Abstract
This special issue of Psychology of Music features work presented at the inaugural Nordoff Robbins Plus Research Conference ‘Music and Communication: Music Therapy and Music Psychology,’ which was held at the Nordoff Robbins London Centre in September 2013. The conference was co-organized by the Research Department at Nordoff Robbins and the Centre for Music and Science, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. The event brought together an international group of over 100 researchers, practitioners and practitioner-researchers to share ideas, definitions and methodologies, as well as technical and practical knowledge in areas related to music and communication.
The conference demonstrated how rare it is – and how exciting it can be – to have a focused dialogue between those who think about music and communication from different disciplinary perspectives and across different contexts of music-making. The dialogue at the conference included keynote presentations by prominent music therapist Felicity North and leading music researcher Ian Cross, with direct responses to each presentation invited from both the music therapy research and music psychology traditions. Other presentations at the conference were in the form of posters in which the authors discussed their research with conference attendees, and the day included group discussions convened to include members of both fields.
This special issue reflects the breadth of this dialogue. Each contribution was reviewed by members of both fields, with an aim of producing articles that would be both accessible and informative to multiple audiences; this was particularly important since both of us, as editors, are not trained as music therapists or music therapy researchers. Although the articles brought together here do not include the full range of what was presented at the conference, they give a sense of the wide range of topics, populations and methods the conference addressed.
The topics range from the nature of intentionality and entrainment in music and speech, to how music therapy affects emotion regulation and self-esteem in children with language impairment, to the structure and organization of musical and linguistic interaction in music lessons and communicative groupings within a therapy trio. The populations studied range from hearing and deaf classical piano and flute players, to music therapy clients with limited verbal skills and learning disabilities, to music conservatory students, and a trio of child, mother and music therapist.
The methods are just as wide-ranging, from laboratory experiments to observations of performers, of music therapy sessions and of one-to-one music lessons, to quantitative analysis and modelling of expressive performance, and to reviews of ethnomusicological and brain science findings. Taken together, these articles honour the perspectives and strengths of both music therapy and music psychology traditions, and they allow unusual access to ways of thinking and talking (and hearing and seeing) from the different fields. As a collection they also provide insight into the opportunities for collaboration between music therapists and music psychologists.
The opportunities for rewarding, enjoyable and productive conversation stem from important similarities and overlaps in starting assumptions. Both fields see music as central to understanding perceptual, communicative and emotional processes. Both fields – in different ways, and not uniformly within fields – see music as having an important relationship with language and with communication more generally. Both fields see temporal relations and synchrony between music-makers as key, although the fields’ histories in thinking about these issues differ, with improvisation having a longer standing centrality in music therapy than in music psychology. Both fields see strong relationships between music-makers’ perception of musical (tonal, rhythmic, etc.) structure and how they respond to the music.
But, as is evident in this special issue, there are also some notable differences in approaches and underlying commitments between the fields. We propose that it may be useful to keep these differences in mind when reading the articles (and perhaps when engaging in conversations across the disciplinary divides more generally). Here we list three that became evident to us in putting together the special issue.
Differences in uses of technical and even non-technical terms
As the most obvious example, the term ‘music’ for some music therapists can be used to refer to all bodily communication between interacting partners, whether there is sound involved or not, and the distinction between music and other modes of communication is not important or relevant for many therapeutic purposes. For most music psychologists what counts as music-making (or its components) and what doesn’t is more bounded, and the boundaries may fall in different places. This kind of alternate use of the same term can make understanding the evidentiary basis of claims made on either side more complicated, in that each side has a wealth of prior experience and understandings that their use of the terms is building on.
Investigators on either side may be lulled into imagining a greater degree of shared understanding than exists because so many musical and research terms – like ‘entrainment,’ ‘interaction,’ ‘emotion,’ or even ‘communication’ – are commonly used in both communities with only partially overlapping meanings. The corollary concern is that investigators can end up thinking they fundamentally disagree with each other when they actually do not. This is compounded by the likelihood that different researchers focus on different aspects or levels of the same phenomena – for example, investigating one feature of a musical process (rhythmic synchrony, or musical affect) or considering a whole musical interaction – and so the scope of what their terms apply to can vary. Given that co-performing musicians themselves do not necessarily fully share understanding of their music making or how their partners characterize it (Schober & Spiro, 2014), it is perhaps not surprising that researchers and practitioners with different backgrounds can interpret each other’s musical terms differently.
Recognizing the potential for this sort of ‘undetected conceptual misalignment’ (Schober, 2005) is, we believe, important for advancing dialogue between music therapists and music psychologists.
Different approaches to what counts as needed and trustworthy evidence for claims
Music therapy practitioners and scientists are engaged in different enterprises. Practitioners need to intervene with clients who need help right now, whether or not the systematic research that scientists desire has been carried out. Scientists are looking for generalizable understanding of musical phenomena. Practitioners may be so used to focusing on the particularities of a relationship with an individual client that the scientific desire for generalization doesn’t seem relevant or desirable. Scientists may be so focused on broader-brush questions that they can be inattentive to (or even uninterested in) the subtleties that are central to an individual case, and they may ask for a level of certainty about causation and about a clinician’s interpretation of a client’s behaviours or intentions that is most often not available (although with the right research resources and knowledge it could be).
