked by the musician through these parameters – that conveys in aes- 

thetic perception how it feels to lose a beloved person. A verbal 

description of the content and substance of this song is not enough to 

reflect what we have experienced as attentive listeners in the appearance 

of his performance. Consequently, reviews or interpretations of a piece of 

music can never replace attentive listening; both can only point out what 

is worth looking for. We do not have to experience personally what is 

presented – we experience it playfully as listeners, we can absorb out- 

looks, irrespective of real contexts. In this way, art permits experiences 

that we have believed to be impossible and cannot put into words: 

„Everything In Its Right Place“ by Radiohead for example gives me per- 




sonally a disturbing impression of how emotions of composure and 

excitement, sense and senselessness, order and chaos, security and bewil- 

derment may coincide without levelling out each other. 

In the manner described above, art permits us to follow its performance 

with our imagination and thus not only reflects real and unreal, well- 

known and unknown human relations to the world but opens them to its 

recipients. In general, popular music has not less to offer than other art 

forms, provided it meets the basic demand to make a world view experi- 

enceable through the interplay of its elements. The issues addressed are 

not less existential compared to other art forms: love and human relations 

of all kinds, the restless world of youth, one’s own body, the rage, the 

loneliness, the monotony of everyday life, ageing, death. The intensity of 

the conveyed experience is certainly not smaller, if we think of intensive 

bodily experiences in techno or heavy metal, or frequently described 

goose-pimple effects. It is true that the procedures of popular music are 

not advanced in many cases. Elements of harmony, rhythm, melody and 

form are well known, whereas we may detect innovations above all in the 

sound arrangement, with immediate appeal to the senses, and in the skil- 

ful use of the most up-to-date means of sound production and recording. 

Frequently the recipients are no „enlightened listeners“ who know 

exactly how their favourite songs produce their effects. The musicians 

mainly strive for immediate understanding and do not presume knowl- 

edge in art history. Understanding is often initiated by lyrics, singing and 

music provide atmospheric and emotional dimensions and personal sig- 

nificance for the content. Aesthetics on the part of listeners and producers 

often is an aesthetic of expression that requires an „authentic“, not per- 

formed expression. Individuals who have experienced everything in arts 

and specifically in music and now look only to abstract and self-reflec- 

tive avant-garde motives may not find much in popular music. But the 




pleasure in professional skills, in structural complexity, innovation and 

original ideas cannot be generalized, must always be seen in relation to 

the experience and knowledge of the audience and is of no relevance to 

the question whether a piece of music may be perceived as art or not. 

From the artist’s perspective, music is successful for those to whom it 

conveys experiences felt to be of personal significance - irrespective of 

reviews that may declare contents and performance as banal. If a 

reviewer does not gain any disturbing experience and calls a piece of 

music unremarkable then this is not relevant for a listener with a com- 

pletely different experience and outlook. A review may induce him to 

follow the critic’s recommendation and try and perceive how and what 

the expert hears – but as a rule he will adhere to the opinion of those with 

a similar outlook to his own. 

Even if we feel that the current number one in the charts is banal and 

commonplace: as soon as the combination of content and form provides 

an existential experience to someone we cannot deny that for this individ- 

ual this music is art. 

A generally valid decision (either democratic or based on expert opinion) 

on criteria for a piece of music to be declared art is impossible – although 

those works that receive social recognition as art are highly dependent on 

institutions that define the discourse, like feuilletons, music journalism 

and musicology. But no argument or scientific discussion can convince 

anybody of the art character of a certain piece of music, since personal 

experience is the decisive factor. 




Conclusion 

I summarize what Seel’s differentiation between contemplation, corre- 

spondence and imagination contributes to an understanding of the recep- 

tion and assessment of popular music: 

1. Music is an excellent motive for aesthetic contemplation. The sensual 

appeal of its melodies, rhythms, timbres and sounds is a temptation to 

forget the usual functions of our senses as instruments of purpose-oriented 

recognition and action temporarily and instead to focus our 

attention on the wealth of the moment which is normally dismissed as 

irrelevant. This performance-oriented form of perception as an end in 

itself raises the moment out of the passing time and thus satisfies our 

need for „experiences of presence“ (Gumbrecht 2003, p. 201ff.). 

Music seduces us to forget all intentions for the time being, to yield 

control of the situation to some degree, and to submit our perceptions 

to the play of what appears. This experience of being moved and letting 

things happen conveys a special feeling of freedom. 

2. The atmospheric power of music helps us to shape our surroundings 

so that they correspond to our current and general ideals in life. Music 

shows us and others how we are feeling and feel in general; it offers 

vivid images of personal identity, general character traits and attitudes, 

and it has the power to express, alter and intensify our experience of 

the moment. 

3. The combination and interplay of musical and lyrical parameters stimulates 

the imagination to discover links between them and associate 

them with an underlying concept. But apart from the peculiar fascination 

of decoding music as a symbol, such a perception of music as art 

contributes much to our orientation in the world. Whether we are able 

to name a semantic substance as a unifying principle or not: attention 

to artistically formed appearance permits encounters and involvement 

with strange experiences and outlooks in a sensual richness that is not 

possible outside art. Art may summarize and highlight individual 

experience and thus ensure us of our own outlook, or it can break up 

„conventionally settled modes of understanding, experience and perception“ 

(Wellmer 2002, p. 173) and thus open up new perspectives. 

We have thus won a terminology and methodology to understand our 

own and others’ judgements and to explain the various dimensions of our 

interest in popular music. 

Conclusion 19



Coda 

This discussion parts from the assumption that the value of music is 

determined by its function to fulfil basic needs for presence experience, 

atmospherically charged construction of our environment and imagina- 

tive encounter with the world. If we accept that these needs exist and that 

music has the potential to meet them, then we may deduce an ethical 

obligation to create and/or adhere to cultural structures which permit and 

support the production, conveyance and reception of musical styles that 

fulfil one or all of these functions. Up to this point, the normative charac- 

ter of the understanding of aesthetical practice as developed in this con- 

text should not be controversial. 

Difficulties and suspicions of ideological bias emerge only if one school 

of aesthetics tries to bring the three dimensions of aesthetical practice 

into a hierarchy and then to pass judgement on the immanent value of 

specific musical styles according to this hierarchy. My point that the art 

character of a certain piece of music may only be defined on the basis of 

individual experience may serve to refute any such attempt a priori. Any 

musical style can provide a valuable experience of art too somebody – 

even if I personally feel no attraction because the essence of this music 

does not concern my way of life or because it does not contribute any- 

thing new or original to me. 

The idea cannot be to list and propagate a strictly limited catalogue of 

musical master pieces; instead, we should support a wide range of musi- 

cal styles in production and media presentation that acquaints as many 

people as possible with those three functions of music: a choice of music 

that is not primarily sales-oriented nor conforms to the lowest common 

denominator nor provides an audience only for music that repeats well- 

known elements with a minimum of variations. We must also offer a 

Coda 20



stage to what is new, daring and unknown. Currently we see much con- 

formity in radio channels, in the music industry, print media and on TV; 

what we need is variety and music critics who take music seriously on all 

three aesthetic levels and do not rashly categorize all new musical publi- 

cations according to different life style sections. Music reviews should be 

based on analytical skills as well as a reflected conception of art, and 

should offer interpretations to the audience. 

In addition we need musical education that teaches to youngsters and 

adults alike the significance of all three levels of musical experience; 

musical education that conveys the necessary skills for productive and 

receptive engagement with the artistic appearance but without artistic 

value as the overriding criterion, and with a proper appreciation of con- 

templative and corresponsive practice. 

Summary 

The discipline of musical aesthetics has always been neglected in the his- 

tory of popular music research. Due to (understandable) reservations 

against tendencies in musical aesthetics to underline timeless values, 

alleged unbiased research and presumably immanent qualities, aesthetics 

have become the enemy for pop researchers with their strong orientation 

towards cultural and social science – with the unfortunate result that per- 

tinent questions as to the specific aesthetical attraction of popular music 

have not been addressed so far. 

In order to reduce this „blind spot“ of popular music research at least to 

some extent, this paper tries to apply more recent theories of philosophi- 

cal aesthetics to the field of pop music. Current publications by the Ger- 

man philosopher Martin Seel in particular might be used for an 

understanding of the assessment and customary reception of popular 

Summary 21



music, and also to answer questions about the aesthetic functions of this 

musical style and its attraction and significance to pop music fans. 

References 

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Social Science, 9, pp.17-48. 

Adorno, Th. W. (1962). Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Frankfurt 

a.M.: Suhrkamp. 

Bourdieu, P. (2000). Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftli- 

chen Urteilskraft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. 

Crozier, W. R. (1997). Music and social influence. In: D. J. Hargreaves & 

A. North (eds.). The Social Psychology of Music. Oxford etc.: 

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Faltin, P. (1977). Ästhetik heute. Skizzen zum Gegenstand einer umstrit- 

tenen Wissenschaft. Melos/Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 2, pp. 99- 

103. 

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fer (eds.). Enzyklopädie der Psychologie Bd. D VII 2: Spezielle 

Musikpsychologie. Göttingen etc.: Hogrefe, pp. 279-342. 

v. Georgi, R. et al. (2006). Personality, emotion and the use of music in 

everyday life: Measurement, theory and neurophysiological aspects 

of a missing link. Tönning etc.: Der Andere Verlag. 

References 22



Gumbrecht, H. U. (2003). Epiphanien. In: J. Küpper & Chr. Menke 

(eds.). Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung. Frankfurt a.M.: 

Suhrkamp, pp. 203-222. 

Kloppenburg, J. (2005). Musikpräferenzen. Einstellungen, Vorurteile, 

Einstellungsänderung. In: H. de la Motte-Haber & G. Rötter (eds.). 

Musikpsychologie (= Handbuch der Systematischen Musikwissen- 

schaft Bd.3). Laaber: Laaber, pp. 357-393. 

Kneif, T. (1978). Sachlexikon Rockmusik. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt. 

Küpper, J. & Menke, Chr. (2003). Einleitung. In: Küpper & Menke 

(eds.). Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung. Frankfurt a.M.: 

Suhrkamp, pp. 7-15. 

Bubner, R. (1989). Ästhetische Erfahrung, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. 

Russell, Ph. A. (1997). Musical tastes and society. In: D. J. Hargreaves & 

A. North (eds.). The Social Psychology of Music. Oxford etc.: 

Oxford University Press, pp. 141-158. 

Schulze, G. (2000). Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der 

Gegenwart. Frankfurt a.M., New York: Campus. 

Schwartz, K. (2002). Music Preferences, Personality Style and Develop- 

mental Issues of Adolescents. Journal of Youth Ministry, Spring 

2002. Retrieved November 27, 2002, from http://www.youthspe- 

cialties.com/academic/jym/issues/2002spring/printables/ 

schwartz.html. 

Seel, M. (1996a). Eine Ästhetik der Natur, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. 

References 23



Seel, M. (1996b). Ethisch-ästhetische Studien. Frankfurt a.M.: 

Suhrkamp. 

Seel, M. (2003). Ästhetik des Erscheinens. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 

2003(Aesthetics of Appearing, Stanford 2004). 

Wellmer, A. (2002). Das musikalische Kunstwerk. In: A. Kern & R. Son- 

deregger (eds.). Falsche Gegensätze. Zeitgenössische Positionen 

zur philosophischen Ästhetik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 133- 

175. 

Author information: 

Ralf von Appen, born 1975, is a musicologist at the University of Gies- 

sen, Germany. He has just finished his Ph.D. thesis concerning the aes- 

thetics of popular music. It is published in German as: Ralf von Appen 

Author information: 24



(2007). Der Wert der Musik. (= texte zur populären musik Bd. 4). 

Bielefeld: Transcript. 

Recent publication (with A. Doehring, 2006): Nevermind The Beatles, 

here's Exile 61 and Nico: 'The top 100 records of all time' – a canon of 

pop and rock albums from a sociological and an aesthetic perspective. 

Popular Music, 25(1), pp. 21-39. For further information see www.uni- 

giessen.de/~g51093. 

TRANSLATER: Christina Wagner, University Witten/Herdecke 

THIS ARTICLE CAN BE 

CITED AS: 

von Appen, R. (2007) On the aesthetics of popular music. Music Therapy 

Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 5-25. available at http://musicther- 

apyworld.net 

Author information: 25



Dining rituals and music 

Aldridge, David 

Aldridge, D. (2007) Dining rituals and music. Music Therapy Today 

(Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 26-38. 

Eating is a fundamental human activity that is both necessary for survival 

and an important social activity. Our eating habits and how they are per- 

formed as rituals, with whom we choose to eat, are fundamental to foster- 

ing an understanding of community and a central activity of building 

community. Our eating practices are essential in defining family, class, 

personal and ethnic identity. It is not only the way that we eat together 

that is important but how we provide food for others that is a vital part of 

establishing a caring community. 

Ritual 

The term “ritual” has both a broad and narrow usage. In any society, cer- 

tain highly elaborated performances are explicitly recognized as rituals 

and these are often associated with formalized religious practice, but they 

may have a purely secular character including many rites of passage such 

as weddings, births, and funerals. There are other kinds of behaviors that 

26

Aldridge, D. (2007) Dining rituals and music. Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 

26-38. available at http://musictherapyworld.net 

are generally not thought of as rituals but which psychologists, anthro- 

pologists, and sociologists identify as ritual forms and these form the 

social patterns that govern ordinary human interaction like dining 

together. 

A notable characteristic of many rituals is that they involve the expres- 

sion of conflicting impulses or transitional states. Human behavior tends 

to become formalized when there is a presence of significant ambiguities, 

ambivalence, transitions between states, or contradictions. The predict- 

able format of rituals promote social coordination and that is why the 

capacity for ritualization of action is a central capacity for creating social 

institutions. Dining rituals have an important function for both encourag- 

ing the necessary function of eating but also in giving form to the days 

events. 

In addition, rituals provide a framework for experiencing events as mean- 

ingful. When something becomes meaningful for us, it is perceived as a 

kind of repetition or near-repetition of something already known. Isolated 

experiences are woven together into a fabric of meaning. That is why eat- 

ing together is a central function in communities, it offers a sense of self 

and belonging within a caring structure. 

Rituals provide the basis for a reframing of experience as generalized 

templates for social performance and provide an interactive form for 

interpreting the ongoing events of their life. That is, rituals help us to 

know what to do, when and with whom in particular situations. We need 

to know when events begin and when they come to an end. Traditionally 

music episodes have been used to define important moments in rituals 

and to accompany certain events. Fanfares, for example signify important 

opening events and songs signify particular moments of solidarity. Simi- 

larly, rituals play an important role in memory that is both personal and 

Ritual 27



social in providing shema for action as conventional mental models 

derived from a shared environment. These shared schemas are produced 

and transmitted within a community and are the very basis of community. 

Dining rituals often provide a framework for mutual interaction that 

include appetite, desire, and pleasure and can offer a structure within the 

daily that regulates social life. Finding a place at the table is an expres- 

sion that relates to eating together but has a wider metaphor of social 

belonging and acceptance. 

Food practices, like eating rituals, deconstruct the idea of an autonomous, 

singular self and return us to the idea of a relational, bodily self existing 

in communitas. Serving and eating food encompass the connotation of 

community, as self in relationship with others. Moving to an institutional 

setting, and living in that setting, involves a constant negotiation of the 

self in everyday life. The transition from the family home setting, or even 

eating alone in the once family home, to an organisational setting is in 

itself demanding. Taking part in mealtimes is an essential form of main- 

taining a social self that demands a considerable social performance. 

We eat to survive but we also eat to express appreciation, for a sense of 

belonging, and as part of a family custom. We bake cakes for visitors or 

birthday treats and those cakes are eaten without regard for nutritional 

value and often when we have no hunger in terms of survival needs. Yet, 

the baking, the delivery, and the eating of the cake with friends and fam- 

ily, are important 

What to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, how often and how are deter- 

mined by culture. However, personal preferences, habits, family customs, 

and social setting largely determine what a person consumes. There were 

even rules for how to arrange food on a table and seating arrangements, 

Ritual 28



about when to eat, how to eat and when to leave the table. When people 

eat together, they are supposed to pay attention to the other diners and to 

react in particular ways. These rules of eating etiquette are part of the 

social fabric of dining and are governed by an engagement with an invis- 

ible factor which is time. 

Mealtimes 

Eating habits in the elderly are the result of the interaction of numerous 

interpersonal and intrapersonal forces (Busse, 1978) and eating rituals 

affirm relationships, connect values and beliefs, and may have differen- 

tial meaning for men and women (Fiese & Tomcho, 2001). The ambiance 

of the dining room is an important issue for improving nutritional status 

and stabilizing health of nursing home residents. (Mathey, Vanneste, de 

Graaf, de Groot, & van Staveren, 2001). If we want to promote nutrition 

with elderly people, then we must remember that when people eat 

together they eat more than when dining alone. The social facilitation of 

meals is an extremely potent influence on intake (de Castro & Brewer, 

1992) 

The elderly often have a reduction in intake that can produce malnutrition 

and impaired health. Mealtimes are central to the nutritional care of resi- 

dents in long-term care facilities and each mealtime is a unique process 

embedded within a long-term care facility's environment.To make the 

best of such mealtimes mealtime experiences for residents require indi- 

vidualized care that reflects interdisciplinary, multi-level interventions. 

(Gibbs-Ward & Keller, 2005) 

Although there does not appear to be a decline with age in the ability of 

non physiological factors to influence the nutrient intakes of the elderly, 

but deficient intakes in the elderly might be corrected or ameliorated by 

Mealtimes 29



manipulation of non physiological factors, such as the number of other 

people present at meals, the palatability of meals, and the time of day and 

location of meals. (de Castro, 2002). Food consumption and the dining 

experience are an integral part of the resident's life in a nursing facility. It 

is important that resident preferences are recognised and the dining expe- 

rience is as pleasant and home-like as possible (DePorter, 2005). 

Habits and rituals 

Habits and rituals are the social structures of everyday life in an institu- 

tion. Personal development, age, and support from one's surroundings 

determine the degree to which a person may continue or alter acquired 

patterns of habit and ritual (Andersen, 1992). 

There are several studies that suggest the improvement of the dining 

facility and they all focus on meeting individual needs, promoting inde- 

pendence and avoiding excess disability that improve quality of life 

(Bower, 1996; Bonnel, 1993; Crogan, Evans, Severtsen, & Shultz, 2004; 

Herman, 2005). Providing residents with a homelike, pleasant dining 

atmosphere should promote socialization, enhance awareness, and 

increase appetites, thereby improving the residents' quality of life (Hotal- 

ing, 1990). 

Music and arousal 

In the ‘typical’ decline of Alzheimer’s disease some skills seem to be 

spared longer in the degeneration process, e.g. the prosodic aspects of 

language, abilities related to procedural memory, and skills related to 

music. Even if the ability to sing progressively is lost in advanced stages 

of dementia, singing is described in the literature to have beneficial 

Habits and rituals 30



effects on agitation, social behaviour, mood, relaxation, and attention. 

Singing is an activity where demands are adapted to levels of functioning 

and have a positive influence on the feeling of identity and on periods of 

lucidity. The use of preludes, jingles, and greeting songs function as con- 

textual or symbolic cues making it easier for the person with dementia to 

recognise the setting and show attention to what is going on. In this way 

songs are indicators of the structure of the setting, and with the use of 

sedative or stimulative features (e.g. rhythm, tempo, harmony, texture, 

volume, intensity, and mood) songs can be used for their regulative 

effects. 

Dialogue and communication is dependent on levels of arousal. A person 

in a hyper-aroused state shows little environmental attention and is 

unable to communicate effectively with others. At a certain point physi- 

cal exhaustion leads the person to hypo-arousal until the person again 

shoots to levels of very high arousal. With no arousal, or only short peri- 

ods of a ‘balanced’ arousal level where the person has most possibilities 

for perceiving environmental stimuli, it is difficult to fulfil psychosocial 

needs. If we cannot communicate with the environment, which includes 

other people, then we do not enter into dialogue. Achieving a balanced 

arousal level is possible by using moderate stimuli and contextual or 

symbolic cues. Moderate stimuli balance between the novel and the 

familiar, fast and slow, loud and quiet, and trivial and intense.(Ridder, H- 

M & Aldridge, 2005). Subject-preferred music has the potential to 

increase older adults' energetic arousal and reduce tension. (Hirokawa, 

2004). 

