The Importance Of Music Therapy

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During the passing years, the constantly changing cultural, historical and social context of music reception and production is the reflection of music aesthetics theories. This and the changing perceptions of music in the history of music therapy, reflects on how the ideas of music and healing in medical theory are constantly changing (Wigram, Pedersen and Bonde, 2002). Even though the above is still changing, the characteristic of music and music making that music therapy rely on are the emotions that music listening reflects. The positive uses of music for emotion regulation helps many people nowadays. Mental illness is a common phenomenon that affects many people in the world. The increase in the occurrence of these disabilities have led…show more content…
Children with autism has many difficulties in initiating and sustaining joint attention and mutuality. The above became the primary therapeutic target for music therapy, as improvisational music making, provides a useful tool for the children. As music converted a therapeutic medium, therapist’s improvisational music started to emerge to autistic children making them realize that the music echoes something to do with them. Autistic children’s expressive or non-expressive production reflects and matches in the therapist’s music and the therapist is able to ‘meet the child’ in music. Additionally, clinical reports and research studies have shown that the many different levels of structure that music contains, along with the imaginatively and instinctively flexible music improvisation, attracts children with autism attention and provokes their engagement, promoting mutual development, interactive communication and play. Music therapy for children with ASD relies on the growth of musical creativity that involves a delicate process of learning inside musical contexts and structures that later develop alterability in intonation, dynamics, duration and tempo (Wigram and Gold,…show more content…
Improvisational music therapy (IMT), used for therapy methods, is when the therapist and the client improvise, creating music by using instruments, their voices and movement. IMT, through improvisational music making, it makes use for the expression of emotion and social engagement. Based on this, there are evidence of IMT effectiveness to children with autism, for joint attention, social interactions, nonverbal communication skills, their relationship with their parents and for affective initiating and sharing behaviour. Geretsegger et al., (2015) through their research mentions that although the IMT has no specific techniques, can address concurrently various dimensions of ASD core characteristics, as a multipart and comprehensive

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