This essay addresses the relationship of improvisation and identity. Biographicalresearch that was conducted by the author into professional musicians’ lifelong learning showed the huge importance of improvisation for personal expression. Musically, the concept of sound appeared to serve as a strong metaphor for identity. In addition, ethnographic research conducted as part of the project Music for Life in London, and published by Smilde, Page and Alheit in 2014, where musicians work in creative music workshops with people with dementia and their caregivers, shed light on the use of improvisation as an expression of the identity of ‘the other’ (i.e. the person with dementia). Sound again appeared to serve as a metaphor for identity. The essay draws on the work of George Herbert Mead on identity, which distinguishes between the personal ‘I’ and the social ‘Me’, and points out that both aspects are essential for the self. In this sense, improvisation can be conceived as a means of communication thatconnects the personal with the social. Furthermore, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another (1992), it is shown that this concept of improvisation in relation to personal and social identity may be transferred to forms of community engagement through music. However, despite its huge importance, improvisation is still often marginalised in specialist higher music education, particularly in conservatoires, and the essay finishes with a strong plea for conservatoires to take up their role in the midst of society and embed improvisation in the core of the curriculum.
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Stress is increasingly being recognized as one of the main factors that is negatively affecting our health, and therefore there is a need to regulate daily stress and prevent long-term stress. This need seems particularly important for adults with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) who have been shown to have more difficulties coping with stress than adults without intellectual disabilities. Hence, the development of music therapy interventions for stress reduction, particularly within populations where needs may be greater, is becoming increasingly important. In order to gain more insight into the practice-based knowledge on how music therapists lower stress levels of their patients with MID during music therapy sessions, we conducted focus group interviews with music therapists working with adults with MID (N = 13) from different countries and clinical institutions in Europe. Results provide an overview of the most-used interventions for stress reduction within and outside of music. Data-analysis resulted in the further specification of therapeutic goals, intervention techniques, the use of musical instruments, and related therapeutic change factors. The main findings indicate that music therapists used little to no receptive (e.g., music listening) interventions for stress reduction, but preferred to use active interventions, which were mainly based on musical improvisation. Results show that three therapy goals for stress relief could be distinguished. The goal of “synchronizing” can be seen as a sub goal because it often precedes working on the other two goals of “tension release” or “direct relaxation,” which can also be seen as two ways of reaching stress reduction in adults with MID through music therapy interventions. Furthermore, the tempo and the dynamics of the music are considered as the most important musical components to reduce stress in adults with MID. Practical implications for stress-reducing music therapy interventions for adults with MID are discussed as well as recommendations for future research.
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Seeing improvisation as something that really needs its place in conservatoire training and education may be more or less ‘new’. However improvisation itself is of course not at all new and has existed since as long as we can remember. I will not go into that any further, it would take not a single address but a symposium of at least two weeks.
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Introduction: Depression can be a serious problem in young adult students. There is a need to implement and monitor prevention interventions for these students. Emotion-regulating improvisational music therapy (EIMT) was developed to prevent depression. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of EIMT for use in practice for young adult students with depressive symptoms in a university context. Method: A process evaluation was conducted embedded in a larger research project. Eleven students, three music therapists and five referrers were interviewed. The music therapists also completed evaluation forms. Data were collected concerning client attendance, treatment integrity, musical components used to synchronise, and experiences with EIMT and referral. Results: Client attendance (90%) and treatment integrity were evaluated to be sufficient (therapist adherence 83%; competence 84%). The music therapists used mostly rhythm to synchronise (38 of 99 times). The students and music therapists reported that EIMT and its elements evoked changes in all emotion regulation components. The students reported that synchronisation elicited meaningful experiences of expressing joy, feeling heard, feeling joy and bodily responses of relaxation. The music therapists found the manual useful for applying EIMT. The student counsellors experienced EIMT as an appropriate way to support students due to its preventive character. Discussion: EIMT appears to be a feasible means of evoking changes in emotion regulation components in young adult students with depressive symptoms in a university context. More studies are needed to create a more nuanced and evidence-based understanding of the feasibility of EIMT, processes of change and treatment integrity.