A vital part of using music ininstituitional settings is discerning the per- 

sonal preferences of the residents and soothing music selections have 

beneficial effects on relaxation in community-residing elderly people. 

(Lai, 2004) 

Music and arousal 31



In any residential setting it is necessary to be aware of the environmental 

conditions of lighting and heating (McDaniel, Hunt, Hackes, & Pope, 

2001). What we often forget is the acoustic environment in which we 

live. Not only do we orientate ourselves in time and space through our 

visual sense, we less orientate ourselves aurally. In situations where a 

radio or television are continually being played, then we fail to provide a 

sound structure within which people can orientate themselves acousti- 

cally. This disorientation can also provoke agitation (McGilton, Rivera, 

& Dawson, 2003). 

Music and agitation 

Music is a powerful tool for maintaining and restoring health; it can be 

used to induce relaxation, alter moods, and create distraction (Aldridge, 

2000; Aldridge & Aldridge, 1992) and has been used successfully to 

reduce agitation in dining settings (Hicks-Moore, 2005). While Kramer 

suggests that nurses have a responsibility to understand and use music in 

their practice (Kramer, 2001), perhaps we could extend that to say that 

nurses need to understand the sound environment in which they work. 

Relaxing music buffers the general noise level typically found in dining 

rooms of nursing homes, exerts a calming effect, and reduces agitated 

behaviors among residents with severe cognitive impairment. Significant 

reductions are observed on the cumulative incidence of total agitated 

behaviors (63.4%); as well as the cumulative incidence of physically 

nonaggressive behaviors (56.3%) and verbally agitated behaviors 

(74.5%) (Goddaer & Abraham, 1994). 

In a study of people in a nursing home ward, dinner music was played 

during three periods of 2 weeks. The residents were particularly affected 

by soothing music from the 1920’s and 1930’s. Residents spent more 

Music and agitation 32



time at dinner when music was played. and eat more calmly (Ragneskog, 

Kihlgren, Karlsson, & Norberg, 1996). A calm atmosphere and a slow 

pace are important strategies to control agitation. One way to achieve this 

is through fixed routines. Music calms individual agitated patients and 

provides a flexible structure in time in which people can orientate them- 

selves. Uncontrolled sounds can cause agitation in residents and stress in 

the nursing staff (Ragneskog & Kihlgren, 1997) (Ragneskog, Brane, 

Karlsson, & Kihlgren, 1996). 

The word “music” covers a broad range of possibilities and it is neces- 

sary to fit the music to the listener. Individualised music interventions are 

preferable to generalised interventions (Gerdner, 2000). When music was 

administered daily and as needed to eight elderly individuals with 

dementia who resided in a long-term care facility there was a significant 

reduction in agitation during the presentation of music and an overall 

reduction in agitation was found on day shift during weeks 1 to 8 and on 

evening shift during weeks 5 to 8. Music also promoted a meaningful 

interaction between the resident and others. (Gerdner, 2005) 

CONCLUSION 

Dining rituals are important social forms in residential settings. The regu- 

lation and maintenance of these forms are based upon structuring events 

in time. Music is a traditional means of structuring ritual forms in varying 

cultures and music can be used in residential settings to offer a structural 

form for the dining experience. To do this, we need to be aware of vari- 

ous musical interventions that we can make within such a dining experi- 

ence. That is why many societies have a form of opening prayer as a 

ritualised form of introduction followed by welcoming songs. We know 

from the research above that music can also be used during the dining 

CONCLUSION 33



experience to reduce agitation and promote a soothing atmosphere. To 

complete any ritual, we also need a musical intervention that signals that 

that ritual is coming to an end and we can do this through music and 

song. 

To achieve coherence we have to engage in a form that exists in time. A 

piece of music achieves coherence in its maintenance of form. Exactly so 

with our personal form in social life. If we lose time, then we lose our 

sense of coherence, and we lose our cognitive abilities too. Just as chil- 

dren gain cognitive abilities with their increasing ability to hold events 

together coherently in time, then we see the reverse process in the perfor- 

mance of the demented – demented being literally without mental form. 

This may occur as a performance difficulty through the loss of connec- 

tions. My hypothesis is that music offers an alternative form for structur- 

ing time that has failed in the working memory of dementia patients. Just 

as developmentally delayed children achieve a working memory that 

enhances their cognitive ability, then the reverse process occurs in 

dementia sufferers. 

On the accompanying compact disc the reader will find a set of musical 

resources suitable for dining situations. First we start with a prayer fol- 

lowed by a choice of songs giving thanks for food about to be eaten. The- 

ses tracks can be chosen as wished. There then follows an interlude of 

music suitable to accompanying dining. At the end, there is a selection of 

songs to conclude the mealtime and mark the end of the dining sequence. 

THE CD A compact disc of musical resources suitable for dining situations has 

been compiled by David Aldridge and Lutz Neugebauer. First we start 

with a prayer followed by a choice of songs giving thanks for food about 

to be eaten. Theses tracks can be chosen as wished. There then follows an 

interlude of music suitable to accompanying dining. At the end, there is a 

CONCLUSION 34



selection of songs to conclude the mealtime and mark the end of the din- 

ing sequence. Further material for working with music and the elderly are 

available from Professor David Aldridge and Professor Lutz Neugebauer 

that can be ordered through www.mytopten.de as a set of compact disc 

recordings. We are also open to cooperation regarding projects regarding 

musical resources. 

Further material for working with music and the elderly are available 

from Professor David Aldridge and Professor Lutz Neugebauer at 

info@nordoff-robbins.org as a set of compact disc recordings. 

References 

Aldridge, D. (2000). Music therapy in dementia care: More new Voices. 

London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. 

Aldridge, D. & Aldridge, G. (1992). Two epistemologies: music therapy 

and medicine in the treatment of dementia. The Arts in Psychother- 

apy, 19, 243-255. 

Andersen, H. J. (1992). Habits and rituals. Dan Med Bull, 39(3), 273- 

274. 

Bonnel, W. B. (1993). The nursing home group dining room: managing 

the work of eating. J Nutr Elder, 13(1), 1-10. 

Bower, M. E. (1996). The resident dining room--a CQI project. J Nutr 

Elder, 15(2), 47-54. 

Busse, E. W. (1978). How mind, body, and environment influence nutri- 

tion in the elderly. Postgrad Med, 63(3), 118-22, 125. 

References 35



Crogan, N. L., Evans, B., Severtsen, B., & Shultz, J. A. (2004). Improv- 

ing nursing home food service: uncovering the meaning of food 

through residents' stories. J Gerontol Nurs, 30(2), 29-36. 

de Castro, J. M. (2002). Age-related changes in the social, psychological, 

and temporal influences on food intake in free-living, healthy, adult 

humans. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci, 57(6), M368-77. 

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humans is a power function of the number of people present. Phys- 

iol Behav, 51(1), 121-125. 

DePorter, C. H. (2005). Regulating food service in North Carolina's long- 

term care facilities. N C Med J, 66(4), 300-303. 

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tices: the relation between religious holiday rituals and marital sat- 

isfaction. J Fam Psychol, 15(4), 597-609. 

Gerdner, L. A. (2000). Effects of individualized versus classical "relax- 

ation" music on the frequency of agitation in elderly persons with 

Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. Int Psychogeriatr, 12(1), 

49-65. 

Gerdner, L. A. (2005). Use of individualized music by trained staff and 

family: translating research into practice. J Gerontol Nurs, 31(6), 

22-30; quiz 55-6. 

Gibbs-Ward, A. J. & Keller, H. H. (2005). Mealtimes as active processes 

in long-term care facilities. Can J Diet Pract Res, 66(1), 5-11. 

References 36



Goddaer, J. & Abraham, I. L. (1994). Effects of relaxing music on agita- 

tion during meals among nursing home residents with severe cogni- 

tive impairment. Arch Psychiatr Nurs, 8(3), 150-158. 

Herman, C. M. (2005). A physician's perspective on the dining experi- 

ence in long-term care. N C Med J, 66(4), 304-306. 

Hicks-Moore, S. L. (2005). Relaxing music at mealtime in nursing 

homes: effects on agitated patients with dementia. J Gerontol Nurs, 

31(12), 26-32. 

Hirokawa, E. (2004). Effects of music listening and relaxation instruc- 

tions on arousal changes and the working memory task in older 

adults. J Music Ther, 41(2), 107-127. 

Hotaling, D. L. (1990). Adapting the mealtime environment: setting the 

stage for eating. Dysphagia, 5(2), 77-83. 

Kramer, M. K. (2001). A trio to treasure: the elderly, the nurse, and 

music. Geriatr Nurs, 22(4), 191-5; quiz 196-7. 

Lai, H. L. (2004). Music preference and relaxation in Taiwanese elderly 

people. Geriatr Nurs, 25(5), 286-291. 

Mathey, M. F., Vanneste, V. G., de Graaf, C., de Groot, L. C., & van Sta- 

veren, W. A. (2001). Health effect of improved meal ambiance in a 

Dutch nursing home: a 1-year intervention study. Prev Med, 32(5), 

416-423. 

McDaniel, J. H., Hunt, A., Hackes, B., & Pope, J. F. (2001). Impact of 

dining room environment on nutritional intake of Alzheimer's resi- 

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302. 

References 37




CITED AS: 

McGilton, K. S., Rivera, T. M., & Dawson, P. (2003). Can we help per- 

sons with dementia find their way in a new environment? Aging 

Ment Health, 7(5), 363-371. 

Ragneskog, H. & Kihlgren, M. (1997). Music and other strategies to 

improve the care of agitated patients with dementia. Interviews 

with experienced staff. Scand J Caring Sci, 11(3), 176-182. 

Ragneskog, H., Brane, G., Karlsson, I., & Kihlgren, M. (1996). Influence 

of dinner music on food intake and symptoms common in demen- 

tia. Scand J Caring Sci, 10(1), 11-17. 

Ragneskog, H., Kihlgren, M., Karlsson, I., & Norberg, A. (1996). Dinner 

music for demented patients: analysis of video-recorded observa- 

tions. Clin Nurs Res, 5(3), 262-77; discussion 278-82. 

Ridder, H-M & Aldridge, D. (2005). Individual music therapy with per- 

sons with frontotemporal dementia: Singing dialogue. Nordic Jour- 

nal of Music Therapy, 14(2), 91-106. 

For additional information see our website www.musictherapyworld.de 

Author information 

David Aldridge is Chair of Qualitative Research in Medicine, University 

Witten Herdecke, Germany and Visiting Professor for the Creative Arts 

Therapies, Bradford Dementia Group, University of Bradford, UK. 

Aldridge, D. (2007) Dining rituals and music. Music Therapy Today 

(Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 26-38. available at http://musictherapy- 

world.net 

Author information 38



Co-Therapists in Nordoff/ 

Robbins Music Therapy 

Fachner, Jörg 

Fachner, J. (2007) Co-Therapists in Nordoff/Robbins Music Therapy. 

Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 39-55. 

Introduction 

This paper 1 is am empirical contribution to an academic analysis of co- 

therapy in the Nordoff/Robbins approach of music therapy. Apart from 

Nowikas (1993) who explored team relations in Nordoff/Robbins music 

therapy, and some comments by Nordoff and Robbins themselves (Nord- 

off & Robbins 1986, p.107-112), nobody has studied the role of co-thera- 

pists in music therapy according to the Nordoff/Robbins approach. The 

focus has mainly been on the therapist in his (musical) activities and not 

on the co-therapist. In the preamble to their book „Creative Music Ther- 

apy“ Nordoff & Robbins point out that this specific therapy form 

emerged in team work, with Nordoff as the musician and Robbins as the 

special education teacher, but they also say that „each therapist working 

alone is confronted with the same world of musical reality and emotions“ 

1. This article has been published as a book chapter in 1997. It is the same content as 

Fachner 1997, translated by Christina Wagner, only two references published in the 

international music therapy references have been added and discussed. 

39

Fachner, J. (2007) Co-Therapists in Nordoff/Robbins Music Therapy. Music Therapy Today (Online 

1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 39-55. available at http://musictherapyworld.net 

(Nordoff & Robbins, 1986). Artistic and musical issues have been 

addressed frequently in explications on therapy, but the aspect of co-ther- 

apy was never explored in detail. 

Methodology 

The choice of method followed a qualitative research concept. A qualita- 

tive analysis of action seeks first and foremost to understand the world in 

a hermeneutical sense from the acting person’s perspective, and in a sec- 

ond step to develop a theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and abstraction 

based on practical experience. The objective of this paper is to under- 

stand the co-therapist and his actions in Nordoff/Robbins music therapy 

from the perspective of the music therapist, and to develop a profile for 

co-therapists. Statements by co-therapists will provide valuable input. 

The method chosen was open interviews. The interviews addressed 

selected issues but were also open to spontaneously emerging additional 

issues; the aim was to permit interview partners to present the issues 

under discussion according to personal views and wishes. In addition, the 

author interviewed Clive Robbins himself, and a number of Nordoff/ 

Robbins music therapists from educational institutions in Witten/ 

Herdecke, London and New York. The answers were structured accord- 

ing to similarities and then categorized. As many of the original state- 

ments as possible were used in the text (see Fachner, 1994). An analysis 

of these interviews led to the summary of characteristics of a co-therapist 

and his activities as presented below. 

Co-therapists – scope of activities 

In group sessions co-therapists take the lead; in Nordoff/Robbins music 

therapy they are mainly active in work with children. They are very help- 

Methodology 40



ful in music therapy with mentally and physically handicapped children. 

Co-therapists adapt the therapy room to a child’s specific needs and pro- 

portions and ensures safety in the therapy context (protection from sharp 

edges and possibly harmful objects etc.) He adjusts the setting with a 

view to the patient’s needs, to specific therapeutic intentions and experi- 

ence, and creates visual attractions for a child. Instruments are positioned 

as required. A co-therapist has to listen attentively to the music, he should 

anticipate practical procedures and movement directions and the „flow“ 

of therapy and be able to hold up a cymbal, for example, at the right place 

and exactly the right moment, to adjust the height of the drum and so on. 

The way he handles the instruments should be playful and convey this 

impression to the child. 

Co-therapists as mediators between therapist, child 

and music 

Co-therapists are part of the same musical process as therapist and child. 

Therefore they are part of the same temporal continuum together with 

therapist and patient or any other person in the same performance (in a 

temporal and local sense). 

A co-therapist furthers the relation between therapist and child and 

assists the process of relation between music and child. He helps the 

child to do what he or she wants to do and helps „to get into the music“. 

He is not only a helper; he generally supports a child’s „positive actions“ 

and efforts to expand the limits of his or her expressivity. He backs chil- 

dren in their intentions to act and must also be able to perceive the thera- 

pist’s intentions. If the therapist clearly „demands“ a structure with his 

music, then the co-therapist can help the child to achieve this structure. 

Co-therapists amplify and channel, they intensify the relation between 

Co-therapists as mediators between therapist, child and music 41



PROCESS/ACTION- 

RELATED ATTITUDE 

AND PROBLEM AREAS 

music, therapist and child, and they guide and direct the energy flow 

between therapist and child. They convey a basic emotional experience. 

On the basic attitude of the co-therapist 

Attitude in this context means a categorical perspective that determines 

the general evaluation of and approach to something, the knowledge of 

something and also the pertinent forms of action and behaviour. 

The basic attitude of the co-therapist is characterised by openness in per- 

ception and awareness and an unbiased view of the child. The co-thera- 

pist should not be guided excessively by other opinions (those of 

physicians, psychologists, educationalists, non-music therapists etc.) of 

the ability or lack of ability in a child. Music is a very specific form of 

stimulation and not to be compared with other stimulating forms and con- 

texts. Similar to the therapist, he does not start a session with a pre- 

defined plan but develops and realizes his intention in the situational 

relation with the client. 

During sessions, the co-therapist has to be alert, must be present at the 

right moment to provide physical help, for example. As a kind of „cata- 

lyst of art“ he is the projection of therapist and child. The co-therapist is 

the servant of patient and music in a facilitating capacity, with the inten- 

tion of being helpful, humane, and supportive. His hope is that the patient 

achieves some personal benefit; he does not determine nor structure the 

objective but facilitates what may be achieved. He develops his personal 

style from experience. He may follow his human instincts and the free 

flow of his (also musical) ideas. 

A co-therapist should always try to maintain a general overview of the 

therapy situation. His perspective of the session differs from that of the 

On the basic attitude of the co-therapist 42



therapist. He is in eye and ear contact with the child and with events in 

the therapy room and he is alert to the music. The main thing is ear con- 

tact. 

Again and again he can offer drum sticks and collect those the child has 

dropped or thrown away in order to keep the child’s musical activities 

within the musical flow. If the child plays on drums, the co-therapist 

should convey the impression that drumming is just as important and 

helpful as medicine. 

The co-therapist knows that in the first session he must wait for, and be 

attentive to, the child. Sometimes he must do nothing but observe. If the 

child is active, the co-therapist may withdraw from the process. But his 

presence may also be disturbing, and then he may not know what to do. 

Often he must get used to being an active part of therapy; active also 

means physical contact with the child. But this might bring too much 

„power“ to the therapy. He must ask himself continuously whether what 

he does facilitates something or prevents something, and why he wants 

the child to behave in a specific manner. The co-therapist may help a 

child to find a musical structure; but there is also the risk to play too 

much himself, instead of letting the child play, and thus to prevent devel- 

opments. 

Relational qualities in therapy 

In a creative art therapy approach like Nordoff/Robbins music therapy, 

the art of music is the therapeutic agent, so that music is in the centre of 

the human relationships involved. The co-therapist is part of a relational 

structure that comprises four elements. 

Relational qualities in therapy 43



Relation to the child 

The co-therapist meets the child before they get to the therapy room; tak- 

ing the child from the waiting area to the therapy room, he gets an 

impression of the child’s mood and behaviour „out of therapy“ towards 

objects or persons. He learns from his encounters and experience with 

this child and thus finds access. He is able to build a more sensitive and 

ultimately different relation to the child and perceive things which might 

elude the therapist at the piano. He may for example react to smallest 

physical movements and interact with the child correspondingly. 

The co-therapist guides a child’ concentrated attention if the child is 

active but unstructured in his or her perception. He often has the function 

of an instrumental teacher and supports the child’s efforts to perceive 

forms of musical performance. He may initiate songs and thus acquaint 

the child, through music, with experience of form and ordered patterns in 

action-related communication; songs can help to perceive such concepts 

of form. 

NON-VERBAL SIGNALS A co-therapist observes and signals something to either child or therapist, 

RELATIONS AND 

CHANGES IN THE TEAM 

OF THERAPISTS 

just like musicians observe, and nod to, each other. He conveys and com- 

municates through symbolic body movements; this is part of the rela- 

tional basis in therapy. His movements form a symbolic imitation 

background for possible intentions of the child to act (for example show- 

ing how to drum with movements in the air). 

The co-therapist develops his relation to the therapist as his work with the 

child proceeds and he should build up an inner connection with the thera- 

pist over long periods of teamwork. This was the case with Nordoff and 

Robbins in their intensive and perfectly coordinated therapy approach. 

From the perspective of professional biography, it is good for a co-thera- 

Relation to the child 44



pist to cooperate with a therapist of a comparable level of experience/ 

development/training, if they want to grow together as a true team. In this 

way, he has a better chance to develop an understanding of the therapist’s 

work and to become better and better, in the course of a prolonged team- 

forming process. An overly personal and intensive relation to a therapist 

may of course impair the co-therapist’s perception of what the therapist 

does, but in general we may say that therapy profits from good relations 

between co-therapist and therapist. 

In sessions, the co-therapist becomes almost an additional arm of the 

therapist; he gives to the patient what the therapist is unable to give. He 

might find it difficult not to disturb the therapist with his own activities. 

Therapists must clarify in situational contexts when they expect action 

from co-therapists and when not. 