These differences in focus tend to be associated with different perspectives on the evidentiary basis for claims. There is a range of perceptions of how reliably self-reports – by music listeners, by music therapists, by service users – accurately reflect people’s mental or emotional life. Some music therapy researchers are sceptical about what can be learned only from formal interviews rather than from additional ethnographic ‘hanging out’ with people. As we see it, this scepticism is similar to some music psychologists’ scepticism towards self-reports more generally, which leads them to favour behavioural or physiological evidence instead.
The different focuses also tend to be associated with a range of perspectives on different methods of observing music-making and music listening. For some, observations of music-making and music-listening are only trustworthy when carried out in natural settings with no intervention by researchers. For others, observations are more trustworthy when carried out in the laboratory or in a context that researchers have in some way controlled. A distinct (though not unrelated) difference is in how researchers see the legitimacy of selecting examples of salient moments of musical interaction for analysis and presentation, as opposed to analysing a full corpus of interactions. This range is likely related to where investigators fall in their commitments to focusing on parts as opposed to the whole, and on parts-in-context as opposed to parts-out-of-context.
These scientist-practitioner differences are, of course, not unique to music psychology and music therapy, but they are profound, and they are an important backdrop to the dialogue this special issue presents.
Different assumptions about the role of participants’ purposes and contexts in music-making and music-listening
Music therapists are particularly sensitized to the different purposes behind music-making and how much this might change participants’ understandings of what is going on (e.g., Stige & Aarø, 2012; Stige Ansdell, Elefant, & Pavlicevic, 2010). Music therapists have also tended to have a more variegated view of music as a communal, social and communicative practice than many music psychologists, with explicit discussion about how the cognitive and affective processes involved in music-making can differ in different contexts (e.g., Meadows, 2011; Pavlicevic, 2003). The assumption is that music used with therapeutic intentions operates in different ways – for clients, therapists, and others – than music used for recreation, professional rehearsal, religious observation, or personal self-regulation.
Although some music psychologists have focused on the effects of contextual variability on music-listening and movement to music (e.g. Demorest, Morrison, Jungbluth, & Beken, 2008; Himberg & Thompson, 2011), the implicit assumption behind much music psychology research has been that what is learned about music listening or production in one setting with one type of participant with a particular purpose (e.g., participating in an experiment for course credit, rehearsing for a performance) generalizes to other kinds of participants, settings and purposes. Even if there is growing awareness among music psychologists that individual variability and expertise are important, in much of the research it has not yet been a common starting assumption that details of setting and purpose might alter fundamental musical processes.
These differences in assumptions affect the extent to which investigators see work from the other community as relevant to their own concerns.
We don’t mean to suggest that music therapists and music psychologists form monolithic communities. Both communities include a wide spectrum of methods, beliefs, ideologies, theories and other disciplines they feel they are close to. Just as there is a range of schools and types within music therapy, there is no single licensure or degree for a researcher who publishes in a music psychology journal, who could just as easily be trained as a neuroscientist or computer scientist as a psychologist or musicologist. There is no guarantee that two music psychologists will agree on more than a music psychologist and a music therapist. Indeed, in putting this issue together it has been interesting to observe that some of the differences in stances and starting assumptions across researchers do not fit neatly into a music therapy vs. music psychology divide. For example, it seems that on both sides there is a range of views on the extent to which basic emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness) can be embodied in a musical example as opposed to often associated with it.
New dialogue about musical communication
From our perspective, music therapists and music psychologists have much to learn from each other, and the opportunities for enriched understanding about music and communication from the kinds of dialogue represented in this special issue are far-reaching. As we see it, the most straightforward dialogue is likely to happen between researchers (whether music therapists or music psychologists) who have similar judgments on the kinds of dimensions we have outlined here: what can and cannot be learned from musicians’ or therapists’ or clients’ self-reports, how much can be learned from work that studies a musical phenomenon in a context abstracted from real-world settings, or how much they believe that emotions reside ‘in’ music as opposed to in music-makers’ and music-listeners’ reactions to music. Researchers who are aware of where their own work fits in such dimensions of variability are more likely to be able to converse with researchers with different commitments. Researchers who understand the different agendas underlying different brands of research are more likely to find the relevant points of connection. And researchers who recognize the limitations of their own methods are more likely to learn from and benefit from research from a different perspective. This is, of course, also the case for interdisciplinary conversations well beyond those between music therapists and music psychologists.
We see an opportunity for a new kind of research that uses the strengths of each field, with a recognition of individual differences and situational complexity combined with sampling methods that allow generalizability. Whether the focus is on interactive or individual processes of music-making and communication, across therapeutic or non-therapeutic settings, it would be interesting to see what can emerge, for example, if music therapy practitioner-researchers can use their clinical experience to participate in shaping the questions a music psychologist might ask, or if music psychologists can contribute to designing music therapy research that also answers music psychology questions.
We are very pleased that this issue gives the opportunity to hear and see audio and video examples of music therapy, which have not always been accessible to outsiders. Many thanks to the authors of the pieces in this issue, as well as to the reviewers, for their commitment to engaging in the kind of dialogue that we believe has such potential.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.