As well as teaching at the University of Aalborg in Denmark, Tony Wigram practices music therapy in Britain. There he works with children with communication and developmental disorders like autism and similar conditions.
“I think the most important area that music therapists are evaluating quite often with children with these particular problems is their social interaction, their imagination and their creativity,” says Wigram. “And because of this, you’re enabling them, you’re empowering them to communicate in a non-verbal way, because most of the conventional ways of communicating for these particular children are quite inhibited, delayed, or disordered. So we’re trying to create a potential for them to communicate.
But that means that you do need to analyze the musical material: the way they play a drum, the way they bang it, or the instruments they choose to use, and you need to understand by the analysis, what is the meaning of what they’re saying. Are they telling you that they’re feeling angry, or they’re frustrated, or are they telling you that they’re happy and they want to communicate with you.”
Wigram talks of a five-year-old boy who was referred to him because he was thought to be autistic. He consistently talked about the toilet and mentioned the word ‘toilet’ about 25 times in the first three minutes of the meeting! He was interested in the toilet because he wanted to watch the water go down, not because he wanted to use the toilet.
“In the music therapy session I didn’t use verbal language with him at all,” says Wigram. “I gave him some drums to play and he stood with the drum either side, and he banged the sticks up and down. I mean his playing was very skilful; very quickly he showed me that he had great rhythmic capacity.
He could hear the rhythms I was playing and reproduce them. And then, what I think was most significant, was that he was able to quickly anticipate and understand turn taking. He played a few notes, then stopped and waited for me. And I played back to him. And we built up a process that was added to by the musical dynamic.”
Talking about the child, Wigram says that he became louder, he became softer, he got faster and slower. “Everything was reciprocal and that’s quite untypical in children with autism. This little boy showed a great capacity for creative improvisation at the same time in this dialogue as respecting and listening to what I was doing.
So it was some very good evidence that this child had much more potential perhaps, at a non-verbal level, for communicating than had previously been estimated because of his rather repetitive and echolalic speech patterns.”
Alan Lem, a music therapist and PhD student at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, researches Tibetan bowls. “They are probably the most fascinating sound-producing tools for the purpose of music therapy, because of their multi-frequency characteristics,” he says.
“A common experience amongst my clients is that the person feels an immediate sensation of warmth and a certain feeling of being centered. People achieve very quickly a state of relaxation when I use the bowls, and also people go very quickly into an altered state of consciousness.”
According to Alan, he feels people tend to use conventional music more often than just sound. But he thinks the scope and potential for the use of bowls is tremendous, because “we’re dealing with sound more than just music. It means that the client can very often relate quicker, because there are no boundaries, there are no rights and wrongs, as to whether we play a right note or a wrong note”.
When the bowls strike, it is a dissonating sound. It is immediately followed by a warm tone. From a psychological point of view, it is pure tension release. It alternates between tension and relaxation. So a person, by listening to these sounds or playing them, can immediately identify with the two states and enter a state of relaxation.
The analysis and the scientific evaluation of the effect of music as therapy is developing, and with the increasing demand in health systems for evidence-based practice, we could easily conclude that there’s proportionately a lot more research going on in music therapy than there is in other professions.