Co-therapists as well as therapists need supervision. Supervision can rec- 

tify and remove differences of opinion or basic and recurrent misunder- 

standings about therapeutic activities of both therapists. The term co- 

therapist alone may be misunderstood and give the impression that the 

co-therapist is the inferior therapist. The co-therapist may feel that the 

music the therapist is playing might not be quite appropriate. He must not 

necessarily stick to his role as co-therapist throughout a session but 

should be free to use the piano as well if he believes this to be necessary. 

Teamwork between therapists appears to have developed differently in 

different cultures. According to an American colleague, co-therapists in 

the United States are more active compared to those in Witten/Herdecke. 

In New York, therapists and co-therapists frequently change roles in 

order to achieve a wider range of perspectives. 




VERBAL AND 

NONVERBAL SIGNALS 

BETWEEN THERAPIST 

AND CO-THERAPIST 

A co-therapist’s perspective of the music therapy session differs from 

that of the music therapist. He provides impulses for the therapist, is 

closer to the child and in a position to perceive even smallest responses. 

His gestures and facial expressions show the therapist which musical 

activities are the child’s or his own. He should communicate with the 

therapist mainly by gestures and eye contact and verbally only if abso- 

lutely necessary, e.g. if they are not in harmony. 

RELATION TO MUSIC Relation to music is determined by the mental flow of music, its intersub- 

jectivity, inner laws and specific initiatory qualities. A co-therapist’s 

music-related activities make him part of the intersubjectivity of music 

that emerges from the subjective soul of the improvising interpreter but is 

based on the intersubjective reality of music as a form of sound and time. 

The co-therapist experiences, and is part of, the same mental flow that 

follows the inner laws of musical language; he is part of a very real exist- 

ence in the moment that is without material reality but has musical form. 

He is one element in a process, in a mental world of music. This enables 

him to be associated mentally with others in the same room through the 

emerging music. 

A co-therapist should be able to anticipate promises and development 

possibilities in the music that emerge during sessions. He must always be 

alert to surprising developments and observant in order to react to musi- 

cal laws in an appropriate way. 

A co-therapist intervenes where the need arises in the music. Being inti- 

mately connected to music and „music as therapy“ he feels when some- 

one is going to develop musical activities; this cannot be grasped by mere 

observation. But he cannot achieve anything if the music does not „carry 




along“ or „stimulate“; he can only act in relation to music. A co-therapist 

perceives the therapy mainly on the basis of what he hears. 

Co-therapist as music therapist 

The co-therapist must be able to follow the musical development in his 

mind and to think like a music therapist; he must understand the musical 

processes taking place and possess the required knowledge and experi- 

ence of musical form. He must place himself at the disposal of the musi- 

cal development and separate his personal expectations from those 

emerging in the music. In all this he must develop an intuitive under- 

standing of the child and perceive the moment when a child really wants 

to make music. 

FORMS OF ACTING The co-therapist is the „servant“ of the patient and the music in a facili- 

PATTERNS AND 

INDICATORS OF 

ACTIVITY 

tating capacity. He acts musically but the form of his musical expression 

is different; he has no instrument. In a way he plays „on and through“ the 

patient, or allows the patient to make music with himself as the medium. 

He „plays the child“ like an instrument but in accordance with the child’s 

intentions. As a musician he has long intervals and enters the musical 

development only in moments where something must be facilitated. 

A co-therapist must be able to enter the child’s mood and on the basis of 

the child’s perception assess pathological limitations; this ability to put 

himself in the position of another individual allows him to assess the 

other person’s willingness or unwillingness to make music. The steps are 

first to enter the child’s mood, then to create an inner distance to what he 

has perceived, and then to use the results as a basis for his support/ guid- 

ance. He observes the child’s movements, motor intentions and direc- 

tions, and thus detects intended activities; he knows „what the child 

wants“. He can feel this in the child’s limbs as an impulse involving the 

Co-therapist as music therapist 47



PROBLEM AREAS OF 

THE CO-THERAPIST’S 

PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES 

entire body (muscles etc.), and in his touch senses the child’s action- 

related presence or absence (among other aspects as a coenaesthetic 

result perceived by the co-therapist). In guiding the child’s hand he feels 

not only muscle movements but also senses and anticipates direction and 

intention of the movement. Typically for interactions, he will not analyse 

the frequencies and sound production of the physical speech sound in the 

speech activity but he will listen to what is intended, to the meaning. Two 

persons starting simultaneously after having assessed special conditions, 

with the same motor intention and different tempi in gait, may be 

expected to arrive at the same time. Translated to music therapy this 

means that a jointly played rhythmical phrase will follow the laws of 

music and resolve into a simultaneous ending and a final beat. 

He finds confirmation of his therapeutic activities in the applied findings 

about the signitive character of body language and nonverbal communi- 

cation, and above all from previous events in sessions, the development 

of the child and his or her growing musical abilities. He therefore knows 

about the physical abilities or lack of abilities of the child and is able to 

assess the activities in evidence in relation to the child’s impairment. 

Hugs and touches by the child are signals of the child’s need for protec- 

tion, comfort, affection and love. 

Nevertheless, the co-therapist should provide as little assistance and 

physical contact as possible and necessary, since the child is expected to 

produce the musical activity; the intention to act and individual experi- 

ence with musical activity should be realized in the purest possible form. 

A co-therapist guides the child’s musical intentions. He senses the 

impulse to act, helps to realize this impulse and directs the playful 

impulse to the drum, for example. A supportive touch and guidance of 

Co-therapist as music therapist 48



body parts relevant to action, the child’s arm, for example, promote and 

facilitate music-related activity. The physical activity of the co-therapist 

may become problematic for himself, because he must sense that single 

and decisive musical impulse and must find a mode in which physical 

contact remains agreeable. He must be able to sense whether his touch is 

unwelcome or whether the impulse to act is related to music. The co-ther- 

apist will basically perform interventions that are intended to release, and 

not to restrict. So he has to find a balance between the impulse to act that 

he offers himself and the child’s impulse he has to guide; this happens in 

a continuous „giving“ and „withdrawing“ on his part. The success of 

„hand over hand“ may lead him to an accepting perspective of his physi- 

cal intervention; the measure for this is always the individual case, the 

child. He may also apply knowledge from physiotherapy and transfer it 

to music, and sometimes even – contrary to physiotherapy interventions 

– achieve a similar success through music-related cues. He may for 

example hold up the cymbals rhythmically and thus lead spontaneous 

reflexes to a musical metre and simultaneously train a stretching move- 

ment when he varies the distance to the drum. 

Co-therapy by non-musicians or non-music therapists 

Clive Robbins was trained as a special education teacher, and he did not 

play the piano often in therapy sessions. A question recurring in this con- 

text is whether the co-therapist in Nordoff/Robbins music therapy must 

necessarily be a trained musician or music therapist. 

An analysis of the answers to this question revealed that there is no need 

for the co-therapist to be a musician or music therapist; but then the bal- 

ance in the teamwork changes. He should be acquainted with musical 

processes. Every individual with the ability to observe and follow the 

Co-therapy by non-musicians or non-music therapists 49



music and its characteristics closely has the potential to become a co- 

therapist. Not being trained as a musician, he may cooperate even better, 

and his cooperation may be just as intuitive as co-therapy provided by a 

music therapist. 

The co-therapist works in an independent therapy realm; his work 

demands specific skills that not everybody possesses. 

Co-therapists in Nordoff/Robbins music therapy integrate within their 

person the potential of physiotherapy, drama therapy (in miming activi- 

ties) and speech therapy. In institutions with only one music therapist, 

physiotherapists frequently assume the role of the co-therapist, ergothera- 

pists, other therapists or medical staff employed in a hospital. In direct 

patient contact, physiotherapists may offer the right support at the right 

moment due to their knowledge of physical impairments, provided they 

are sufficiently open for the music. 

Co-therapists in other therapy settings 

There is almost no music therapy literature addressing and exploring the 

specific situation and perspectives of co-therapists. Davis &Richards 

(1998) discuss their experience and the specific dynamics of working as 

co-therapists in group settings. Positive mentioned was that stress is 

reduced by working with another professional peer, attention of two 

minds “bringing different sensitivities and perspectives” (p. 56), transfer- 

ence and counter-transference issues would have a double structure, i.e. 

maternal and paternal family roles enter the relationship processes and 

might serve as positive new model. Fearn & O‘Connor (2003) demon- 

strate that working as a team over a length of 10 years resulted in signifi- 

cant improvements to the therapy given to children with special needs 

aged between 2 and 18 and also to the support offered to their parents. 

Co-therapists in other therapy settings 50



The various topics covered include the development of a co-therapy 

assessment procedure, group psychodynamic music therapy for children 

with special needs, sessions for children and their parents, the signifi- 

cance of counter-transference and the importance of supervision. Up to 

now there is no other research published on co-therapy in Nordoff-Rob- 

bins settings. 

A few psychotherapy papers discuss co-therapy (Geyer, 1981; Neuert, 

1989; Roller & Nelson, 1993; Lonergan, 1995; Stone, 1995), and then 

mainly the role of co-therapy in psychotherapy groups. Schwabe in his 

short comments on co-therapy points out the basic financial problem 

involved in using co-therapists: „It is no luxury, as some still believe, to 

have two therapists in psychotherapy groups but a necessity and 

improves therapy effects“ (Schwabe 1983, 143). But in practice it is very 

rare indeed that an institution has more than two music therapists, even 

more so that they work according to the same therapy approach and can 

or might cooperate as a team. In most cases the co-therapists are employ- 

ees of the same institution but working in other professional fields (com- 

pare Mutthesius 1990, 48/49; Davids & Richard 1998; Fearn & 

O‘Connor 2003), e.g. as physiotherapists. 

Summary 

In group music therapy, the co-therapist is in charge in most cases. He 

works mainly with physically and mentally handicapped children. He 

arranges a therapy setting in accordance with the therapy situation and 

clients’ personal needs; he anticipates requirements as regards instru- 

ments and equipment and also possible hazards. He mediates between 

therapist, child and music and is an integral part of the entire process. He 

is a kind of „catalyst of art“, he acts as the prolonged arm of therapist and 

Summary 51



child. Ideally his basic attitude is to be helpful, facilitating and open to 

the situation, alert and personal at the same time. 

His relation to the child is defined by physical nearness, which gives him 

a different perception and perspective compared with the therapist. In the 

therapy process he has to find an adequate procedural balance between 

active intervention, and passive observation and letting things develop. 

He may also give nonverbal clues to the child. 

A good team of therapists ideally starts on an identical level of develop- 

ment and experience and gradually develops an almost „blind“ under- 

standing of the partner’s intentions. This inner connection grown out of 

joint experience and intimate knowledge of each other turns a co-thera- 

pist into a therapist’s „third arm“. But this situation is not without conflict 

potential. Exchange of information between therapist and co-therapist is 

mostly nonverbal. The relation to music (therapy) is based on the inter- 

subjectively perceivable flow of music and its development. The inner 

laws of music and its temporal and acoustic structures may be anticipated 

in its expectations and almost inevitable developmental steps. In this way 

music initiates an impulse to act in order to realise inherent objectives. A 

co-therapist does not necessarily have to be a musician, but he must be 

able to follow the musical development and must know about musical 

processes. He should possess the required knowledge and experience of 

musical forms, should be at the service of music and be able to separate 

personal expectations from actual musical events in therapy. 

As a music therapist he has a specific form of expression, he plays „on 

and through“ the child when he senses the child’s motor impulses and 

intentions, or he allows the child to play with himself as the medium. It is 

the art of co-therapy to intervene and withdraw continuously and thus to 

develop a feeling for the individual child, to sense if and what a child 

Summary 52



really wants to play and which contact might be disagreeable to the child. 

This may require a fine balance between a therapist’s offered patterns of 

action and guidance by the child. 

References 

Fachner, J. (1994). Die kunsttherapeutisch orientierte Nordoff/ Robbins 

Musiktherapie in Witten/Herdecke. Unveröffentlichte Diplomarbeit 

am Fachbereich Erziehungswissenschaften, Abtg.: Sondererzie- 

hung und Rehabilitation der Universität Dortmund. 

Fachner, J. (1997). Der Co-Therapeut in der Nordoff-Robbins Musikther- 

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CITED AS: 

Fachner, J. (2007) Co-Therapists in Nordoff/Robbins Music Therapy. 

Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 39-55. available at 

http://musictherapyworld.net 

References 55



Creating order out of chaos: Music 

therapy with adolescent boys 

diagnosed with a Behaviour Disorder 

and/or Emotional Disorder 

McIntyre, Joanne 

McIntyre, J. (2007) Creating order out of chaos: Music therapy with 

adolescent boys diagnosed with a Behaviour Disorder and/or Emotional 

Disorder. Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 56-79. 

Abstract 

This paper is based on a presentation given at the 3 rd International Nordoff-Robbins 

Symposium of Music Therapy held in Germany in June, 

56

McIntyre, J. (2007) Creating order out of chaos: Music therapy with adolescent boys diagnosed with a Behaviour Disorder and/or Emotional 

Disorder. Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 56-79. available at http://musictherapyworld.net 

2006. It gives an overview of the evolution of a project funded by the 

Australian Federal Government awarded to Nordoff-Robbins Music 

Therapy Australia (NRMTA) in conjunction with the Golden Stave 

Music Therapy Centre (GSMTC), Kingswood Australia. A discussion on 

the students’ responses to music therapy and their progress through resistiveness 

is presented as well as the approach and methods used to facilitate 

their self expression, social and emotional growth and academic 

progress. 

Introduction 

The increasing numbers of adolescents with an emotional disturbance 

and or behaviour disorder in Australian secondary schools indicates that 

there is a need to develop more specific programmes and approaches that 

work with affecting self regulation, communication and social/behav- 

ioural dysfunction within this population group. Forecasts by the NSW 

Department of Education and Training (DET) indicate that the increase in 

students being diagnosed with a Behaviour Disorder/Emotional Disorder 

(BD/ED) will continue into the foreseeable future. An Australian study 

carried out by Sugai and Evans (1997) indicated that 2% of students were 

significantly behind their peers in self management and social interac- 

tions. The figures obtained from the NSW DET for 1995 to 2005 indicate 

a significant increase in NSW students leaving mainstream high schools 

to attend BD/ED units or schools. In 1996, 110 students with a BD were 

placed in units. By 2005, it had increased to 339. Similarly, the placement 

of students with ED’s increased from 365 places in 1996, to 741 in 2005. 

These figures show only a small percentage of adolescents that are 

affected by a BD/ED as Brennan (2006) estimates that there is up to 

180,000 (or 1 in 5) adolescents in NSW state high schools who have a 

moderate to severe mental health problem which fits into the BD/ED 

diagnosis. 

Introduction 57



Behaviour management techniques, such as positive reinforcement, 

token economy systems, contracting and time-out are commonly used in 

programmes for this population group with success. In addition many 

supportive therapies involving music and the visual arts are beginning to 

be utilised to try and add to the treatment and success of such interven- 

tions. 

In June 2004, Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Australia (NRMTA) in 

conjunction with the Golden Stave Music Therapy Centre (GSMTC), 

Kingswood, Australia, received funding from the Australian Federal 

Government’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) to 

provide music therapy for adolescents at risk of under achieving socially 

and/or academically in New South Wales State High Schools. The guide- 

lines for the project included a minimum of twenty students being identi- 

fied and drawn from a minimum of three schools. 

The project began in July, 2004 when two Registered Music Therapists 

were employed one day a week. The initial setup of the project included 

identifying three High Schools to participate in the project, and building 

relationships with the Principals of these schools. The allocated time for 

this process was one school term i.e. ten weeks. 

The three schools chosen to participate in the project included one with a 

support unit for adolescents with an intellectual disability, one with a 

support unit for students diagnosed with a behaviour disorder/emotional 

disorder, and an academic selective high school. This paper focuses on 

the students who were referred to the project and attended the behaviour/ 

emotional disorder unit. 

Introduction 58



Literature Review: Is Music Therapy Effective with 

BD/ED Adolescents? 

Research has indicated that the number of students at risk of educational 

failure is increasing (Brown 1986). If the needs of these particular stu- 

dents are acknowledged and met adequately, the potential to succeed can 

be realised, resulting in adults with greater self esteem and better work 

force qualifications. Focussing on students that are experiencing unsuc- 

cessful outcomes within the education system may help reduce the mag- 

nitude of many social problems in the future (Brown, 1986). 

Music therapy with BD/ED students has been conducted by music thera- 

pists in a number of different countries and settings. Music therapy stud- 

ies indicate that using music as an intervention can be of great value for 

those who have difficulties with self-control, thinking, responding appro- 

priately and social interaction (Stratton, 1989; Friedlander, 1994). Music 

therapists and those involved in music education, have a deep belief that 

all students can be helped to learn to enjoy and to become involved in 

music (Walker, 1996). Because music is so accessible to adolescents and 

their lives are “centred on music” (Hendricks et al., 1999 p. 39) it is 

strongly indicated that conducting music therapy with these students 

would have highly successful outcomes. A study by Montello and Coons 

(1998) supports this theory. They found that students who were experi- 

encing severe obstacles in forming relationships with others and their 

environment began to show evidence of improved self worth and self 

esteem as a result of making music. 

Hanschumaker (1980) summarizes succinctly what music can do for 

young children and which could be generalized to all school-aged chil- 

dren. He says that music has the ability to “facilitate language acquisi- 

tion, reading readiness, and general intellectual development…to 

enhance creativity; and to promote social development, personality 

Literature Review: Is Music Therapy Effective with BD/ED Adolescents? 59



adjustment, and self-worth.” If the use of music with children can 

achieve these things then future work with adolescents with a BD/ED 

may have similar outcomes. 

In 1975, Juliet Alvin conducted a study with adolescent boys diagnosed 

with a behaviour disorder. She found that when preparing for a concert, 

the boys who were usually aggressive showed interest and enthusiasm 

towards music. She found that music was able to initiate conversation 

and help create a state of mind in which the boys were ready to reveal 

their problems. This study and its results were later confirmed by Gold- 

smith (1981), Trad (1987) and Rickson (2003). 

Other studies have identified music therapy as being able to address 

many issues with adolescents who have a BD/ED. Music therapy can 

help reduce levels of anxiety (Cooke, 1969; Alvin, 1975; Ricci, 1993; 

Hendricks et al., 1999). Wasserman (1972) saw music therapy as a tool to 

improve emotional responsiveness and recently Layman et al. (2002) 

indicated that it helps with problems of impulsivity and self-regulation. 

Music therapy can also help with assisting internal organisation and co- 

ordination of the mind and body (Gaston, 1968; Montello, 1996). Self- 

concept can also be developed and attained by this population group 

when music therapy is used as an intervention (Friedlander, 1994). 

Sandra Wilson (1991) sees music therapy as an “adjunct” to education 

where children with “learning disabilities resulting from physical, psy- 

chological or emotional problems” can develop socially, emotionally, 

cognitively and physically. Wilson also emphasises that the discipline of 

music, particularly in ensemble playing, helps students work effectively 

within the school environment without resorting to inappropriate or vio- 

lent behaviour. 




Music therapy in an educational setting is acknowledged by Wilson 

(1991) as contributing significantly to an individual’s learning capacity 

and just as importantly in their motivation to learn. The resistive nature 

of the students receiving music therapy through the DEST project and 

their lack of academic achievement and social skills make the partici- 

pants excellent candidates to trace any change and progress observed in 

their behaviour. One of the basic premises of Nordoff-Robbins (1980) is 

that present in the process of creative music therapy is client participation 

and resistiveness. 

In the Nordoff-Robbins approach to music therapy, improvisation is a 

key component utilised by the therapists with clients. It provides a 

medium by which clients or students can dissipate frustration and anger 

and begin to process some of the emotional issues that affect them so 

strongly. Tervo (2005) states that “free improvisation with the music ther- 

apist enables the identification of the sources of hidden internal experi- 

ences and conflicts”. Their own music becomes the focus of the sessions 

and helps to provide a safe environment to express themselves. Bruscia 

(1987) explains that such activity is a “musical-psychological structure” 

and that “the child’s tension is directed at a new “transitional object”, and 

conflicts can be more easily resolved. 

