Fox News Spotlights Mozart During Colonoscopy

The Daily Muse     


Welcome to the Daily Muse feature of Music Makes Sense!  This daily update brings you up to the minute news about music and music therapy as it relates to our professions, events and individual lives.  You can follow the daily entries by subscribing to Music Makes Sense on Twitter or by "Liking" the Facebook page for Music Makes Sense.  Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

This story was intriguing because I had recently been talking with some doctors that I know about extending some of my previous research. Many years ago I looked at the effect of sedative music on the anxiety levels of patients having pacemaker implant or heart caths. It was a small study and I am thinking about expanding on this ideas with more participants and also using live music instead of recorded music.


One of the limitations in my previous study was getting enough participants.  It was time consuming seeing only 2 or 3 patients per week.  One of the doctors that I spoke to recently suggested that I use music during colonoscopy procedures.  He argued that they do ten times as many of these procedures as pacemaker implants or angioplasty.  The patients still must be awake and their anxiety levels are usually elevated, so they would make good candidates for the use of music to affect anxiety.


The Fox News story is not talking about music therapy, but demonstrates what people already inherently know, that music can be a powerful influence on both the patient and the treatment team.  It is also pointed out in the video that using music is very cost-effective.  This is a great benefit to talk about in marketing music therapy!

Skypedrum With Kat Fulton!

The 3rd Semi-Annual Skypedrum event at 

Florida State University

We held our Skype drumming event today in my music therapy drumming class.  Kat Fulton has been very gracious in facilitating simulated drum circles for my class the last three semesters.  Her experiences using drumming in the real world have been an invaluable resource for my students!  I love giving them a different perspective and bringing in guest lecturers to share their specific knowledge about target populations.  

Teaching via Skype has its own learning curve and sets of rules, but facilitating drum circles over Skype is still in uncharted territory.  Kat has done more than anyone I know to develop some protocols for facilitating drumming over Skype.  One of the most difficult things to overcome is the time delay.  Her strategy to help manage this phenomenon during our session was to encourage the group to self-facilitate.  Essentially, she gave instructions and then had a person from the group do the leading.  But Kat was also able to do some facilitating on her own by ignoring the sounds coming from her computer and just staying in time with a chant and drum response.  This worked well for a class of music students who could keep a steady beat, but I wonder how well it would work with real clients?  Something to explore!

Today we were studying about the psychiatric setting.  Kat introduced an activity called, "Evolution."  She credited the activity to Arthur Hull, but it worked very well as an activity that could be adapted for use in a psychiatric setting.  You can see that in the picture above the students are seated in a circle facing outward.  There actually had been small percussion instruments placed on each chair before they were sitting down.  They went around the circle and stopped together at times in front of different chairs to play a group groove/rhythm.  After each person had played all the instruments, Kat had them talk about what instruments they liked and didn't like.  This discussion easily transferred into real life examples related to social interaction, personalities, mood and emotional expression.  A great stimulus for group discussion and processing!  

Than you, Kat for another wonderful installment of Skypedrum!   

The iPad Taking Music Therapy and the World of Special Education by Storm!

The Daily Muse     


Welcome to the Daily Muse feature of Music Makes Sense!  This daily update brings you up to the minute news about music and music therapy as it relates to our professions, events and individual lives.  You can follow the daily entries by subscribing to Music Makes Sense on Twitter or by "Liking" the Facebook page for Music Makes Sense.  Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

The iPad has recently taken the world of music therapy by storm! There were several presentations at the music therapy National Conference this year about different apps and uses for the iPad and almost every therapist I know has an iPad on their Christmas wish list!


There are new apps coming on-line every month that aim to help children and others with disabilities communicate and learn concepts. I think the reason that the iPad has been so successful is its ease of use, size, weight and just the fact that it is cool! Kids especially love anything that is cool! The typical vocal output devices in the world of special education have been clunky, heavy, and a headache to program. They are also limited by their function and not able to play movies or display programs other than simply saying a word that is chosen from the screen. 


This 60 minutes story is a very positive portrayal of the iPad and other tablet devices and their application in the education of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.  The story focuses on using the iPad for communication, but also has some interesting news about future research and the use of the iPad for assessment purposes.  The really nice thing about the iPad, not mentioned in the story, is that it also has tons of apps that are useful for creating music and writing songs.  Since kids seem to be drawn to the iPad as well as music, it makes for a lovely match!  I hope you enjoy the video.  One of my favorite parts was when one of the boys suddenly started receptively identifying all kinds of objects that nobody imagined he knew!