Zooming in and zooming out: What we read when we read in a journal

An autistic person in Israel repeats lines of songs in their head over and over again when stressed out. //An Australian music therapy student on a placement in India feels doubtful, wondering whether their short-term presence allows for working sustainably. // A Norwegian free improvisation artist plays his saxophone on stage, ready to assume and lose control when his co-performers, the music itself, or the audience seem to demand it. // A person who has survived a stroke selects a Taiwanese folk song to sing with the accompaniment of a music therapist.

These individual experiences have in common that – you guessed it – they are all featured in this issue’s articles. Beyond their own distinct significance, they also serve to broaden our understanding of larger concepts – neurodiversity, international development, enactivism, and interdisciplinary collaboration in healthcare. In a way, we can zoom in with our minds on these single episodes, empathising with individuals, and then, gradually or in a leap, zoom out again, perceiving these experiences as being part of larger contexts and debates. Sometimes this adjustment of one’s inner lens is a natural process, occurring in response to the respective needs of a situation; at other times it takes a conscious effort to not lose oneself in too much detail and keep “big pictures” in mind, or to operationalise large concepts to everyday settings.

Similar to our approach to content, the very act of reading can also be seen as a practice of zooming in and out. When selecting journal articles to read and then engaging with them, we may do so in different ways, depending on immediate needs, prompts, skills acquired, or personal style and preference. We might follow references from other articles, use electronic search engines to find specific information, respond to recommendations by educators, colleagues, or social media algorithms, follow publications by a specific author or author team, check what’s new in a field, or just stumble across a relevant article we didn’t look for when flicking through a printed journal.

Once we have picked an article, which sections do we then read? Looking through the title and abstract (or parts of the abstract) is usually the starting point, and often already the end of our engagement with articles. What draws us in to read on? Do we skim through the whole thing, read everything from the first page to the last, or just zoom in on the results section before moving on to the next article? And do authors keep in mind that oftentimes, only parts of their articles will be read?

Small text excerpts that we come across online or on paper can also serve as a path to finding and reading an article. From 1999 onwards (i.e. since its volume 8), each issue of the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy (NJMT) has featured a quote taken from one of its articles on its back cover or, more recently, on the page that displays the issue contents. Captioning one or more sentences deemed quintessential in a certain way, this quote may serve as an inspiration to spark one’s own thoughts on a certain topic, or as a teaser for readers to delve into an article.

Nowadays, the majority of readers engage with NJMT articles online, meaning that the material provided on the cover of a printed copy is invisible to them. Therefore, for once, I want to reiterate this issue’s selected quote here at the end of the Editorial, as an additional stimulus.

Reflecting on the function of these quotes, I also felt stimulated to go through past print copies of the NJMT and the quotes on their back covers. It was an engaging exercise to locate one quote each that can be somehow linked to and thus juxtaposed to each of this issue’s articles, creating a “moment of meeting” between articles that might otherwise not be linked together. This may be seen as a further interpretation of what our current cover image, entitled “Duet”, illustrates (see Grace Thompson’s Editorial in the previous issue; Thompson, 2024). You will find those quotes following the introduction to each article below. Regardless of whether these pairings may be perceived as clashing, random and irrelevant, or mutually enriching, they can serve as an invitation to engage with earlier publications – a type of analog analogon to what is known as “Throwback Thursday” in the digital world, a tradition of weekly posts on our social media channels that direct the readers’ attention to past NJMT publications.

The first article featured in this issue is a qualitative study on echolalia by Maya K. Marom, Avi Gilboa and Ehud Bodner (p. 169). From interviews with autistic adults, they extracted a range of intra-personal reasons and few inter-personal reasons that cause autistic individuals to echo, and highlight connections between echolalia, prosody, and music. Thus, the authors challenge preconceived assumptions about echolalia and help us to better understand this phenomenon in the context of therapy and neurodiversity more generally.

Back cover quote of NJMT issue 9(2):

… music is therapeutic because it attunes to the essential efforts that the mind makes to regulate the body, both in its inner neurochemical, hormonal and metabolic processes, and in its purposeful engagements with the objects of the world, and with other people. (Trevarthen & Malloch, 2000)

In another interview study, Lucy Bolger and Melissa Murphy situate the experiences of Australian music therapists reflecting on their student placement program in India within the broader context of international development practice and research (p. 189). Results show how participants’ placement experience informed their subsequent music therapy practice and professional identity, and how the complexity of placement experiences can facilitate critical reflexivity and intercultural learning.

Back cover quote of NJMT issue 21(2):

I remember the times I used to focus on everything about me as a therapist: what I was doing, how I was doing it, is it what my supervisor wants, etc. Now, I am finally to the point where I care more about my clients […] I take what I need from supervisors and observers, but I have learned to rely on my instinct and gut with my clients. I now feel more secure in my identity as a music therapist. (A participant in Wheeler & Williams, 2012)

In the third article in this issue, Simon Høffding, Torben Snekkestad and Brynjulf Stige provide us with an introduction to the theoretical approach and multidisciplinary research program of “enactivism” and elaborate on its potential to serve as integrating framework for music therapy practice and research (p. 208). They describe how enactivism has been applied to the analysis of music performance, music listening, psychopathology and psychiatry, and present a saxophonist’s free improvisation as a case example of enactivist analysis. They argue that improvisation-based music therapy may work so well for people with severe mental illness because it addresses one’s sense of agency.

Back cover quote of NJMT issue 8(2):

Theories are like maps. With the complex and often mysterious regions of consciousness accessed through music, we need maps. (Kenny, 1999)

Chia-Hsin Chou, Po-Cheng Chen, Yi-Chi Huang, Tsung-Hsun Yang, Lin-Yi Wang, I-Hsuan Chen, Hui-Ju Lee and Yan-Yuh Lee report on a randomised controlled trial in post-stroke rehabilitation (p. 226). In their study, four sessions of neurologic music therapy were provided to patients who had experienced a stroke in the past 6 months. Beneficial effects were found on patients’ disability in daily activities, but not on depression and cognition. While the multiprofessional team of authors does not explicitly address the implications of their findings to the interdisciplinary context of rehabilitation settings, their study can be seen as another invitation to reconsider specific and unique contributions of music therapy to treatment programmes, questions regarding dosage and frequency, and the overall topic of skill sharing and collaboration among health-care professions.

Back cover quote of NJMT issue 31(5):

Jussi’s [research participant] self-motivation was evident both in and outside of therapy sessions. At home he practiced changing directions and turning while walking and reciting his chosen rhyme, showing that, although he did not previously consider himself musical, he had learned to see music as a tool he was himself competent to use on his own rather than a tool provided by the therapist. (Ruotsalainen et al., 2022)

Whether online or on paper, I hope you will continue to have fruitful experiences reading past and present NJMT articles alike, in parts and in their entirety, zooming in on individual experiences and details, and gaining a refined sense of the larger contexts and historical developments they may be embedded within.

[T]he therapeutic effect of improvisation-based music therapy can be partly explained as a strengthening, flexing, or recalibrating of the agential capacity, which is impaired in severe mental illness.

Simon Høffding, Torben Snekkestad and Brynjulf Stige in their article “Enactivist music therapy: Toward theoretical innovation and integration”