Music therapy has been highly effective with clients who typically lack 

crucial self-esteem and self- concept (Henderson, 1983; Johnson, 1981; 

Kivland, 1986). Music therapy works with the relationship between 

learning and music by reflecting an awareness of self perception, allow- 

ing subsequent growth and facilitating intrinsic change at many levels 

(Wilson, 1991). Disclosure and awareness of self has been precipitated 

through the music as the relationship with music, therapist and self has 

developed. Songwriting, according to Goldstein (1990) provides a suc- 




cessful, pleasant experience and that a great deal of additional informa- 

tion about the participant can be gained through such techniques. 

When working with these students, trust and respect are key factors in 

developing and sustaining a musical and therapeutic relationship. Ritchie 

(1993) believes that “clients with challenging behaviour are intriguing 

and amazing. They demonstrate an incredible enthusiasm to survive, a 

strength of character and a relentless need to be taken seriously” (p. 173). 

Music therapy highlights the innate potential of such clients, and pro- 

vides a channel for the enormous amount of creative energy possessed by 

these individuals. Within the acceptance found through the musical thera- 

peutic environment adolescents can be supported in their own endeav- 

ours to develop self esteem and a more positive knowledge of self. 

Students diagnosed with a BD/ED participating in group music therapy 

sessions for a study by Haines (1989), demonstrated more immediate dif- 

ferences in group dynamics than those participating in verbal therapy 

alone. Subjects were more motivated, more willing to work together, 

playing, discussing, composing, and reflecting, and made more choices 

regarding their interactions. Group improvisation according to Haines 

(1989) with instruments and/or voice can also enhance group cohesion 

and cooperation. 

Music therapy appears to be especially effective with adolescents 

because they already relate extensively to the music of their peer culture 

and it is a familiar medium to them. It can readily provide a common 

starting place for discussion and self-expression. The non-verbal aspect 

of music makes it an excellent resource for reaching people and facilitat- 

ing self-expression through an alternate means of communication. Music 

is often the only tool that enhances communication with this population 

(Brooks, 1989). 




Haines (1989) also discovered that adolescents with a BD/ED were 

highly motivated to participate in music therapy groups. He found that 

appropriate social behaviours emerged and were learned as the group 

tried to work together toward a common goal of musical experience and 

performance. Music stimulated socialization and verbalization, and often 

provided a common starting place for discussion and self-disclosure, as 

well as increasing group awareness and cooperation. 

What is a Behaviour Disorder (BD)? 

Children are considered to have a behaviour disorder (BD) when their 

behaviour falls outside the norm such as: being inattentive, withdrawn, 

aggressive, nonconforming, disorganized, immature, or unable to get 

along with others (Bos, Schuam, & Vaughn, 2000). The most common 

disruptive behaviour disorders include attention deficit hyperactivity dis- 

order (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and conduct disor- 

der (CD). These three behaviour disorders share some common 

symptoms, and are often comorbid, (exist together) so diagnosis can 

often be difficult and time consuming (Busamante, 2000). These disor- 

ders in children and adolescents may be caused by: 

• biological factors such as genetics, chemical imbalances in the body, 

and damage to the central nervous system, such as a head injury. 

• environmental factors including exposure to violence, extreme 

stress, and the loss or death of an important person. 

BD’s are grouped into two broad categories: externalizing and internaliz- 

ing. Externalizing behaviours are characterized by acting out, aggression, 

interfering, attention seeking, and conduct problems. Externalizing 

behaviours appear to be more intolerable to teachers than other undesir- 

able behaviours because they directly challenge the teachers’ authority, 

interfere with the delivery of instruction, disrupt classroom routines and 

What is a Behaviour Disorder (BD)? 63



affect classmates adversely (McConaughy & Skiba, 1993; Safran & Saf- 

ran, 1987). 

Internalizing behaviours are viewed as more self-directed, such as being 

anxious, worried, and depressed (Bos, Schumn & Vaughn, 1997). In gen- 

eral, internalizing or over controlled behaviours are more inner-directed 

and covert in nature (Bocian, Gresham, Lambros, MacMillan, & Ward, 

1998). When teachers and or parents detect any of these behaviours, the 

student should then be evaluated and assessed for a possible BD place- 

ment. Further, the educational intervention should match the established 

needs of the students with a BD (Zabel, 1998). 

What is an Emotional Disorder (ED)? 

The term "emotional disorder" is not a fully accurate medical term, but is 

commonly used in ordinary context to refer to those psychological disor- 

ders that appear to affect the emotions. Some of these disorders include: 

bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, post traumatic stress syndrome, depres- 

sion, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, anxiety disorders 

and obsessive compulsive disorder. 

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, America) defines 

emotional disorder as: a condition exhibiting an inability to learn, to 

build or maintain relationships, showing inappropriate behaviour and a 

general pervasive mood of unhappiness, and a tendency to develop fears 

and physical symptoms associated with school. These characteristics are 

observed over a long period of time and to such a marked degree that 

they adversely affects a child's educational performance (Code of Federal 

Regulations, Title 34, Section 300.7(c) (4) (i)). 

What is an Emotional Disorder (ED)? 64



THE SCHOOL AND THE 

PARTICIPANTS 

The Project 

The BD/ED unit is situated in Western Sydney, Australia. There are up to 

twenty one students aged from twelve to sixteen at any one time enrolled 

in the unit. They are referred to the unit because they exhibit behaviour 

that is inappropriate in the mainstream classroom and are frequently 

unable to fit in to the routines established by classroom teachers. They 

are often under achievers socially and academically, absconders and are 

at times extremely resistive to authority. To be accepted into the unit the 

students must undergo an assessment by a psychologist who then diag- 

noses them with either a BD or an ED or a combination of the two disor- 

ders. 

AIMS OF THE PROJECT The aim of the project was to facilitate change through the use of music 

in the students’ behaviour with particular emphasis on their social inter- 

actions and their classroom behaviour and academic progress. 

Specific outcomes for the participants were devised after they had com- 

pleted an initial nine weeks of thirty minute sessions, once per week. The 

outcomes for the student participants included 

• To develop new skills, both musical and non-musical 

• To instigate appropriate interaction with others in the group 

• To experience group identity, cohesion and purpose 

• To communicate and express themselves through the use of musical 

instruments, voice, lyric writing and lyric analysis 

• To expand their capacity to respond, relate and communicate 

• To develop greater self esteem and self awareness 

• To enjoy musical experience and expression 

• To use music to help facilitate self regulation of impulsive or inappropriate 

behaviour within session time and school time 

INITIAL SETUP Seven adolescent males from the BD/ED unit began attending music 

therapy sessions in October, 2004 (term 4 of the school year). The stu- 

The Project 65



dents were divided into two groups by the therapists and they began 

receiving one thirty minute session each week. 

During the early development of the project the first challenge was to 

find appropriate repertoire and to decide on what approach to take so the 

aims of the project could be implemented. The first nine weeks were sim- 

ilar to a pilot project where the therapists and students got to know each 

other and “sussed” each other out. Various music making was introduced 

to the group including group improvisation via a drum circle, individual 

improvisation via the piano, structured music making e.g. arrangements 

and an introduction to computer composition via music composition soft- 

ware such as Super Duper Music Looper and Kinetic. By the end of the 

term it became clear which material could be used successfully and what 

should not be used. The conclusion reached by the therapists with this 

group of adolescent boys was that if the therapists wanted to progress the 

boys resistiveness, then the music they were familiar with and the instru- 

ments that were suitable to play these types of genre, should be used in 

session time. Anxiety levels decreased in session times for both the boys 

and the therapists when familiar instruments and repertoire was intro- 

duced. 

IMPLEMENTATION By February 2005 it became clearer the direction the students were tak- 

ing the therapists. The boys clearly showed they were more willing and 

able to engage in the music making when familiar and contemporary 

music was utilized in the sessions. This could be attributed to their diag- 

noses in that change and new experiences caused some of the boys to 

have high levels of anxiety. The traditional repertoire of Nordoff-Robbins 

although initially helpful in providing containment and a way of assess- 

ing each student, was replaced by repertoire the students knew or at least 

were fairly familiar with. Out went “Fun For Four Drums” and “Drum 

Talk” and in came “We Will Rock You” by Queen, “Pump It” by Black 

The Project 66



Eyed Peas, “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, “Smells Like a Teen 

Spirit” by Nirvana and “Dammit” by Blink 182. As the students began 

choosing some of the repertoire, the lyrics of the songs and the style of 

music indicated these boys were indeed beginning to reveal more about 

themselves through the music they chose. Fowler (1994) supports this by 

stating that “musical preferences reveal something about you, it helps 

define who you are.” With the introduction of a rock repertoire for group 

music making, came a discovery of musical ability and talent in some 

students that was not evident before. A new found respect for each other 

began to develop as the students made constructive suggestions to each 

other about their music and actively listened to the music being played. 

One of the aims of the project was to help adolescents build social skills. 

The rock repertoire was a catalyst in this process as it became a way the 

boys were able to express themselves and to connect with others in the 

group. By using these songs and instruments such as electric guitars, 

drum kit, electronic hand drum pads, bass guitar and microphone, the stu- 

dents began to experiment with sounds and freely improvise within the 

sessions. Out of this came individual and ensemble playing that tran- 

scended all expectations the therapists had about what the students could 

play. Tervo (2005) explains this phenomenon succinctly by saying 

“The secure and supportive atmosphere provided by music therapy 

allows the adolescent, even those with a limited musical ability, 

to freely experiment with instruments and sounds. Thus, the 

adolescent takes part in creating music with other adolescents. It 

is this which allows them to work spontaneously together.” 

ASSESSMENT The changes and progress of each student were tracked and assessed in a 

number of ways. 

• Weekly written session notes 

• Weekly DVD recordings 

The Project 67



• Evaluation Scales (Nordoff and Robbins 1980) applied twice per 

school term (approximately every five weeks) 

• Teacher Evaluation Forms completed by teachers twice per year highlighting 

areas of change socially, academically and behaviourally. 

DISCUSSION Since beginning music therapy with the BD/ED boys there have been sig- 

nificant changes in their behaviour, attitude, academic achievements and 

social interactions. These changes were revealed in the NR Scales of 

Assessment, the teacher evaluations and the observations made by the 

therapists. Some of these changes included: 

• an observable difference in the quality of listening to the therapists 

and listening to each other during music making 

• an increase in the length of time they were able to maintain focus and 

concentration during an improvisation and during a session. 

• resistive behaviour decreased significantly during the sessions 

• a change in school room behaviour developed after music therapy sessions 

• positive attitudes towards their own education began to emerge 

• a stronger sense of “self” became evident 

• improvement in classroom relationships 

• motivation to improve their academic results occurred 

• self expression and a development of creativity in music occurred 

• group participation and respect for each other significantly developed 

• the boys began to experience the fun aspects of playing and making 

music as an individual and as a group 

The data from the Nordoff-Robbins Evaluation Scales indicated change 

in restiveness and a change in the ability to relate to the therapist and oth- 

ers in the group. Each individual that participated in the project showed 

positive and progressive changes in these areas. Initially the students 

involved lacked focus in their musical expression and lacked the ability 

to co-operate as a group. They were only interested in being heard as an 

individual and to be heard at the loudest volume possible. They often 

wandered around the room and could not keep concentration on one 

instrument for much longer than ten to twenty seconds. After six months 

The Project 68



of sessions, the boys were able to play in structured music making as well 

as individually improvise with the therapists and improvise as part of the 

group. They began to contribute their own style and music in more 

appropriate ways and were able to begin to express in lyrics their con- 

cerns, passions and frustrations. 

IMPROVISATION The supportive nature of the sessions and the use of improvisation 

enabled two students in particular to experiment with their own musical- 

ity. “David” and “Harry” had been attending music therapy sessions for 

six months. Both were very musical and “David” had had lessons on var- 

ious instruments in the past. The musical relationship that had developed 

between the students and the therapist was exhibited when the therapist 

began playing a chord progression which “held” the students and gave 

them musical boundaries to play inside of. The chord structure played by 

the therapist on the piano enabled them to experiment on their own 

instruments and to participate in a musical conversation. The give and 

take in the improvisation was indicative of the progress these boys had 

made in relating to each other and to an adult in a contained environment. 

From that point on, the boys were observed to progress in their school 

work, i.e. they began Distance Education (mainstream subjects) instead 

of Lifeskills Units, their attitude towards authority figures improved and 

their overall mood became more stable. 

MUSICAL RIFFS As the project evolved, so did the method of working with the students. 

After approximately twelve months, the therapists introduced riffs to the 

sessions. The first riff used was “Smoke on the Water”. This became the 

signature riff for the group. It motivated them to play, experiment with 

sound enhancers on the guitar, technique, and to talk about their ideas. 

For the boys diagnosed with ADHD, the riff gave them a small musical 

building block to work with. The more they increased their focus and 

The Project 69



concentration, the more times they could play the riff and therefore create 

a whole piece. This approach using riffs facilitated positive responses 

from the group as they began to increase in self confidence and self 

esteem. Each student could play the riff on guitar, bass or piano and as a 

result none of them failed even if they couldn’t play the entire song. 

This discovery of using musical building blocks became the way the boys 

were able to master staying on task in music therapy. They progressed 

from “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple to “Sunshine of My Love” 

by Cream, “Pump It” by Black Eyed Peas, “Peter Gun” by The Blues 

Brothers and “Mission Impossible” by Henri Mancini. 

THE CONCERT The DEST project concluded on the 21 st September, 2006 with a concert. 

All schools that participated in the project participated in the event. Par- 

ents, teachers, principals of schools, local politicians, federal politicians, 

business people and local dignitaries attended. This showcased the abili- 

ties of adolescents with a BD/ED and gave them an opportunity to be rec- 

ognised as musicians. 

Preparation for this concert was not just musical preparation. Most of the 

students attending were often excluded from school concerts because of 

their behaviour and as a result had rarely seen a performance let alone 

performed in one. The anxiety levels were extremely high around per- 

forming in front of all the guests so quite a few weeks were spent in the 

sessions discussing what they could expect to see and feel. 

On the day the students from the BD/ED unit played five songs and one 

of the boys sang his own song. This was the culmination of two and a 

half years work by the boys and therapists. It showed their determination 

to manage their behaviours in a potentially volatile and confronting envi- 

ronment. 

The Project 70



Conclusions 

This project was the beginning of a learning curve for the students as well 

as the therapists that could not have been anticipated when the project 

began. The students involved in the project made significant gains in the 

areas of social interaction, self regulation, attitude towards school and 

work, music skills, academic progress and self awareness. 

Two of the students graduated from Yr 10 and are now attending a main- 

stream senior high school. Two students currently attending the unit have 

begun integrating into a local high school and plan to progress to senior 

high. All these students were stuck in the BD/ED unit because of their 

extreme behaviours and poor academic performance. Music Therapy in 

combination with classroom interventions has helped facilitate a progres- 

sion in resistiveness for the boys participating in the project. Weekly 

music therapy sessions in which the boys actively participated in impro- 

visation, both group and individual, and where they played riffs which 

developed into songs, were indicated as the two main areas which aided 

in this progression. 

More research is needed into the effects of music therapy on adolescents 

and children with BD/ED’s so the best clinical interventions can be con- 

ducted with adolescents and families who are experiencing these chal- 

lenging behaviours. Creating an evidence base in music therapy for this 

client group will assist music therapy clinicians in establishing best prac- 

tices in mental health care. New measuring tools need to be developed 

and tested to ensure their efficacy. The literature needs to be enriched to 

include quantitative studies measuring the effects of music therapy on 

young people who have been diagnosed with a BD/ED as music therapy 

offers potential to attend to the cognitive deficits that few other interven- 

tions can address. 

Conclusions 71



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FIGURE 1. Joanne McIntyre 

BIOGRAPHY Joanne McIntyre graduated as a music therapist in 2002. Since graduat- 

ing as a Nordoff- Robbins music therapist she has worked in the areas of 

physical and intellectual disabilities, sensory impairment, early interven- 

tion and behaviour and emotional disorders. Joanne has lectured at the 

University of Western Sydney for the Master of Creative Music Therapy 

course as well as the Master of Expressive Therapies course. She pre- 

sented 2 papers at the World Congress of Music Therapy in Brisbane in 

2004 and 3 papers at 3 rd International Nordoff-Robbins Symposium of 

Music Therapy held in Germany in June, 2006. She has also presented 

papers at other allied health conferences including the Australian 

National Early Intervention Conference and the National Occupational 

and Physiotherapy Conference in 2006. Joanne is currently working for 

Sydney West Area Health Services with children, adolescents and fami- 

lies who have a mental health disorder and is also conducting a funded 

research project at the same site. She also works for Nordoff-Robbins 





CITED AS: 

Music Therapy Australia on a government funded project for high school 

students diagnosed with a behaviour and/or emotional disorder. In 2006, 

Joanne completed her Master of Creative Music Therapy. 

McIntyre, J. (2007) Creating order out of chaos: Music therapy with ado- 

lescent boys diagnosed with a Behaviour Disorder and/or Emotional 

Disorder. Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 56-79. 

available at http://musictherapyworld.net 




Conference report: National conference 

on music therapy as an alternative 

medicine - Feb 12-13, 2007, at India 

International Centre, New Delhi 

Puri, Seema 

Puri, S. (2007) National conference on music therapy as an alternative 

medicine - Feb 12-13, 2007, at India International Centre, New Delhi. 

Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 80-83. 

The National Conference on Music Therapy as an Alternative Medicine 

is perhaps the first of its kind in India to focus attention on the growing 

realization that music is undoubtedly an efficient non invasive alternative 

80

Puri, S. (2007) National conference on music therapy as an alternative medicine - Feb 12-13, 2007, at India International Centre, New 

Delhi. Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 80-83. available at http://musictherapyworld.net 

medicine not only for the elderly population but for various stages of life. 

Dr Kalyan Bacgchi, President of the Society for Gerontological 

Research, reiterated that recent research has proved that music has bene- 

ficial effects in various conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson 

disease, and mental retardation. Music therapy is being used in a few cen- 

tres in India primarily in memory clinics. 

While music therapy is being widely used in the West, it is not so com- 

mon in India. With our rich tradition of Carnatic and Hindustani Music 

for centuries, the potential beneficial effects of such music need to be 

explored and well documented. The National Conference focused atten- 

tion on the need to use music as a therapy and to develop a cadre of 

music therapists. Over 40 experts from various parts of the country par- 

ticipated in the conference. 

The conference was inaugurated by Mr MM Sabharwal, President Emer- 

itus, HelpAge India, who reiterated the role of music in mental health. Mr 

TV Sairam, in his keynote address enumerated the beneficial effects of 

Raga therapy on mentally retarded children. Dr Muthuswamy Varadara- 

jan emphasized the association of music and mood. Presentations were 

made on various forms of music therapy - drumming, tiger dance therapy 

and the role of satsangs. Recommendations of the conference empha- 

sized the need for music therapy in improving the quality of life, the 

training of music therapists and planning and implementation of a suit- 

able training programme for the same. The need to generate mass aware- 

ness regarding the importance of music therapy was also strongly 

expressed. 

81




FIGURE 1. Dr. Seema Puri 

Dr Seema Puri is Reader and Head, Department of Food and Nutrition, 

Institute of Home Economics, Delhi University. She holds a doctorate 

degree in nutrition from Delhi University and has specialized training in 

Social Gerontology and Global Health Concerns. She has over 25 years 

of teaching and research experience. Her research interests include global 

health, quality of life issues, gerontological research, bone health and 

adolescent health. She has presented papers at numerous national and 

international conferences on issues related to nutrition and the elderly. 

Publications to her credit include a jointly authored textbook on 

“Nutrition and Dietetics”, an edited work on “Diet and Ageing”, booklets 

on “Diets for the Elderly” and research articles in journals. 

Dr Seema Puri is an advisor to several NGOs working in the area of 

public health, nutrition and ageing. She is a member of several academic 

bodies including the Nutrition Society of India, Indian Dietetic 

Association, Home Science Association of India, International 

Federation of Ageing, Association of Gerontology India, Indian Academy 





CITED AS: 

of Geriatrics, Nutrition Syndicate, Society for Gerontological Research, 

Indian Society for Bone Mineral Research, Celiac Society of Delhi and 

Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India. 