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Depression is a highly prevalent and seriously impairing disorder. Evidence suggests that music therapy can decrease depression, though the music therapy that is offered is often not clearly described in studies. The purpose of this study was to develop an improvisational music therapy intervention based on insights from theory, evidence and clinical practice for young adults with depressive symptoms. The Intervention Mapping method was used and resulted in (1) a model to explain how emotion dysregulation may affect depressive symptoms using the Component Process Model (CPM) as a theoretical framework; (2) a model to clarify as to how improvisational music therapy may change depressive symptoms using synchronisation and emotional resonance; (3) a prototype Emotion-regulating Improvisational Music Therapy for Preventing Depressive symptoms (EIMT-PD); (4) a ten-session improvisational music therapy manual aimed at improving emotion regulation and reducing depressive symptoms; (5) a program implementation plan; and (6) a summary of a multiple baseline study protocol to evaluate the effectiveness and principles of EIMT-PD. EIMT-PD, using synchronisation and emotional resonance may be a promising music therapy to improve emotion regulation and, in line with our expectations, reduce depressive symptoms. More research is needed to assess its effectiveness and principles.
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The realization of one’s musical ideas at the keyboard is dependent on the ability to transform sound into movement, a process called audiomotor transformation. Using fMRI, we investigated cerebral activations while classically-trained improvising and non-improvising musicians imagined playing along with recordings of familiar and unfamiliar music excerpts. We hypothesized that audiomotor transformation would be associated with the recruitment of dedicated cerebral networks, facilitating aurally-cued performance. Results indicate that while all classically-trained musicians engage a left-hemisphere network involved in motor skill and action recognition, only improvising musicians additionally recruit a right dorsal frontoparietal network dedicated to spatially-driven motor control. Mobilization of this network, which plays a crucial role in the real-time transformation of imagined or perceived music into goal-directed action, may be held responsible not only for the stronger activation of auditory cortex we observed in improvising musicians in response to the aural perception of music, but also for the superior ability to play ‘by ear’ which they demonstrated in a follow-up study. The results of this study suggest that the practice of improvisation promotes the implicit acquisition of hierarchical music syntax which is then recruited in top-down manner via the dorsal stream during music performance. In a study of audiomotor transformation in Parkinson patients, we demonstrated a dissociation between dysprosody in speech and music. While patients’ speech could reliably be distinguished from that of healthy individuals, purely on the basis of aural perception, no difference was observed between patients and healthy controls in their ability to sing improvised melodies.
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Music interventions are used for stress reduction in a variety of settings because of the positive effects of music listening on both physiological arousal (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure, and hormonal levels) and psychological stress experiences (e.g., restlessness, anxiety, and nervousness). To summarize the growing body of empirical research, two multilevel meta-analyses of 104 RCTs, containing 327 effect sizes and 9,617 participants, were performed to assess the strength of the effects of music interventions on both physiological and psychological stress-related outcomes, and to test the potential moderators of the intervention effects. Results showed that music interventions had an overall significant effect on stress reduction in both physiological (d = .380) and psychological (d = .545) outcomes. Further, moderator analyses showed that the type of outcome assessment moderated the effects of music interventions on stress-related outcomes. Larger effects were found on heart rate (d = .456), compared to blood pressure (d = .343) and hormone levels (d = .349). Implications for stress-reducing music interventions are discussed.
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Music interventions are used for stress reduction in a variety of settings because of the positive effects of music listening on both physiological arousal (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure, and hormonal levels) and psychological stress experiences (e.g., restlessness, anxiety, and nervousness). To summarize the growing body of empirical research, two multilevel meta-analyses of 104 RCTs, containing 327 effect sizes and 9,617 participants, were performed to assess the strength of the effects of music interventions on both physiological and psychological stress-related outcomes, and to test the potential moderators of the intervention effects. Results showed that music interventions had an overall significant effect on stress reduction in both physiological (d = .380) and psychological (d = .545) outcomes. Further, moderator analyses showed that the type of outcome assessment moderated the effects of music interventions on stress-related outcomes. Larger effects were found on heart rate (d = .456), compared to blood pressure (d = .343) and hormone levels (d = .349). Implications for stress-reducing music interventions are discussed.
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