We at the Center for Music Therapy desire to provide the best care for our clients. That’s why we offer free screenings to assess your needs and begin moving towards reaching you and/or your loved ones goals!
What is Music Therapy?
Why Music?
Music influences human behavior by affecting the brain and subsequently other bodily structures in ways that are observable, identifiable, measurable, and predictable, thereby providing the necessary foundation for therapeutic applications.
Why Music Therapy?
Music Therapists use these influences to affect specific behaviors and outcomes.
What is Music Therapy?
Music Therapy is the enhancement of human capabilities through the planned use of musical influences on brain functioning. For more information and examples, click here to watch videos.
Why give so much attention to the brain?
Because the brain is the command center and place where all our senses and experience come together to be processed and understood then perceived, expressed or acted on by we humans.
Music is a human phenomenon. It's the only sensory experience that can activate all areas of the brain at the same time SIMULTANEOUSLY! This creates powerful new potentials to our clients for the development of new neuropathways. When we discuss brain plasticity theory,it takes extensive and hard work to stimulate and build these pathways but you get exciting results . Pictured below is an person listening to music during and MRI Scan. All the brain areas activated in the MRI image light up like a Christmas Tree.
Music Therapy is useful because music triggers whole brain processes and functioning which directly affect one's cognitive, emotional, and physical functions and abilities. With the newest understandings of Neuroplasticity models music therapy has become a core strategy used in leading rehabilitation, education and wellness programs.
How else is music therapy useful?
From the social and cultural perspective music permeates our society and culture making it familiar and easily accessible for our clients. Thus, a professional music therapist can select and apply appropriate music for effective treatment of our clients that reflects their culture and personal identity. This makes treatment a more personal and individualized experience. This approach reflects a person's preferences which is more normalizing and effective then a traditionally more sterile or generic procedure. This also contributes to making music therapy based treatment often faster and more effective than treatment without music. Additionally, our clients report the treatment is simply more enjoyable. Healing the spirit as well as the body during treatment is old wisdom, "We're the spirit leads the body tends to follow."
Full Spectrum Music Therapy
A full spectrum model of music therapy is offered at the Center for Music Therapy, Inc. We incorporate the wide breadth of music-based interventions, techniques, research, and philosophies to meet the individual needs of our diverse client population. Music therapy is used as a tool to assist in making non-musical gains in order to apply the focus of the patient's music therapy treatment directly to the patient's desired needs, outcomes, and appropriate diagnosis and treatment setting.
To achieve this we work with an interdisciplinary model which incorporates medical, psycho-dynamic, person centered, neurological, and biochemical research and philosophies. A core strategy we use is a cognitive/behavioral approach in all our sessions. You may hear the therapist catching the patient being good by using music and verbal praise as reinforcement at a 4 to 1 ratio to help sculpt and shape behavior. You may also hear them discuss psychodynamic principles, such as transference/counter transference or aspects of the iso-principle. Although medicine, hard science, education, neurology and psychology are usually considered separate fields of exploration and treatment, we find that information from each field can often be applied for the benefit of another. Thus, we integrate these fields in our practice to yield new and enhanced benefits for our clients.
With all the specialized training and expertise of our staff and the advanced research our field has to offer, it would be easy to fall into an expert or academic role. Yet with all the knowledge and training gained from years of clinical practice comes an increased awareness of what we still do not know. Instead with humbleness and gratitude we courageously strive to learn and explore further with our clients the exciting potential they have desire to achieve in their lives. We have an appreciation for the unmeasurable universal power of the human spirit and music therapy's capacity to touch, harness and connect with it. The Center for Music Therapy, Inc. supports in every therapeutic interaction that music is a defining feature of our humanity and gives voice to our deepest and most intimate experiences. Therefore with this respect and understanding we deeply value the power of each therapeutic moment and the persons within it with great awe and care.
For more information, check out our FAQs page.