Puri, S. (2007) National conference on music therapy as an alternative 

medicine - Feb 12-13, 2007, at India International Centre, New Delhi. 

Music Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 80-83. available at 

http://musictherapyworld.net 




Portrait: Global Crisis Intervention - A 

Commission of the World Federation 

of Music Therapy 

Magill, Lucanne 

Magill, L. (2007) Portrait: Global Crisis Intervention - A Commission of 

the World Federation of Music Therapy. Music Therapy Today (Online 

1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 84-86. 

As environmental and social issues become more demanding in today’s 

society, individuals around the world are encountering multiple losses 

and are experiencing the traumas of illness, impoverishment, residential 

displacement and personal hardship. Music therapists have humanitarian 

skills that may play key roles in helping attend to the multi-faceted needs 

of children and adult survivors. 

The World Federation of Music Therapy has developed a new commis- 

sion called “Global Crisis Intervention”. This commission was initiated 

at the last World Conference in 2005 in thinking about the growing needs 

of humanity. The purpose of this commission is to gather information 

regarding work that is being done around the globe to help the victims of 

natural disasters. Our aim is to develop a central pool of information to 

be available to those in need and to help refer music therapists when 

assistance is needed. 

84

Magill, L. (2007) Portrait: Global Crisis Intervention - A Commission of the World Federation of Music Therapy. Music 

Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 84-86. available at http://musictherapyworld.net 

We are eager to hear any stories that you may have regarding the work 

you or other music therapists are doing in your community and/or around 

the world to help those facing crises. We are interested in learning what is 

being done, where and how. For example, the American Music Therapy 

Association has developed the AMTA Disaster Relief project in the USA. 

There have been other music therapists attending to the needs of Tsunami 

victims in Thailand. We will compile such information through the Com- 

mission on Global Crisis Intervention and will disseminate through the 

WFMT website. 

Please contact me with any information you can share, to help build this 

world base of information. We invite anecdotal stories, as well as ideas 

for helping offer our services during times of trauma. 

Thank you for your heart-felt concerns and efforts! 

I look forward to hearing from you. 

85

Magill, L. (2007) Portrait: Global Crisis Intervention - A Commission of the World Federation of Music Therapy. Music 

Therapy Today (Online 1st April) Vol.VIII (1) 84-86. available at http://musictherapyworld.net 


CITED AS: 

Lucanne Magill, DA, MT-BC 

Chair, Commission on Global Crisis Intervention 

World Federation of Music Therapy 

lucannem@uwindsor.ca 

Magill, L. (2007) Portrait: Global Crisis Intervention - A Commission of 

the World Federation of Music Therapy. Music Therapy Today (Online 


86

March 20, 2007 

Odds and ends, themes and 

trends 

Doch, Tom 

For Easy Tasks, Brain Preps and Decides Together 

Source: www.gatech.edu/ March 6, 2007) 

http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=1292/ 

A Georgia Tech researcher has discovered that for tasks involving spatial 

processing, preparing for the task and performing it are not two separate 

brain processes, but one – at least when there are a small number of 

actions to choose from. The research appears online in the journal Brain 

Research. 

In a brain imaging study using functional magnetic resonance imaging 

(fMRI), Eric Schumacher, assistant professor of psychology at the Geor- 

gia Institute of Technology, along with colleagues from the University of 

Pittsburgh and the University of California, Berkeley, monitored the 

activity of brain regions in subjects while they responded to visual stim- 

uli. 

The researchers predicted that when they gave the subjects a cue that they 

were about to perform a hard task, only the superior parietal cortex, 

87

For Easy Tasks, Brain Preps and Decides Together 

known for its involvement in spatial attention, and the premotor cortex, 

known for planning movements, would activate. Then, the prefrontal cor- 

tex, known for its role in decision-making, would activate after the stim- 

ulus was presented. But they were wrong. 

"We found that all of these regions began to activate when the subjects 

prepared to do the task, even the prefrontal, which is the region that 

makes the decision on what to do,” said Schumacher. “Activating the 

decision-making region even before the stimulus is presented seems to 

allow for a quicker response, it allows the brain to get a running start.” 

Subjects were loaded into an MRI scanner and then shown a disk on a 

screen prompting them to press a button. They had two different tasks to 

perform, one labeled easy, and one hard. 

During the easy task, subjects were asked to push a button using the fin- 

gers of their left hand if the disk appeared on the left of the screen and 

their right hand if the disk appeared on the right. 

The hard task was manually incompatible, so that if the disk appeared on 

the left, they were to push the buttons using their right hand and vice- 

versa. 

Sometimes a visual cue prompted them that they were about to perform 

the hard or the easy task, sometimes it did not. 

When the tasks were cued, all three regions of the brain increased their 

activity. When there was no cue, there was less activity. 

So what does this mean in the real world? 

Odds and ends, themes and trends 88

Music In Our Schools Month® 

"One analogous situation might be when you’re driving and coming up 

on an intersection where there is a stale green light. You may get ready 

for the light to change to yellow and then red. My research suggests that 

this preparation for the upcoming change and appropriate responses 

involves the same brain regions that are involved in actually pressing the 

brake (or gas) once the light turns red or yellow,” said Schumacher. 

OutDoorLinks: 

Cognitive Neuroscience at Tech Research Laboratory 

http://www.gatech.edu/ 

Eric Schumacher 

http://www.psychology.gatech.edu/departmentinfo/faculty/bio-ESchumacher.html 

--- 


Source: http://www.menc.org/guides/showcase/showcase.html 

This year MENC introduces a new way to celebrate -- the Music In Our 

Schools Showcase! 



This is an opportunity to spotlight your school’s program while promot- 

ing the importance of music education in your community and through- 

out the nation. 

What is Music In Our Schools Month®? 

March has been officially designated by MENC: The National Associa- 

tion for Music Education for the observance of Music In Our Schools 

Month (MIOSM®), the time of year when music education becomes the 

focus of schools across the nation. 

MIOSM began as a single statewide celebration in 1973, and has grown 

over the decades to encompass a day, then a week, and then in 1985 to 

become a month long celebration of school music. 

The purpose of MIOSM is to raise awareness of the importance of music 

education for all children – and to remind citizens that school is where all 

children should have access to music. 

MIOSM is an opportunity for music teachers to bring their music pro- 

grams to the attention of the school and the community and to display the 

benefits school music brings to students of all ages. 

The celebration continues to grow each year, reaching more and more 

students, teachers, musicians, and music supporters. Schools and com- 

munities throughout the country and overseas celebrate MIOSM with 

concerts and other activities based on the year's theme. 

Classrooms, concert halls, civic buildings, clubs, parks, libraries, and 

shopping malls are just some of the arenas in which the public can 

observe the processes and results of music education. 



MENC, representing more than 130,000 members, is the sponsor of 

MIOSM. 

In addition to announcing the theme for the year, the organization is 

responsible for communicating ideas to support state and local MIOSM 

celebrations, providing awareness items such as T-shirts, posters, and 

buttons, and coordinating programs such as the Music In Our Schools 

Showcase. 

MENC's 52 federated state organizations (representing each state, the 

District of Columbia, and Europe) play an active role in the observance, 

securing governors' proclamations, enlisting the support of chief state 

school officers, and establishing organizational structures to help reach 

individual music educators. 

MIOSM chairpersons with each state organization provide the major 

thrust for the MIOSM celebrations, with the goal of involving students, 

administrators, parents, civic groups, and community members. Other 

national arts and education organizations also lend their endorsements 

and support to the programs through publications and events. 

MIOSM and the events surrounding it are the ideal opportunities for 

increasing awareness of the benefits of high quality music education pro- 

grams in our nation's schools. 

MENC hopes that teachers, students, and music supporters alike will find 

ways to join in on the celebration through creative activities and advo- 

cacy. Click here to learn more about ways to support music education 

through MENC, and visit MusicFriends to join other advocates working 

to insure that music is part of a well-rounded education for all children. 


A functional MRI study of happy and sad affective states induced by classical 

OutDoorLinks: 

Music In Our Schools Showcase: Time To Vote! 

http://www.menc.org/guides/showcase/showcase.html 

The National Association for Music Education 

http://www.menc.org/ 

-- 

A functional MRI study of happy and sad affective 

states induced by classical music 

By Mitterschiffthaler MT, Fu CH, Dalton JA, Andrew CM, Williams SC. 

Source: PupMed/8.2.2007 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/ 

query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=Abstract- 

Plus&list_uids=17290372&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum 

Hum Brain Mapp 2007. (c) 2006 Wiley-Liss, Inc. 

PMID: 17290372 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] 


A functional MRI study of happy and sad affective states induced by classical 

The present study investigated the functional neuroanatomy of transient 

mood changes in response to Western classical music. 

In a pilot experiment, 53 healthy volunteers (mean age: 32.0; SD = 9.6) 

evaluated their emotional responses to 60 classical musical pieces using a 

visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0 (sad) through 50 (neutral) to 

100 (happy). 

Twenty pieces were found to accurately induce the intended emotional 

states with good reliability, consisting of 5 happy, 5 sad, and 10 emotion- 

ally unevocative, neutral musical pieces. 

In a subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, the 

blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal contrast was mea- 

sured in response to the mood state induced by each musical stimulus in a 

separate group of 16 healthy participants (mean age: 29.5; SD = 5.5). 

Mood state ratings during scanning were made by a VAS, which con- 

firmed the emotional valence of the selected stimuli. Increased BOLD 

signal contrast during presentation of happy music was found in the ven- 

tral and dorsal striatum, anterior cingulate, parahippocampal gyrus, and 

auditory association areas. 

With sad music, increased BOLD signal responses were noted in the hip- 

pocampus/amygdala and auditory association areas. 

Presentation of neutral music was associated with increased BOLD sig- 

nal responses in the insula and auditory association areas. 

Our findings suggest that an emotion processing network in response to 

music integrates the ventral and dorsal striatum, areas involved in reward 


Brain works more chaotically than previously thought 

experience and movement; the anterior cingulate, which is important for 

targeting attention; and medial temporal areas, traditionally found in the 

appraisal and processing of emotions. 

OutDoorLinks: 

Martina T Mitterschiffthaler 

http://internal.iop.kcl.ac.uk/ipublic/staff/profile/external.aspx?go=10066 

-- 


Source: www.alphagalileo.org/27 February 2007 

http://index.cfm?fuseaction=readrelease&releaseid=518534 

The brain appears to process information more chaotically than has long 

been assumed. This is demonstrated by a new study conducted by scien- 

tists at the University of Bonn. 

The passing on of information from neuron to neuron does not, they 

show, occur exclusively at the synapses, i.e. the junctions between the 

nerve cell extensions. Rather, it seems that the neurons release their 

chemical messengers along the entire length of these extensions and, in 

this way, excite the neighbouring cells. 



The findings of the study are of huge significance since they explode fun- 

damental notions about the way our brain works. Moreover, they might 

contribute to the development of new medical drugs. The study is due to 

appear shortly in the prestigious academic journals "Nature Neuro- 

science" and has already been posted online (doi:10.1038/nn1850). 

Until now everything seemed quite clear. Nerve cells receive their signals 

by means of little "arms", known as dendrites. Dendrites pass on the elec- 

trical impulses to the cell body, or soma, where they are processed. The 

component responsible for "distributing" the result is the axon. Axons are 

long cable-like projections of the cell along which the electrical signals 

pass until they meet, at a synapse, the dendritic arm of another neuron. 

The synapse presents an insurmountable barrier to the neuron's electrical 

pulses. The brain overcomes this obstruction by means of an amazing 

signal conversion: the synapse releases chemical messengers, known as 

neurotransmitters, which diffuse to the dendrites. There, they dock onto 

specific receptors and generate new electrical impulses. 

"It was previously thought that neurotransmitters are only released at 

synapses," points out Dr. Dirk Dietrich at Bonn University. "But our find- 

ings indicate that this is not the case." 

The messenger attracts insulating cells 

Together with his colleagues Dr. Maria Kukley and Dr. Estibaliz 

Capetillo-Zarate, Dietrich has conducted a careful examination of the 

"white matter" in the brain of rats. This substance contains the "cable 

ducts" linking the right and left halves of the brain. 



They consist essentially of axons and ancillary cells. There are no den- 

drites or even synapses here. "So it is not a place where we would expect 

to see the release of messengers," the neuroscientist explains. 

Yet it is in the white matter that the scientists have made a remarkable 

discovery. As soon as an electrical impulse runs through an axon cable, 

tiny bubbles containing glutamate travel to the axon membrane and 

release their content into the brain. 

Glutamate is one of the most important neurotransmitters, being released 

when signal transmission occurs at synapses. The researchers were able 

to demonstrate that certain cells in the white matter react to glutamate: 

the precursor to what are known as oligodendrocytes. Oligodendrocytes 

are the brain's "insulating cells". They produce the myelin, a sort of fatty 

layer that surrounds the axons and ensures rapid retransmission of sig- 

nals. 

"It is likely that insulating cells are guided by the glutamate to locate 

axons and envelope them in a layer of myelin," says Dirk Dietrich. 

As soon as the axons leave the white "cable duct" they enter the brain's 

grey matter where they encounter their receptor dendrites. Here, the 

information is passed on at the synapses to the receptor cells. 

"We think, however, that on their way though the grey matter the axons 

probably release glutamate at other points apart from the synapses," 

Dietrich speculates. "Nerve cells and dendrites are closely packed 

together here. So the axon could not only excite the actual receptor but 

also numerous other nerve cells." 



If this hypothesis is correct, the accepted scientific understanding of the 

way neurons communicate, which has prevailed for over a hundred years, 

will have to be revised. 

In 1897 Sir Charles Sherrington first put forward the idea that chemical 

messengers are only released at "synapses", a term he coined. According 

to the founder of modern neurophysiology this means that nerve cells can 

only communicate with a small number of other nerve cells, i.e. only 

with those with which they are connected via synapses. This concept is 

the basis of the notion that neuronal information in the brain, somewhat 

like electricity in a computer, only spreads directionally in the brain, fol- 

lowing specific ordered circuits. 

Too much glutamate is the death of cells 

There is, however, also an aspect to the research team's discovery that is 

of considerable medical interest. It has long been known that in the event 

of oxygen deficiency or a severe epileptic fit, large numbers of insulating 

cells in the white matter are destroyed. 

The trigger for this damage is our old friend, the neurotransmitter 

glutamate. "Nobody knew until now where the glutamate actually comes 

from," says Dr. Dietrich. "Our results might open the door to totally new 

therapeutic options." 

After all, drugs have already been developed that prevent glutamate bub- 

bles from discharging their load into the brain. Indeed, Bonn's neurosci- 

entists now know precisely which receptors of the insulating cells are 

stimulated by the neurotransmitter – another starting point for developing 

new drugs. 


Living with autism in a world made for others 

Yet, why can glutamate sometimes be so dangerous? When an epileptic 

fit occurs, the nerve cells "fire" very rapidly and fiercely. In this event so 

many impulses run through the axons that large quantities of glutamate 

are released all at once. 

"In these concentrations the neurotransmitter damages the insulating 

cells," says Dietrich. "It's the dosage that makes it harmful." 

OutDoorLinks: 

Dirk Dietrich 

http://www.epilepsy.uni-bonn.de/ifb/cms/front_content.php?idart=24 

Sir Charles Sherrington 

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1932/sherringtonbio.html 

--- 


By A. Chris Gajilan 



Source: A. Chris Gajilan/www.cnn.com/February 22, 2007 

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/02/21/autism.amanda/index.html 

Amanda Baggs, 26, is part of new generation of adults with autism. 

Baggs communicates using a computer or a voice synthesizer. 

600,000 adults have autism in the U.S., according to the Autism Society 

of America 

No cure for autism; precise causes unknown 

Watch the videos! 

file://localhost/ 

When I walk into her apartment, Amanda Baggs makes no eye contact. 

She doesn't come to the door or raise her hand to greet visitors. In fact, 

I'm having a hard time discerning whether she even knows I'm there. I 

say hello and introduce myself, but she remains silent, sitting at her desk, 

staring out the window, rocking slightly back and forth. 

Amanda Baggs is a 26-year-old woman with autism. I've been corre- 

sponding with her for weeks via e-mail. I've read her Web site, and from 

her I've learned a great deal about living with autism. 

A video she posted recently on the Internet describes how she experi- 

ences the world. "My language is not about designing words or even 

visual symbols for people to interpret," she says in the video. "It is about 

being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment." 



Admittedly, it's hard to recognize her in real life, after meeting her online 

persona first. (Read Dr. Sanjay Gupta's thoughts after meeting Amanda 

Baggs.) 

I awkwardly carry on a one-sided conversation, until she grunts. My 

attention shifts to her computer slowly booting up. She clicks on a pro- 

gram. A keyboard diagram fills the screen. She begins to type at a stac- 

cato pace. We begin a conversation. I talk. She types. 

This is the Amanda I've come to know over the past few weeks. She's 

highly intelligent, well read and has a great sense of humor. She never 

makes eye contact, but there is no doubt she is interacting with me. 

Amanda is part of a new generation of adults with autism. The Autism 

Society of America estimates that 600,000 adults are living with autism 

in the United States. That number will most likely skyrocket, given the 

CDC's recognition of an increase in the numbers of children with autism. 

The newest numbers suggest that one in every 150 children has autism. 

"The field as a whole has really neglected adults with autism," says Dr. 

Eric Hollander, psychiatrist and head of the Seaver and New York Autism 

Center of Excellence. 

Adults with autism live normal life spans and may require long-term 

medication, therapy and residential placement. Hollander says the aver- 

age cost of caring for an individual with autism over a lifetime can be 

several million dollars. 

Autism treatment and research are undeniably centered on children. The 

goals are early diagnosis and intervention. They're aimed at reducing dis- 



ruptive behaviors and eventually mainstreaming children with autism 

into school and society. 

At its core, autism is a developmental disorder of communication. There 

is no cure. No one knows the precise causes, but recent science points 

towards a genetic component with a possible environmental trigger. 

Amanda Baggs has severe autism. She didn't cry when she was born. She 

had to be taught how to nurse. As a little girl, she rocked her head back 

and forth but could speak. As she grew, she would go longer and longer 

without speaking, until her spoken language disappeared altogether. 

(Read Amanda's post to the AC 360 blog on CNN.com.) 

She slowly learned how to type. Now, she relies on her computer or a 

voice synthesizer linked to a keyboard to interact with people. According 

to Hollander, "You might think that these individuals are mentally 

retarded or have no verbal skills, but in fact, they're not mentally 

retarded. They really understand what is going on and if they utilize a 

communication device, they can really communicate what they are think- 

ing and feeling." 

For Amanda, it takes a great deal of energy to think in words. It is not her 

natural state of mind. "It's like being bilingual," she types. "A lot of the 

way I naturally communicate is just through direct response to what is 

around me in a very physical sort of way. It's dealing with patterns and 

colors rather than with symbolic words." (Watch why "normal" commu- 

nication isn't for Amanda ) 

The Internet has allowed Amanda to communicate to the whole world. 

While standard body language and facial expressions are lost on many 



with autism, she says many non-verbal people with autism have the abil- 

ity to communicate with one another through autistic body cues. 

Thirty or 40 years ago, life would have been different and much harder 

for Amanda, says Morton Ann Gernsbacher, a cognitive psychologist 

who specializes in autism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The 

Internet is providing for individuals with autism, what sign language did 

for the deaf," she says. "It allows them to interact with the world and 

other like-minded individuals on their own terms." (Ask Amanda your 

questions about autism. ) 

These days, Amanda Baggs lives on her own terms. With the help of an 

agency, she moved from California to Vermont about a year and a half 

ago to be closer to a friend. 

And what does Amanda think is the hardest thing about living with 

autism? "Having to navigate a world that is, on all levels, is built for the 

abilities and deficits of people who are not built remotely like me." 

OutDoorLinks: 

In my Language (!!!) 

The film by Amanda Baggs on YouTube: From the world within 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc 

The CNN-Videos about Amanda Baggs 


While you slumber, your brain puts the world in order 

http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/health/2007/ 

02/21/gupta.amanda.pt1.cnn 

Dr. Sanjay Gupta's thoughts after meeting Amanda Baggs. 

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/blogs/paging.dr.gupta/2007/02/behindveil-of-autism.html 

Autism: An Expert Interview With Eric Hollander, MD 

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/497979 

Seaver and New York Autism Center of Excellence 

http://www.mssm.edu/psychiatry/autism/ 

Eric Hollander 

http://www.healthgrades.com/directory_search/physician/profiles/dr-mdreports/Dr-Eric-Hollander-MD-080FD5C6.cfm 

-- 


Source: New Scientist/22 February 2007 

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325924.700-while-you-slumber-your-brain-puts-the-world-in-order.html 

Ever wondered why sleeping on a problem works? 



It seems that as well as strengthening our memories, sleep also helps us 

to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up 

during the day. 

Bob Stickgold from Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found 

that people were better able to recall lists of related words after a night's 

sleep than after the same time spent awake during the day. 

They also found it easier to recollect themes that the words had in com- 

mon - forgetting around 25 per cent more themes after a waking rest. 

"We're not just stabilising memories during sleep," says Stickgold. 

"We're extracting the meaning." 

In another experiment, people were shown cards with symbols followed 

by reports of various weather outcomes - so for example, diamond shapes 

might be followed by rain 70 per cent of the time. 

Twelve hours after training, people felt able to guess the weather from 

the symbols, though they struggled to voice their "rules". After sleeping, 

their predictions were 10 per cent better. 

Sleep helps us extract rules from our experiences, says Stickgold. It's like 

knowing the difference between dogs and cats, he says, even if it is hard 

to explain. 

He presented the results last week at a meeting organised by The Science 

Network at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. 

From issue 2592 of New Scientist magazine, 22 February 2007, page 17 


Low-pitch treatment alleviates ringing sound of tinnitus 

OutDoorLinks: 

Bob Stickgold 

http://sleep.med.harvard.edu/people/faculty/220/Robert+Stickgold+PhD 

--- 

Low-pitch treatment alleviates ringing sound of 

tinnitus 

UCI researchers find novel approach for hearing therapy 

Source: oday.uci.edu/ February 14, 2007 

http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1570 

For those who pumped up the volume one too many times, UC Irvine 

researchers may have found a treatment for the hearing damage loud 

music can cause. 

Fan-Gang Zeng and colleagues have identified an effective way to treat 

the symptoms of tinnitus, a form of hearing damage typically marked by 

high-pitched ringing that torments more than 60 million Americans. 

A low-pitched sound, the researchers discovered, applied by a simple 

MP3 player suppressed and provided temporary relief from the high- 

pitch ringing tone associated with the disorder. 



Tinnitus is caused by injury, infection or the repeated bombast of loud 

sound, and can appear in one or both ears. It’s no coincidence that many 

rock musicians, and their fans, suffer from it. 

Although known for its high-pitched ringing, tinnitus is an internal noise 

that varies in its pitch and frequency. Some treatments exist, but none are 

consistently effective. 

Zeng presented his study Feb. 13 at the Middle Winter Research Confer- 

ence for Otolaryngology in Denver. 

“Tinnitus is one of the most common hearing disorders in the world, but 

very little is understood about why it occurs or how to treat it,” said 

Zeng, a professor of otolaryngology, biomedical engineering, cognitive 

sciences, and anatomy and neurobiology. “We are very pleased and sur- 

prised by the success of this therapy, and hopefully with further testing it 

will provide needed relief to the millions who suffer from tinnitus.” 

As director of the speech and hearing lab at UCI, Zeng and his team 

made their discovery while addressing the severe tinnitus of a research 

subject. The patient uses a cochlear implant to address a constant mid- 

ranged pitched sound in his injured right ear accented by the periodic 

piercing of a high-pitched ringing sound ranging between 4,000 and 

8,000 hertz in frequency. 

At first, Zeng thought of treating the tinnitus with a high-pitched sound, a 

method called masking that is sometimes used in tinnitus therapy 

attempts. But he ruled out that option because of the severity of the 

patient’s tinnitus, so an opposite approach was explored, which provided 

unexpectedly effective results. 



After making many adjustments, the researchers created a low-pitched, 

pulsing sound – described as a “calming, pleasant tone” of 40 to 100 

hertz of frequency – which, when applied to the patient through a regular 

MP3 player, suppressed the high-pitched ringing after about 90 seconds 

and provided what the patient described as a high-level of continued 

relief. 

Zeng’s patient programs the low-pitched sound through his cochlear 

implant, and Zeng is currently studying how to apply this treatment for 

people who do not use any hearing-aid devices. Since a cochlear implant 

replaces the damaged mechanism in the ear that stimulates the auditory 

nerve, Zeng believes that a properly pitched acoustic sound will have the 

same effect on tinnitus for someone who does not use a hearing device. 

Dr. Hamid Djalilian, a UCI physician who treats hearing disorders, points 

out that a custom sound can be created for the patients, who then can 

download it into their personal MP3 player and use it when they need 

relief. 

“The treatment, though, does not represent a cure,” Zeng said. “This low- 

pitch therapeutic approach is only effective while being applied to the 

ear, after which the ringing can return. 

But it underscores the need to customize stimulation for tinnitus suppres- 

sion and suggests that balanced stimulation, rather than masking, is the 

brain mechanism underlying this surprising finding.” 

OutDoorLinks: 


INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON THE BIOLOGY AND GENETICS OF MUSIC 

Soundexample 

http://today.uci.edu/mp3/tinnitus_zeng_070209.mp3 

Fan-Gang Zeng 

http://www.ucihs.uci.edu/anatomy/zeng.html 

Hamid Djalilian 

http://www.ent.uci.edu/djalilian.htm 

Middle Winter Research Conference for Otolaryngology in Denver 

http://www.aro.org/mwm/mwm.html 

-- 

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON THE BIOLOGY 

AND GENETICS OF MUSIC 

20-22 May, Palazzo del Podestà - Bologna 

Source: MUSIC THERAPY ENEWS, FEBRUARY 9, 2007 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 

Deadline 31, March 2007 

Organizers: 

European Genetics Foundation (Bologna, Italy) 


INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON THE BIOLOGY AND GENETICS OF MUSIC 

Fondazione Pierfranco e Luisa Mariani (Milano, Italy) 

Orchestra Mozart (Bologna, Italy) 

Comune di Bologna, University of Bologna 

Scientific Advisory Committee: 

G. Barbujani (Ferrara-Italy) 

D. Drayna (Rockville-USA) 

T. Fitch (St. Andrews-UK) 

L. Lopez (Rome-Italy) 

I. Peretz (Montréal-Canada) 

D. Pettener (Bologna, Italy) 

The fee for the whole Workshop (3 days) is • 200 (including the ticket to 

the Ethnographic Exhibition on Mongolia and the concert of the Acca- 

demia dell'Orchestra Mozart). 

For registrations before February 15, the Workshop fee will be reduced to 

• 170. 

To register please complete the Registration Form available on 

www.musicagenetica.it 

Every participant can submit a poster abstract (please fill in the Poster 

Application Form available on the website). 


Boosting slow oscillations during sleep potentiates memory 

 

Please submit your abstract(s) before March 31, 2007. 

The selected posters will be shown during the poster sessions every day. 

Each selected poster will have to be approximately 70 cm (width) x 100 

cm (height) and will be exhibited in a specific area at the Workshop 

venue where the Authors will have the opportunity to present their work 

to all the other participants, faculties and students. 

A Book of Abstracts will be distributed at the beginning of the Workshop 

and the Proceedings will be published in electronic and/or paper format 

after the Workshop. 

OutDoorLinks: 

"International Workshop on the Biology and Genetics of Music" 

http://www.musicagenetica.it/ 

--- 

Boosting slow oscillations during sleep potentiates 

memory 

By Lisa Marshall, Halla Helgadóttir, Matthias Mölle and Jan Born 


Boosting slow oscillations during sleep potentiates memory 

Source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7119/abs/ 

nature05278.html 

There is compelling evidence that sleep contributes to the long-term con- 

solidation of new memories. 

This function of sleep has been linked to slow (

Jobs Calls for End to Music Copy Protection 

Brain stimulation with oscillations at 5 Hz—another frequency band that 

normally predominates during rapid-eye-movement sleep—decreased 

slow oscillations and left declarative memory unchanged. 

Our findings indicate that endogenous slow potential oscillations have a 

causal role in the sleep-associated consolidation of memory, and that this 

role is enhanced by field effects in cortical extracellular space. 

OutDoorLinks: 

Jan Born 

http://www.kfg.uni-luebeck.de/html/gb/born.htm 

--- 


By JOHN MARKOFF 

Source: www.nytimes.com/ February 7, 2007 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/technology/ 

07music.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin 



Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, jolted the record industry on 

Tuesday by calling on its largest companies to allow online music sales 

unfettered by antipiracy software. 

The move is a gamble for Apple. Its iPod players and iTunes Store have 

defined the online music market, and they have much at stake in the cur- 

rent copy-protection system. 

Under terms reached with the major record labels, online music stores 

embed software code into the digital song files they sell to restrict the 

ability to copy them. Because Apple uses its own system, the songs it 

sells can be played only on the iPod. That limitation has drawn increasing 

scrutiny from European governments, pressure that Apple has recently 

begun to acknowledge. 

Mr. Jobs’s appeal, posted on the company’s Web site Tuesday, came in 

the form of an essay titled “Thoughts on Music,” but in essence it was a 

letter to the “Big 4” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner 

and EMI. 

While he said that “customers are being well served” by the current 

approach to digital rights management — with online music retailers 

using incompatible antipiracy systems but nonetheless offering “a wide 

variety of choices” — the subtext clearly pointed to the prospect of 

change. 

He dismissed one possible alternative, in which Apple would license its 

own system, FairPlay, allowing competing digital players to play iTunes 

songs and letting other stores sell copy-protected music for the iPod. Mr. 

Jobs said that approach would only complicate enforcement of digital 



rights management, as myriad companies would have to coordinate soft- 

ware and hardware updates. 

Instead, he proposed that labels could shed digital rights management 

altogether. Mr. Jobs pointed out that only 10 percent of all music sold last 

year was through an online store and that music is already easily loaded 

onto digital players from CDs, with no antipiracy features. Attaching dig- 

ital rights management to music bought online has only limited the num- 

ber of online music stores, he wrote. 

“This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would 

embrace it in a heartbeat,” he wrote. 

Mr. Jobs’s move comes as the music industry appears to be facing a cri- 

sis. Sales of its mainstay product — the album — continue to sink, and 

sales of digital music, including individual songs, have not increased fast 

enough to offset the decline. 

With a paucity of hit releases to start the year, industrywide album sales 

are already down more than 15 percent from last year, the worst January 

performance since computerized sales tracking began in 1991. 

At a forum in France last month, Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNet- 

works, which operates the Rhapsody digital music service, predicted the 

widespread availability of unrestricted digital music within a few years. 

He said it was “an idea in ascendance and whose time has come.” 

But Mr. Jobs is clearly the most powerful voice raised so far in support of 

a change. With the clout built on his company’s market share for both 

players and music, he has already prevailed against the labels in disputes 

over pricing. 



Facing pressure to bolster digital sales, the four major music companies 

have only toyed with the idea of selling unprotected files — most notably 

with a personalized version of a Jessica Simpson song and the first single 

from the new album of Norah Jones. MySpace, the social-networking 

giant that is host to pages for countless independent and major-label acts, 

has embraced the unrestricted MP3 format for artists who choose to sell 

music there. 

More recently, the industry has been abuzz with rumors that one or more 

of the major companies is preparing to lift restrictions on some portions 

of their digital catalog. 

Jeanne Meyer, a spokeswoman for EMI, said, “The lack of interoperabil- 

ity between a proliferating range of digital platforms and devices is 

increasingly becoming a real issue for music consumers.” 

The Universal Music Group, the Warner Music Group and Sony BMG 

Music Entertainment declined to comment. But several industry execu- 

tives said they viewed Mr. Jobs’s comments as an effort to deflect blame 

from Apple and onto the record companies for the incompatibility of var- 

ious digital music devices and services. 

There is a general sense that the industry is still unwilling to do away 

completely with copy protection, and no contracts have been signed yet 

to change the systems of distribution by any of the players. 

Another digital music industry executive said that the record companies 

— many of them part of larger media companies involved in movie and 

television production — were concerned that lifting restrictions on digital 



music might have perilous effects on the parallel market for copy-pro- 

tected video content. 

Several consumer electronics and music industry executives said that if 

the music industry moved away from copy protection, it could potentially 

make it easier for competing music players. Mr. Jobs seems to be betting 

that anything that stimulates the sale of digital music can only help his 

company. 

“It’s a bold move on his part,” said Ted Cohen, managing partner of TAG 

Strategic, an industry consultancy; he is also former senior vice president 

for digital development and distribution for EMI Music. “If anything can 

play on anything, it’s a clear win for the consumer electronics device 

world, but a potential disaster for the content companies.” 

The global music trade group, the International Federation for the Phono- 

graphic Industry, based in London, has long pushed for “interoperabil- 

ity,” saying Apple should license its digital management system so that 

iTunes music plays on devices other than the iPod. But the industry has 

also stuck with the idea of some kind of digital control to prevent whole- 

sale copying of musical tracks. 

Officially, the industry chose to respond Tuesday by seizing on one idea 

that Mr. Jobs raised — licensing Apple’s own copy-protection system — 

even though he went on to reject it. “Apple’s offer to license FairPlay to 

other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a 

real victory for fans, artists and labels,” the Recording Industry Associa- 

tion of America said. 



Mr. Jobs’s statement drew criticism from some competitors, who argued 

that he was simply trying to get in front of a shift in industry strategy and 

claim credit for it. 

Jason Reindorp, marketing director for Zune at Microsoft, said Mr. Jobs’s 

call for unrestricted music sales was “irresponsible, or at the very least 

naïve,” adding, “It’s like he’s on top of the mountain making pronounce- 

ments, while we’re here on the ground working with the industry to make 

it happen.” 

“He’s certainly a master of the obvious,” Mr. Reindorp said, adding that 

“the stars were already aligning” to loosen the restrictions. 

In Norway last month, after a yearlong investigation, the government’s 

consumer ombudsman ruled that iTunes violates national law by restrict- 

ing playback to iPods. The government gave Apple until Oct. 1 to make 

changes. 

Consumer agencies in six other European countries are looking into the 

legality of limiting how legally purchased songs can be played. 

Late last month, as consumer groups across the region began banding 

together, Apple issued a statement that said, “Apple hopes that European 

governments will encourage a competitive environment that allows inno- 

vation to thrive, protects intellectual property and allows consumers to 

decide which products are successful.” 

In 2005, France lobbed the first legislative volley in the European effort 

to fight digital restrictions, but by the time the law was adopted last sum- 

mer, most of the teeth were gone from the proposal. Now, the French are 


How listeners perceive verbs 

putting together a government commission that will rule on the legality 

of digital rights restrictions case by case. 

-- 


Quelle: www.nwo.nl/29 January 2007 

http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOA_6X6CMA_Eng 

The verb forms the heart of a sentence. Although a lot of research has 

been done into the role that verbs play during the transfer of information, 

less is known about exactly how and when the listener or reader uses this 

information. 

Dutch researcher Dieuwke de Goede delved into this subject and investi- 

gated how the functioning of the verb is expressed when sentences are 

listened to. 

The verb expresses an action or event described by the sentence and pro- 

vides information about persons or objects involved in the event. 

To measure the assimilation of a verb in a sentence, De Goede asked 

more than 400 study subjects in eight different experiments to listen to 

about 120 spoken sentences per experiment. 

Whilst listening they were shown words on a computer screen and they 

had to indicate whether or not these were real Dutch words. Half of the 

words were related in meaning to the verbs from the sentences to which 

the study subject was listening at that moment. 



At different points in the sentence, the study subjects were found to more 

quickly recognise verbs as genuine if these had a meaning related to the 

verbs in the sentences spoken. 

From this it was concluded that at these points in the sentence the verb 

was active. 

The different experiments revealed a clear pattern: in complex Dutch 

sentences, consisting of a main clause followed by a secondary clause, 

the verb was activated until the end of the main clause. In other words, 

the meaning of the verb remains with the listener until the end of the 

main clause and subsequently disappears in the next clause. 

The pattern of verb activation found differs considerably from the pattern 

that was found for nouns. 

For example, although a noun becomes active immediately after its use, 

this effect has virtually disappeared well before the end of the main 

clause. 

According to De Goede one reason for this is the fact that verbs nearly 

always have several meanings, whereas that is not the case for nouns. 

The exact meaning of a verb depends on the sentence context. 

The research results emphasise the importance of the verb for under- 

standing the sentence. 

Furthermore, De Goede's research could be important for research into 

children with language disorders and patients with aphasia, people who 

have problems with language as a consequence of brain damage. 


Sickening — worst sound in the world announced 

These groups often encounter more problems with verbs than nouns. 

De Goede's research is part of the NWO programme, "The role of the 

verb in Dutch during on-line spoken sentence processing and spoken sen- 

tence production". 

For further information please contact: 

Dr Dieuwke de Goede (University of Groningen) 

Email: dieuwkedegoede(at)home.nl 

OutDoorLinks: 

Verbs in spoken sentence processing: Unraveling the activation pattern of 

the matrix verb pattern of the matrix verb 

Goede, Dieuwke de 

http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/arts/2007/d.de.goede/?FullItem- 

Record=ON 

--- 


Source: http://www.sound101.org/about.php 

Vomiting is officially the most horrible sound ever, according to over a 

million votes cast worldwide in a mass online science experiment. 



International visitors to the BadVibes website (www.sound101.org) — a 

research project from the University of Salford — listened to sounds such 

as a dentist's drill, fingernails scraping down a blackboard and aircraft 

flying past, before rating them in terms of their unpleasantness. 

Although fingernails scraping down a blackboard is said to be the worst 

sound by many people, the actual recording of this sound only came 16th 

out of 34 sounds auditioned. Microphone feedback came a close second 

in the 'horribleness ranking', with many babies crying coming joint third 

with a horrible scrapping sound. 

Over 1.1m votes were statistically analysed by Professor Trevor Cox of 

the University's Acoustic Research Centre, who conducted the experi- 

ment in order to explore the public's perceptions of unpleasant sounds 

and help inform the acoustics industry. 

He said: "I am driven by a scientific curiosity about why people shudder 

at certain sounds and not others. We are pre-programmed to be repulsed 

by horrible things such as vomiting, as it is fundamental to staying alive 

to avoid nasty stuff but, interestingly, the voting patterns from the sound 

did not match expectation for a pure 'disgust' reaction. 

"Similarly, the sound of fingernails down a blackboard has been com- 

pared to the warning cries of monkeys — again, something that humans 

might instinctively respond to because of our ancestry. So we examined 

whether the voting patterns for the scraping sounds were consistent with 

an evolved response. But only for the worst scraping sound were the 

results consistent with the hypothesis of an evolved response." 



One of Trevor's discoveries was that females rated 25 out of the 34 

sounds more horrible than males. However, baby cries were one of the 

few sounds males found worse than females. He said: "This may be 

because women play a role in protecting both themselves and their off- 

spring from attack. It could be that females have become habituated to 

the sound of babies crying." 

Trevor, who is now planning a similar experiment to rate the most pleas- 

ant sound in the world, is hoping to use the results of the BadVibes 

project to help inform industry about how to engineer sounds which are 

more pleasant. 

He said: "This research has been fascinating in gaining an insight into 

why people are repulsed by certain sounds — and how this differs by 

gender, age and nationality. This is so important because noise signifi- 

cantly affects our quality of life." 

OutDoorLinks: 

Trevor Cox 

http://www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/research/arc_cox.htm 

The hunt for the worst sound in the world 

http://www.sound101.org/index.php 


7th Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society 31st Göttingen Neurobiology 

--- 

7th Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society 31st 

Göttingen Neurobiology Conference 

Source: http://www.neuro.uni-goettingen.de/nbc.php 

The 7th Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society will be held from 

Thursday, March 29 until Sunday, April 1, 2007 in Göttingen. 

Chairpersons are Prof. Dr. Klaus-Peter Hoffmann and Prof. Dr. Kerstin 

Krieglstein. 

In addition to the main lectures, a large number of symposia will be held. 

Furthermore, satellite symposia will be included into the programme. 

Special emphasis will be placed on the poster sessions, an important part 

of the meeting schedule. 

The choice of the plenary lectures and the symposia does not signify a 

thematic restriction on the posters: the Göttingen Conference is meant to 

give a general overview of current research in all fields of neuroscience. 

Main Lectures 

Niels Birbaumer (Tübingen, Germany) 

Breaking the Silence: Brain-Computer-Interface Research and Paralysis 

Benedikt Grothe (Munich, Germany) 

New Concepts in Sound Localization - Inhibition Matters 


7th Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society 31st Göttingen Neurobiology 

Uwe Heinemann (Berlin, Germany) - Otto Creutzfeldt Lecture 

Mechanisms of Memory Consolidation in the Hippocampal Formation 

Hans Lassmann (Vienna, Austria) - K.-J. Zülch Lecture 

Success and Failure of Translational Research: The Example of Multiple 

Sclerosis 

Gilles Laurent (Pasadena, USA) - Ernst Florey Lecture 

Population Dynamics and Synaptic Connectivity in Circuits for Olfactory 

Learning 

Rodolfo Llinas (New York, USA) - Roger Eckert Lecture 

Intrinsic Electrical Properties of Neurons: Their Role in Global Brain 

Function 

Christof Niehrs (Heidelberg, Germany) 

Molecular Regulation of Wnt/beta Catenin Signaling in Antero-Posterior 

Axial Patterning 

Award Lectures 

Werner Göbel (Zurich, Switzerland) - Till Photonics Technology Award 

Lecture 

Imaging cellular network dynamics in three dimensions using fast 3D 

laser scanning 


The human circadian clock entrains to sun time 

Thomas Misgeld (Munich, Germany) - Schilling Research Award Lec- 

ture 

In vivo imaging of axon development and degeneration 

OutDoorLinks: 

31st Göttingen Neurobiology Conference 

http://www.neuro.uni-goettingen.de/nbc.php 

Klaus-Peter Hoffmann 

http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/neurobiol/mitarbei/klauspeter_hoffmann/e_kphoffmann.htm 

Prof. Dr. Kerstin Krieglstein 

http://www.neuroanatomie.uni-goettingen.de/Gruppe/Personen/ 

Krieglstein/Krieglstein.htm 

--- 


By Till Roenneberg, C. Jairaj Kumar, and Martha Merrow Supplemental 



Source: http://download.current-biology.com/supplementarydata/curbio/ 

17/2/r44/DC1/mmc1.pdf 

Experimental Procedures Chronotype: 

When two oscillators synchronise, they oscillate with the same period 

and they adopt a distinct phase relationship to each other. 

When circadian clocks are synchronised (entrained) by periodic signals 

from their environment (zeitgebers, e.g., light or temperature) their phase 

relationship to the zeitgeber cycle is called chronotype. 

An example relevant to this work is the temporal relationship between 

wake time and dawn in humans under natural conditions. Chronotype 

depends on several properties such as the strength of the zeitgeber (e.g., 

how intense the light is during the day and how dark it is at night), and its 

duration (photoperiod). 

Chronotype also depends on the endogenous period of the individual cir- 

cadian clock and on its sensitivity to the zeitgeber stimulus. 

Furthermore, both the period of the circadian clock and its sensitivity to 

light are subjected to genetic variation. Individuals, therefore, adopt dif- 

ferent phase relationships to the natural light-dark-cycle, i.e., have differ- 

ent chronotypes. Assessment of chronotype and its normalisation: We 

assess human chronotype with the help of a simple questionnaire [S3] 

which essentially determines when people fall asleep and wake up on 

work days and free days. As a first approach to determining chronotype, 

the mid-sleep time on free days is calculated (MSF). 



We use mid-sleep because individual timing of sleep and individual sleep 

duration are independent traits [S3] which makes both sleep onset and 

wakeup unreliable markers for sleep timing. In addition, mid sleep corre- 

lates best with melatonin profiles and the morningness-eveningness 

score. 

Although MSF is a good indicator of chronotype, sleep deprivation dur- 

ing the work week can act as a confounder for the sleep duration on free 

days (sleep compensation), leading to a later MSF. 

These excessive free-day sleep times are, therefore, corrected for accord- 

ing to the individual's (weekly) average sleep need (MSFsc, for correc- 

tion algorithm, see supplement to [S5]). 

Like for MSF, the dimension of MSFsc is not a score; it’s dimension is 

local time and it represents an excellent predictor for the chronotype of 

an individual's present stage. However, for genetic and epidemiological 

studies, two additional corrections are applied. Chronotype depends on 

age, and this age-related change further depends on sex [S5]. 

These two confounding factors are, therefore, also used for normalisa- 

tion. Figure S1 shows the age dependencies of female and male subjects 

based on our present data base (N=40,000). 

The individual curve fits to the sex-specific datasets are used to calculate 

a theoretical chronotype (MSFsasc) which is standardised to the age of 

30 and corrected for sex-differences (see circle in the supplementary fig- 

ure). Fits are calculated separately for the delaying and the advancing 

portions of the age-dependencies, and also separately for males and 



females (the shift from later to earlier chronotype for females is 19.5 

years and for males, it is 21 years) considering ages up to 78. 

All fits are highly significant (young females: r=0.99; adult females; 

r=0.98; young males: r=0.99; adult males: r=0.99). 

Normalisations are performed by adding the difference of a subject’s 

chronotype from the age- and sex-specific mean to MSFs30. 

Statistics: Multiple regression analysis, incorporating all data 

(N=21,600), shows that both longitude and population size are signifi- 

cant and independent predictors of chronotype (r2 = 0.017; p

Baby Music - Very young children are much better than adults at learning music 

http://www.current-biology.com/ 

Munich Chronotype Questionnaire (MCTQ) 

http://www.imp-muenchen.de/index.php?id=917 

Baby Music - Very young children are much better 

than adults at learning music 

Source: http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/ 

view.php3?article_id=218392888 

As a ScienCentral News video explains, this music lesson gives new 

insight as to how we learn. 

Even as children, we find that certain things just come easier or are more 

important to us. 

It's a type of specialization that is an element in creating who we will 

become as adults. 

But research now indicates that some specialization happens very early in 

life. I 

n research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci- 

ences, Erin E. Hannon found such a specialization in the area of music 

and rhythms. 



She says, "At six months infants respond to familiar and unfamiliar 

rhythms -- so, rhythms from their own culture, and other cultures -- 

equally well. 

By 12 months however, we find that infants have a very culture-specific 

way of responding to rhythms." 

Studies like this are shedding light into infants' early learning patterns in 

a number of areas, not just music. Hannon says, "We see it in language, in 

sort of speech perception; we see it in perception of faces." She adds, 

"Perhaps, for a number of different things infants have highly flexible 

ways of responding to the world. And they are very rapid learners. And 

this ability to learn may change as we get older. The questions about why 

this changes are complex. It could be sort of a critical period type of 

effect." 

Hannon adds that it appears that even at ages of around a year, we are 

already filtering out information, adding, "It may arise from the fact that 

as we acquire more and more knowledge, we've already shaped the way 

that our brains deal with information. And so when we try to introduce 

new things there's sort of more resistance. And so this makes it more dif- 

ficult to change the basic ways that we respond to things." 

How did Hannon and the University of Toronto's Sandra Trehub go about 

learning an infant's music preference? Since other studies have shown 

that infants will stare slightly longer at something that is unfamiliar, the 

researchers used this to evaluate their studies. In a quiet lab, the research- 

ers would watch the infant's reaction as the infants watched TV monitors 

showing simple cartoons with various test music. 



In a test similar to this, Hannon played unfamiliar rhythms to groups of 

children. 

In one experiment, they found that 12 month-olds had difficulty with for- 

eign-sounding rhythms from Eastern-Europe, but not with western-style 

rhythms. Hannon explains, "We wanted to find out ... how does this hap- 

pen and when does learning sort of change as we develop?" 

In a second experiment Hannon says they sent the infants and parents 

home with CD's of the Eastern-European music. 

She says, "They listened to those CD's for two weeks. We brought them 

back in the lab and we retested them and they showed renewed ability to 

perceive this sort of rhythmic structures in a foreign context." 

Adults, however, are another issue. 

Hannon also tried the second experiment on them, sending them home 

with the CDs of foreign music and then testing their ability to discern dis- 

ruptions. 

Hannon says, "We tried to do the same thing with adults, thinking we 

might be able to teach them, and they improved only minimally and they 

never got above chance. Which suggests that although they're getting the 

same basic kind of exposure that infants are, they're just not learning as 

much from it." 

She says the studies show, "That as we become increasingly good at 

familiar structures, that sort of warps the way we respond to everything. 


A proposal for robust temperature compensation of circadian rhythms 

And so when you introduce structures that don't conform to the ones 

we've already been learning, we sort of distort that as we listen." 

OutDoorLinks: 

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/102/35/12639 

Erin E. Hannon 

http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=218392888 

Sandra Trehub 

http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/strehub.0.html 

-- 

A proposal for robust temperature compensation of 

circadian rhythms 

By Christian I. Hong, Emery D. Conrad and John J. Tyson 

Source: www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/2007 January 17 

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1773060 

The internal circadian rhythms of cells and organisms coordinate their 

physiological properties to the prevailing 24-h cycle of light and dark on 

earth. 


A proposal for robust temperature compensation of circadian rhythms 

The mechanisms generating circadian rhythms have four defining char- 

acteristics: they oscillate endogenously with period close to 24 h, entrain 

to external signals, suffer phase shifts by aberrant pulses of light or tem- 

perature, and compensate for changes in temperature over a range of 

10°C or more. 

Most theoretical descriptions of circadian rhythms propose that the 

underlying mechanism generates a stable limit cycle oscillation (in con- 

stant darkness or dim light), because limit cycles quite naturally possess 

the first three defining properties of circadian rhythms. 

On the other hand, the period of a limit cycle oscillator is typically very 

sensitive to kinetic rate constants, which increase markedly with temper- 

ature. 

Temperature compensation is therefore not a general property of limit 

cycle oscillations but must be imposed by some delicate balance of tem- 

perature dependent effects. 

However, "delicate balances" are unlikely to be robust to mutations. 

On the other hand, if circadian rhythms arise from a mechanism that con- 

centrates sensitivity into a few rate constants, then the "balancing act" is 

likely to be more robust and evolvable. 

We propose a switch-like mechanism for circadian rhythms that concen- 

trates period sensitivity in just two parameters, by forcing the system to 

alternate between a stable steady state and a stable limit cycle. 

To whom correspondence should be addressed. 


Role of the corpus callosum in speech comprehension: interfacing syntax and 

John J. Tyson, E-mail: tyson(at)vt.edu 

OutDoorLinks: 

Christian I. Hong 

http://www.colbud.hu/main_old/Fellow-lists/Bios2002-2003/HongChristian.html 

Emery D. Conrad 

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~emeryc/ 

John J. Tyson 

http://mpf.biol.vt.edu/ 

--- 

Role of the corpus callosum in speech 

comprehension: interfacing syntax and prosody. 

By Friederici AD, von Cramon DY amd Kotz SA. 

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?tmpl=NoSide- 

bar- 

file&db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=17196536&dopt=Abstract 


Role of the corpus callosum in speech comprehension: interfacing syntax and 

The role of the corpus callosum (CC) in the interhemispheric interaction 

of prosodic and syntactic information during speech comprehension was 

investigated in patients with lesions in the CC, and in healthy controls. 

The event-related brain potential experiment examined the effect of pro- 

sodic phrase structure on the processing of a verb whose argument struc- 

ture matched or did not match the prior prosody-induced syntactic 

structure. 

While controls showed an N400-like effect for prosodically mismatching 

verb argument structures, thus indicating a stable interplay between pros- 

ody and syntax, patients with lesions in the posterior third of the CC did 

not show this effect. 

Because these patients displayed a prosody-independent semantic N400 

effect, the present data indicate that the posterior third of the CC is the 

crucial neuroanatomical structure for the interhemispheric interplay of 

suprasegmental prosodic information and syntactic information. 

OutDoorLinks: 

Prof. Angela Friederici 

http://www.mpg.de/cgi-bin/mpg.de/person.cgi?persId=123415&lang=de&inst=kognition_neuro 

--- 


Pediatrician Creates Foundation, CD Series To Bring Healing Music to Pediatric 

Pediatrician Creates Foundation, CD Series To Bring 

Healing Music to Pediatric Patients 

Source: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/525793/ 

Description 

Dr. Raffi Tachdjian, a third-year pediatric fellow in the division of allergy 

and immunology at Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA, founded the 

nonprofit Children’s Music Fund to help bring music to his patients. 

Newswise — A UCLA pediatrician believes that patient care takes more 

than just medicine — a dose of music helps too. 

Dr. Raffi Tachdjian, a third-year pediatric fellow in the division of allergy 

and immunology at Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA, founded the 

nonprofit Children’s Music Fund to help bring music to his patients. 

“Most sick children spend their evenings in the hospital playing video 

games or watching TV and videos,” said Tachdjian. “Instead, music can 

help with their sadness, pain and overall coping mechanism.” 

To help raise funds to provide new instruments and music therapy to 

chronically ill pediatric patients, Tachdjian has mastered a series of three 

CDs featuring his own tracks, as well as those of internationally 

renowned artists who graciously donated their music. 

“The newest CD, ‘Open Your Window,’ is an uplifting album and incred- 

ible collaboration of some wonderful musical artists,” Tachdjian said. 

“The generosity of these artists and consumer support will allow children 

in need find comfort through music.” 



According to Tachdjian, who is researching the effects of music in a 

study conducted through the Pediatric Pain Program at Mattel Children’s 

Hospital, brain imaging studies have shown links between music and 

regions of the brain responsible for emotion, mathematics, memory and 

coordination. 

By interacting in a musical environment, hospitalized children can 

develop their overall mental processes while simultaneously improving 

their emotional well-being. 

Kids participating in the Children’s Music Fund program can choose 

from guitars, keyboards and percussion instruments. If the patient does 

not know how to play, Tachdjian said that they will be linked with an 

organization that provides instruction. 

To participate in and benefit from the program, patients are identified 

through a caregiver, medical staff or by themselves. Patients from any 

hospital are eligible. Tachdjian said the new instruments cost the founda- 

tion approximately $100 each. 

In the future, the Children’s Music Fund also plans to support a licensed 

music therapist at Mattel Children’s Hospital. 

The Children’s Music Fund was founded in 2001, while Tachdjian was a 

pediatric resident in Boston. 

“It started with one patient whose enthusiasm came through only when I 

held 'mini-concerts' for him in the playroom with other kids listening in, 

then playing on their respective shakers, bongos, etc.,” Tachdjian said. 

“We were doing basic music therapy before I knew what that was.” 



For more information on nominating a pediatric patient for an instru- 

ment, ordering CDs or supporting the Children’s Music Fund, email 

music@childrensmusicfund.org or visit http://www.childrensmusic- 

fund.org 

Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA is the highest rated children’s hospi- 

tal in Southern California and is a vital component of UCLA Medical 

Center, consistently ranked “Best in the West” in U.S. News & World 

Report’s annual survey. The hospital offers a full spectrum of primary 

and specialized medical care for infants, children and adolescents. The 

mission of Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA is to provide state of-the- 

art treatment for children in a compassionate atmosphere, as well as to 

improve the understanding and treatment of pediatric diseases. 

OutDoorLinks: 

childrensMusicFund 

http://www.childrensmusicfund.org/ 

Mattel Children’s Hospital 

http://www.mattel.ucla.edu/ 

--- 


Interference with Bottom-Up Feature Detection by Higher-Level Object 

Interference with Bottom-Up Feature Detection by 

Higher-Level Object Recognition 

By Li Zhaoping and and Nathalie Guyader 

Source: http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/ 

abstract?uid=PIIS0960982206024250 

Copyright © 2007 Cell Press. All rights reserved. 

Current Biology, Vol 17, 26-31, 09 January 2007 

Summary 

Drawing portraits upside down is a trick that allows novice artists to 

reproduce lower-level image features, e.g., contours, while reducing 

interference from higher-level face cognition. 

The target had a unique lower-level orientation feature but was identical 

to distractors in its higher-level object shape. Limiting the available 

processing time to suffice for lower- but not higher-level operations is a 

more general way of reducing interference. We elucidate this interference 

in a novel visual-search task to find a target among distractors. 

Through bottom-up processes, the unique feature attracted gaze to the 

target [1, 2, 3]. 

Subsequently, recognizing the attended object as identically shaped as 

the distractors, viewpoint invariant object recognition [4, 5] interfered. 

Consequently, gaze often abandoned the target to search elsewhere. If the 

search stimulus was extinguished at time T after the gaze arrived at the 


Interference with Bottom-Up Feature Detection by Higher-Level Object 

target, reports of target location were more accurate for shorter (T < 500 

ms) presentations. 

This object-to-feature interference, though perhaps unexpected, could 

underlie common phenomena such as the visual-search asymmetry that 

finding a familiar letter N among its mirror images is more difficult than 

the converse [6]. 

Our results should enable additional examination of known phenomena 

and interactions between different levels of visual processes. 

Corresponding author 

Li Zhaoping 

Email: z.li(at)ucl.ac.uk 

OutDoorLinks: 

Li Zhaoping 

http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~zhaoping/ 

-- 


Generation of extreme ultrasonics in rainforest katydids 

Generation of extreme ultrasonics in rainforest 

katydids 

By Fernando Montealegre, Glenn K. Morris and Andrew C. Mason 

Source: http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/209/24/4923 

Journal of Experimental Biology 209, 4923-4937 (2006) 

Published by The Company of Biologists 2006 

doi: 10.1242/jeb.02608 

Abstract: 

The calling song of an undescribed Meconematinae katydid (Tettigoni- 

idae) from South America consists of trains of short, separated pure-tone 

sound pulses at 129 kHz (the highest calling note produced by an Arthro- 

pod). 

Paradoxically, these extremely high-frequency sound waves are produced 

by a low-velocity movement of the stridulatory forewings. 

Sound production during a wing stroke is pulsed, but the wings do not 

pause in their closing, requiring that the scraper, in its travel along the 

file, must do so to create the pulses. 

We hypothesize that during scraper pauses, the cuticle behind the scraper 

is bent by the ongoing relative displacement of the wings, storing defor- 

mation energy. 

When the scraper slips free it unbends while being carried along the file 

and its deformation energy contributes to a more powerful, higher-rate, 


Generation of extreme ultrasonics in rainforest katydids 

one-tooth one-wave sound pulse, lasting no more than a few waves at 

129 000 Hz. 

Some other katydid species make pure-tone ultrasonic pulses. Wing 

velocities and carriers among these pure-tone species fall into two 

groups: 

(1) species with ultrasonic carriers below 40 kHz that have higher calling 

frequencies correlated with higher wing-closing velocities and higher 

tooth densities: for these katydids the relationship between average tooth 

strike rate and song frequency approaches 1:1, as in cricket escapement 

mechanisms; 

(2) a group of species with ultrasonic carriers above 40 kHz (that 

includes the Meconematinae): for these katydids closing wing velocities 

are dramatically lower and they make short trains of pulses, with inter- 

vening periods of silence greater than the duration of the pulses they sep- 

arate. 

This signal form may be the signature of scraper-stored elastic energy. 

OutDoorLinks: 

Fernando Montealegre Lizarralde 

http://www.ibun.unal.edu.co/instituto/inicio.htm 

Glenn K. Morris 

http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/~w3bio/faculty_and_research/morris.htm 


Music of the Hemispheres 

Andrew C. Mason 

http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~amason/ 

-- 


By CLIVE THOMPSON 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/31.12.2006 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/arts/music/ 

31thom.html?em&ex=1167714000&en=0c0280f9fe2eb67f&ei=5087 

“Listen to this,” Daniel Levitin said. “What is it?” 

He hit a button on his computer keyboard and out came a half-second clip 

of music. 

It was just two notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but I could imme- 

diately identify it: the opening lick to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.” 

Then he played another, even shorter snippet: a single chord struck once 

on piano. Again I could instantly figure out what it was: the first note in 

Elton John’s live version of “Benny and the Jets.” 

Dr. Levitin beamed. “You hear only one note, and you already know who 

it is,” he said. “So what I want to know is: How we do this? Why are we 

so good at recognizing music?” 



This is not merely some whoa-dude epiphany that a music fan might have 

while listening to a radio contest. Dr. Levitin has devoted his career to 

exploring this question. 

He is a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for Music Per- 

ception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal, per- 

haps the world’s leading lab in probing why music has such an intense 

effect on us. 

“By the age of 5 we are all musical experts, so this stuff is clearly wired 

really deeply into us,” said Dr. Levitin, an eerily youthful-looking 49, 

surrounded by the pianos, guitars and enormous 16-track mixers that 

make his lab look more like a recording studio. 

This summer he published “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton), a 

layperson’s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. 

Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific 

trivia. For example we learn that babies begin life with synesthesia, the 

trippy confusion that makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes 

as colors. 

Or that the cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is 

also wired to the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to 

music. 

His experiments have even suggested that watching a musician perform 

affects brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording. 

Dr. Levitin is singular among music scientists for actually having come 

out of the music industry. Before getting his Ph.D. he spent 15 years as a 



record producer, working with artists ranging from the Blue Öyster Cult 

to Chris Isaak. 

While still in graduate school he helped Stevie Wonder assemble a best- 

of collection; in 1992 Dr. Levitin’s sensitive ears detected that MCA 

Records had accidentally used third-generation backup tapes to produce 

seven Steely Dan CDs, and he embarrassed the label by disclosing it in 

Billboard magazine. 

He has earned nine gold and platinum albums, which he tucks in corners 

of his lab, office and basement at home. “They look a little scary when 

you put them all in one place, so I spread them around,” he said. 

Martin Grant, the dean of science at McGill, compares Dr. Levitin’s split 

professional personality to that of Brian Greene, the pioneering string- 

theory scientist who also writes mass-market books. 

“Some people are good popularizers, and some are good scientists, but 

not usually both at once,” Dr. Grant said. “Dan’s actually cutting edge in 

his field.” 

Scientifically, Dr. Levitin’s colleagues credit him for focusing attention 

on how music affects our emotions, turf that wasn’t often covered by pre- 

vious generations of psychoacousticians, who studied narrower questions 

about how the brain perceives musical sounds. 

“The questions he asks are very very musical, very concerned with the 

fact that music is an art that we interact with, not just a bunch of noises,” 

said Rita Aiello, an adjunct professor in the department of psychology at 

New York University. 



Ultimately, scientists say, his work offers a new way to unlock the mys- 

teries of the brain: how memory works, how people with autism think, 

why our ancestors first picked up instruments and began to play, tens of 

thousands of years ago. 

DR. LEVITIN originally became interested in producing in 1981, when 

his band — a punk outfit called the Mortals — went into the recording 

studio. None of the other members were interested in the process, so he 

made all the decisions behind the board. “I actually became a producer 

because I saw the producers getting all the babes,” he said. “They were 

stealing them from the guitarists.” He dropped out of college to work 

with alternative bands. 

Producers, he noted, were able to notice impossibly fine gradations of 

quality in music. Many could identify by ear the type of amplifiers and 

recording tape used on an album. 

“So I started wondering: How was the brain able to do this?” Dr. Levitin 

said. “What’s going on there, and why are some people better than oth- 

ers? And why is music such an emotional experience?” He began sitting 

in on neuroscience classes at Stanford University. 

“Even back then, Dan was never satisfied with the simple answer,” said 

Howie Klein, a former president of Reprise and Sire Records. “He was 

always poking and prodding.” 

By the ’90s Dr. Levitin was disenchanted with the music industry. “When 

they’re dropping Van Morrison and Elvis Costello because they don’t sell 

enough records,” he said, “I knew it was time to move on.” Academic 



friends persuaded him to pursue a science degree. They bet that he would 

have good intuitions on how to design music experiments. 

They were right. Traditionally music psychologists relied on “simple 

melodies they’d written themselves,” Dr. Levitin said. What could that 

tell anyone about the true impact of powerful music? 

For his first experiment he came up with an elegant concept: He stopped 

people on the street and asked them to sing, entirely from memory, one of 

their favorite hit songs. The results were astonishingly accurate. Most 

people could hit the tempo of the original song within a four-percent mar- 

gin of error, and two-thirds sang within a semitone of the original pitch, a 

level of accuracy that wouldn’t embarrass a pro. 

“When you played the recording of them singing alongside the actual 

recording of the original song, it sounded like they were singing along,” 

Dr. Levitin said. 

It was a remarkable feat. Most memories degrade and distort with time; 

why would pop music memories be so sharply encoded? Perhaps because 

music triggers the reward centers in our brains. In a study published last 

year Dr. Levitin and group of neuroscientists mapped out precisely how. 

Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. 

machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First 

the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and mean- 

ing of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area 

activated to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain’s sense 

of reward. 



The cerebellum, an area normally associated with physical movement, 

reacted too, responding to what Dr. Levitin suspected was the brain’s pre- 

dictions of where the song was going to go. As the brain internalizes the 

tempo, rhythmand emotional peaks of a song, the cerebellum begins 

reacting every time the song produces tension (that is, subtle deviations 

from its normal melody or tempo). 

“When we saw all this activity going on precisely in sync, in this order, 

we knew we had the smoking gun,” he said. “We’ve always known that 

music is good for improving your mood. But this showed precisely how 

it happens.” 

The subtlest reason that pop music is so flavorful to our brains is that it 

relies so strongly on timbre. Timbre is a peculiar blend of tones in any 

sound; it is why a tuba sounds so different from a flute even when they 

are playing the same melody in the same key. 

Popular performers or groups, Dr. Levitin argued, are pleasing not 

because of any particular virtuosity, but because they create an overall 

timbre that remains consistent from song to song. That quality explains 

why, for example, I could identify even a single note of Elton John’s 

“Benny and the Jets.” 

“Nobody else’s piano sounds quite like that,” he said, referring to Mr. 

John. “Pop musicians compose with timbre. Pitch and harmony are 

becoming less important.” 

Dr. Levitin dragged me over to a lab computer to show me what he was 

talking about. “Listen to this,” he said, and played an MP3. It was pretty 



awful: a poorly recorded, nasal-sounding British band performing, for 

some reason, a Spanish-themed ballad. 

Dr. Levitin grinned. “That,” he said, “is the original demo tape of the 

Beatles. It was rejected by every record company. And you can see why. 

To you and me it sounds terrible. But George Martin heard this and 

thought, ‘Oh yeah, I can imagine a multibillion-dollar industry built on 

this.’ 

THE largest audience that Dr. Levitin has performed in front of was 

1,000 people, when he played backup saxophone for Mel Tormé. Years of 

being onstage piqued Dr. Levitin’s interest in another aspect of musical 

experience: watching bands perform. Does the brain experience a live 

performance differently from a recorded one? 

To find out, he and Bradley Vines, a graduate student, devised an interest- 

ing experiment. They took two clarinet performances and played them 

for three groups of listeners: one that heard audio only; one that saw a 

video only; and one that had audio and video. As each group listened, 

participants used a slider to indicate how their level of tension was rising 

or falling. 

One rapid, complex passage caused tension in all groups, but less in the 

one watching and listening simultaneously. Why? Possibly, Dr. Levitin 

said, because of the performer’s body language: the clarinetist appeared 

to be relaxed even during that rapid-fire passage, and the audience picked 

up on his visual cues. The reverse was also true: when the clarinetist 

played in a subdued way but appeared animated, the people with only 

video felt more tension than those with only audio. 



In another, similar experiment the clarinetist fell silent for a few bars. 

This time the viewers watching the video maintained a higher level of 

excitement because they could see that he was gearing up to launch into a 

new passage. The audio-only listeners had no such visual cues, and they 

regarded the silence as much less exciting. 

This spring Dr. Levitin began an even more involved experiment to 

determine how much emotion is conveyed by live performers. In April he 

took participants in a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert — the con- 

ductor Keith Lockhart, five of the musicians and 15 audience members 

— and wired them with sensors to measure their state of arousal, includ- 

ing heart rate, body movements and muscle tension. 

At one point during the performance Mr. Lockhart swung his wrist with 

such force that a sensor attached to his cuff went flying off. Dr. Levitin’s 

team tried to reattach it with duct tape, until the conductor objected — 

“Did you just put duct tape on an Armani?” he asked — and lighter surgi- 

cal tape was used instead. 

The point of the experiment is to determine whether the conductor cre- 

ates noticeable changes in the emotional tenor of the performance. Dr. 

Levitin says he suspects there’s a domino effect: the conductor becomes 

particularly animated, transmits this to the orchestra and then to the audi- 

ence, in a matter of seconds. Mr. Lockhart is skeptical. “As a conductor,” 

he said, “I’m a causatory force for music, but I’m not a causatory force 

for emotion.” But Dr. Levitin is still crunching the data. 

“It might not turn out to be like that,” he said, “But wouldn’t it be cool if 

it did?” 



Dr. Levitin’s work has occasionally undermined some cherished beliefs 

about music. For example recent years have seen an explosion of “Baby 

Mozart” videos and toys, based on the idea — popular since the ’80s — 

that musical and mathematical ability are inherently linked. 

But Dr. Levitin argued that this could not be true, based on his study of 

people with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that leaves people 

with low intelligence. Their peak mental capacities are typically those of 

young child, with no ability to calculate quantities. Dr. Levitin once 

asked a woman with Williams to hold up her hand for five seconds; she 

left it in the air for a minute and a half. “No concept of time at all,” he 

said, “and definitely no math.” 

Yet people with Williams possess unusually high levels of musical abil- 

ity. 

One Williams boy Dr. Levitin met was so poorly coordinated he could 

not open the case to his clarinet. But once he was holding the instrument, 

his coordination problems vanished, and he could play fluidly. Music 

cannot be indispensably correlated with math, Dr. Levitin noted, if Will- 

iams people can play music. He is now working on a study that compares 

autistics — some of whom have excellent mathematical ability, but little 

musical ability — to people with Williams; in the long run, he said, he 

thinks it could help shed light on why autistic brains develop so differ- 

ently. 

Not all of Dr. Levitin’s idea have been easily accepted. He argues, for 

example, that music is an evolutionary adaptation: something that men 

developed as a way to demonstrate reproductive fitness. (Before you 

laugh, consider the sex lives of today’s male rock stars.) Music also 



helped socia groups cohere. “Music has got to be useful for survival, or 

we would have gotten rid of it years ago,” he said. 

But Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard known for his defense 

of evolutionary psychology, has publicly disparaged this idea. Dr. Pinker 

has called music “auditory cheesecake,” something pleasant but not evo- 

lutionarily nutritious. If it is a sexual signal for reproduction, then why, 

Dr. Pinker asked, does “a 60-year-old woman enjoy listening to classical 

music when she’s alone at home?” Dr. Levitin wrote an entire chapter 

refuting Dr. Pinker’s arguments; when I asked Dr. Pinker about Dr. Lev- 

itin’s book he said he hadn’t read it. 

Nonetheless Dr. Levitin plugs on, and sometimes still plugs in. He con- 

tinues to perform music, doing several gigs a year with Diminished Fac- 

ulties, a ragtag band composed entirely of professors and students at 

McGill. On a recent December afternoon members assembled in a cam- 

pus ballroom to do a sound check for their performance that evening at a 

holiday party. Playing a blue Stratocaster, Dr. Levitin crooned the Chris 

Isaak song “Wicked Game.” “I’m not a great guitarist, and I’m not a 

great singer,” he said. 

But he is not bad, either, and still has those producer’s ears. When 

“Wicked Game” ended, the bass player began noodling idly, playing the 

first few notes of a song that seemed instantly familiar to all the younger 

students gathered. “That’s Nirvana, right?” Dr. Levitin said, cocking his 

head and squinting. “ ‘Come As You Are.’ I love that song.” 

OutDoorLinks: 



Daniel Levitin 

http://ego.psych.mcgill.ca/levitin.html/ 

Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill 

http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/levitin/people.htm 

“This Is Your Brain on Music” 

http://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Brain-Music-Obsession/dp/ 

0525949690 

Martin Grant 

http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~grant/ 

Rita Aiello 

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/aiello/ 

Howie Klein 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howie_Klein 

Steven Pinker 

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/ 

-- 


20 December 2006 Singing for survival 


Source: http://www.alphagalileo.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=read- 

release&releaseid=517413 

It is well known that animals use song as a way of attracting mates, but 

researchers have found that gibbons have developed an unusual way of 

scaring off predators – by singing to them. 

The primatologists at the University of St Andrews discovered that wild 

gibbons in Thailand have developed a unique song as a natural defence to 

predators. 

Literally singing for survival, the gibbons appear to use the song not just 

to warn their own group members but those in neighbouring areas. 

They said, “We are interested in gibbon songs because, apart from human 

speech, these vocalisations provide a remarkable case of acoustic sophis- 

tication and versatility in primate communication. Our study has demon- 

strated that gibbons not only use unique songs as a response to predators, 

but that fellow gibbons understand them.” 

“This work is a really good indicator that non-human primates are able to 

use combinations of calls given in other contexts to relay new, and in this 

case, potentially life-saving information to one another. This type of ref- 

erential communication is commonplace in human language, but has yet 

to be widely demonstrated in some of our closest living relatives - the 

apes.” 



Gibbons are renowned amongst non-human primates for their loud and 

impressive songs that transmit over long distances and are commonly 

used in their daily routine when mating pairs ‘duet’ every morning. 

Songs in response to predators – mostly large cats, snakes and birds of 

prey – have been previously noted, but no extensive research into its pur- 

pose or understanding by other gibbons has been done until now. 

The team, Esther Clarke, Klaus Zuberbuhler (both St Andrews) and 

Ulrich Reichard (Max Planck Institute, Germany) observed the singing 

behaviour of white-handed gibbons in Khao Yai National Park, Thailand. 

They were able to identify individual gibbons according to their voice 

and describe gibbon songs as a ‘crescendo of notes’, formed by combin- 

ing up to seven notes – including ‘wa’, ‘hoo’, ‘sharp wow’ and ‘waoo’ – 

into more complex structures or ‘phrases’. 

The researchers wanted to establish whether there were any differences 

between the typical duetting morning song and that delivered in response 

to a predator. 

They noted subtle differences between the two songs, particularly in the 

early stages (first ten notes) of the song, which would be important in the 

case of predator encounters. 

Songs usually begun with a series of very soft notes, audible only at close 

range, but which rapidly changed into louder notes heard over long dis- 

tances. 



They said, “We found that gibbons produce loud and conspicuous songs 

in response to predators to alert kin, both near and far – since gibbons fre- 

quently change group compositions, neighbouring groups often consist 

of close relatives. 

We found that gibbons appear to use loud ‘long-distance’ calls to warn 

relatives in neighbouring areas and that those groups responded by join- 

ing in the singing, matching the correct predator song, demonstrating that 

they understood the difference between calls.” 

The researchers also observed the singing behaviour of gibbons spending 

time away from their home group. They noted that during predator songs 

within the group setting, the absent individual responded with his own 

song, before reappearing to join the group again. 

Because gibbons are unusually monogamous, it is thought that sexual 

selection is the main evolutionary mechanism for the evolution of gibbon 

song. 

The researchers concluded, “Vocal behaviour appears to function as a 

powerful tool to deal with immense sexual competition under which 

these primates operate, and it may not be surprising that they have 

evolved unusually complex vocal skills to deal with these social chal- 

lenges. 

“Not unlike humans, gibbons assemble a finite number of call units into 

more complex structures to convey different messages, and our data 

show that distant individuals are able to distinguish between different 

song types and understand what they mean. This study offers the first evi- 


PLoS ONE is launched by the Public Library of Science 

dence of a functionally referential communication system in a free-rang- 

ing ape species.” 

“Finding this ability among ape species, especially gibbons who in a 

sense bridge the evolutionary gap between great apes and monkeys, 

could shed light on when this ability developed in the primate lineage.” 

OutDoorLinks: 

Esther Clarke 

http://psy.st-andrews.ac.uk/people/postgrads.shtml 

Klaus Zuberbuhler 

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/psychology/people/lect/kz3.shtml 

Ulrich Reichard 

http://email.eva.mpg.de/~reichard/ 

Khao Yai National Park 

http://www.khaoyai.de/ 

-- 

PLoS ONE is launched by the Public Library of 

Science 

Source: www.alphagalileo.org/20 December 2006 



http://www.alphagalileo.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=read- 

release&releaseid=517384 

Until now, online scientific journals have been little more than electronic 

versions of the printed copy. Today, that all changes with the launch of 

PLoS ONE, which publishes primary research from all areas of science 

and employs both pre- and post-publication peer review to maximize the 

impact of every report it publishes. 

PLoS ONE is published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the 

open access publisher whose goal is to make the world’s scientific and 

medical literature a public resource. 

PLoS has taken a close look at the way scientific and medical publishing 

works now, and has asked how the Internet can be used to make it work 

better. 

As a result, virtually everything about PLoS ONE is new: the peer- 

review strategy, the production workflow, the author experience, the user 

interface, and the software that provides the publishing platform. 

Harold Varmus, Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of PLoS and Presi- 

dent of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, remarks, “For 

those of us who have been engaged with PLoS from its conception, the 

launch of PLoS ONE is tremendously exciting—this is the moment when 

we seize the full potential of the Internet to make communication of 

research findings an interactive and fully accessible process that gives 

greater value to what we do as scientists.” 



PLoS ONE was first described to the research community back in June 

2006, and the response to the proposal has been enthusiastic and sus- 

tained. 

Although PLoS ONE opened its doors to manuscript submissions only in 

August, it already receives in excess of 100 submissions each month and 

launches with the publication of 100 peer-reviewed research articles. 

The volume of articles is unprecedented for a journal launch, and is an 

indication of the strong support within the research community for the 

PLoS ONE approach. 

The articles published today have been peer-reviewed under the guidance 

of an extensive academic editorial board, and cover a broad range of 

research topics, from basic molecular science to clinical studies. 

Specific subjects include the evolution of language, the control of rabies, 

mimicry of jumping spiders, and Alzheimer’s disease. 

And because the articles are published under an open access license, 

these scientific riches are free for everyone to read, reuse, and build 

upon. 

The work published at the launch of PLoS ONE is impressive in its own 

right, but the power of this project really lies in what happens after publi- 

cation. 

In almost all other journals, publication of a research paper is a full stop. 

The next significant step forward will be the publication of another paper 

following on from the previous work. 



But in PLoS ONE, as soon as an article is published, a conversation 

between authors and readers can begin. There might be a question about 

a method that is described in the article, a link to another useful work or 

resource that can be added, or an alternative interpretation that can be 

offered for some of the results. 

In each case, readers and authors can respond to the addition, and every- 

one else can benefit from the resulting dialogue. The possibilities are 

without limit, and the applications of this technology will no doubt hold 

some surprises. 

The beta version5 of PLoS ONE that is launched today is a work-in- 

progress. It is presented in beta because PLoS wishes the community to 

help shape PLoS ONE, and the underlying publishing platform, into its 

most valuable form. 

The software is open source, and will form the first part of an innovative 

and flexible publishing system that will be developed over the next two 

years and will be available to all groups for storing, disseminating, and 

sharing literature and data. 

PLoS ONE will accelerate the pace of scientific research because publi- 

cation is faster and more interactive than ever before. No longer need 

there be months of delay between submission and publication. Now there 

is a way to share not only the results of research but also the responses, 

ideas, and opinions of fellow researchers as well. 

OutDoorLinks: 



PLoS ONE 

http://www.plosone.org/ 

Public Library of Science (PLoS) 

http://www.plos.org/ 

Harold Varmus 

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1989/varmus-autobio.html 

http://www.mskcc.org/mskcc/html/515.cfm

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